Craig Grannell writes today about how Lion actually deserves the criticism it gets for being too buggy. I completely agree. Say what you will about Macs, but there was a time when everyone could agree that Macs were stable. The whole “software made for the hardware” argument made sense and held up in reality. Now, Lion is the OS I’m almost embarrassed to explain to my newly Mac-ified friends. “Yes, that print dialogue sometimes doesn’t work.” “Yup, all your folders just moved around because Finder no longer remembers where they were before.” “Yes, Preview just opened your image and then immediately quit. You didn’t want it to do that?” Lion is decidedly not the “most polished OS ever” that some people claim it is.

Of course there are detractors who want to label everything Apple makes as the next Vista. But Apple really does need to fix Lion up, and quickly. Yesterday my laptop decided to spontaneously forget that it had an Airport card installed. Simple explanation, right? Except that my card did not actually die. I just replaced it a month ago, and it was installed by the Geniuses themselves. The previous one actually did fail, so I can tell this isn’t a hardware problem. A simple Google search turns up dozens of similar complaints from the Apple and MacRumors support forums, but not one viable fix. The standard “repair permissions, reset SMC and PRAM” is the most common suggestion, but it doesn’t work. I’ve restored from a Time Machine backup. I’ve installed the 10.7.1 combo update. I’ve reinstalled Lion itself from the recovery partition. I’ve opened up my MacBook, removed the Airport Card, then replaced it just to see if anything changed. Nothing.

It’s legitimately serious bugs like these that make me leery of using Lion as a primary OS, even though it’s been out of beta since July. This is not the Apple I admire for its best-in-class products and “just works” mentality. Until Cupertino pushes out a fix, I’m stuck to a cable. Because that’s what laptops are for, right?