Lion's New Recovery Partition
This morning, shortly after Lion hit the App Store for the general public, I posted a link to several notable reviews of Lion where you can read all about the nit-picky details that have changed or been added/removed. I won't attempt to write a comprehensive review of my own, simply because people like John Siracusa will do a much better job at it than I will. One notable new feature of the operating system that I would like to point out though, is the new recovery partition that Lion makes when it installs itself. Apple has posted an entire knowledge base article detailing how this process works:
OS X Lion includes a new feature called Lion Recovery that includes all of the tools you need to reinstall Lion, repair your disk, and even restore from a Time Machine backup without the need for optical discs. A lot of people noted that the new Mac Minis released this morning no longer contain optical drives built-in. Jim Dalrymple actually managed a brief interview with Brian Croll, Apple's vice president of OS X product marketing who told Jim: A new Mac mini was also released with faster processors, and surprisingly to some people, no optical drive. Apple said the popularity of the Mac App Store helped with that decision. “We found that the majority of customers don’t use the optical drive on a regular basis,” said Moody. “Things are changing. The primary use for the optical drive was to install software, but the Mac App Store provides a more efficient method for doing that.” Clearly Apple is not afraid to eliminate components that customers don't regularly use in order to take advantage of the extra space to add new hardware on the inside. They first did this with the MacBook Air, and now the Mini. As John Gruber says: Optical drives are the new floppy drives.