I already own a MacBook with the scriv, and when Lion came around I quickly regretted installing it.
Now using Snow Leopard, with no issues.
I’d like to get a lighter machine for travelling, such as the Air.
But if I can only run Lion on the Air, there’s a chance i’ll go crazy.
So what about a small PC?
Are there any cross-platform issues between Scrivener Mac and Scrivener PC?
When I get home, can I open my mac and (using drop box) start tapping away on the latest version of my work?
I’m sure the PC folks will call “foul!” but as a cross platform user let me suggest the following: if you like OSX then you really don’t want to use windows.
Stick with what you know. Consider an older air to get ensured snow leopard compatibility if you need to, but I think you would be better served by the familiar (and likely more comfortable) creative environment.
On the flip-side, unless the airs stop selling like sno-cones in the desert, you’re going to have to deal with something like Lion eventually if you stick to Macs. If that idea gives you nightmares, then you should seriously consider abandoning Mac OS X. You could even install Windows on your macbook so you don’t waste brain power on switching back and forth between platforms.
As for cross-platform issues, there aren’t any major issues going between the two, scrivener-wise. The current windows Scrivener (1.3) drops the Default New Document settings on folders in the binder, and it currently hides inspector comments and footnotes. Those limitations will be eliminated in the future, maybe even in the current beta release for windows.
On the one hand, the Air is beautiful, fast and “just works”. On the other, you could get a lesser-spec’d Windows netbook for a third of the price of an Air.
Lion? It came with my Air; my experience of it is very similar to Snow Leopard. Of its innovations, I use Full Screen and that’s about it. I’m sure if I finagled it, I could construct Lion to function more or less the same as SL. But as Robert says, Lion is a signpost to the Mac future. Just as it’s getting harder to find software that will still work with Tiger, so presumably in a year or three it will be less easy to continue to use Snow Leopard.
But in any case the latest Airs are now some way through their upgrade cycle, so I suppose if I was planning to buy one new I’d hang on for the prospect of a Retina screen and significantly longer battery life.
On the other other hand, any OS update is a PITA. Win 7 has been a bit of a user support nightmare in my shop. Many “where do I find” and “how do I do” type questions (office '10 was worse than win 7 though). Considering that Win 8 is on the horizon, if you do go PC you are going to be right back in the same OS update dilemma soon.
As a dedicated “I HATE CHANGE!!!” adherent, I did have to upgrade to Lion. It only too me a few minutes to learn how to ignore everything that was a “new feature” and use it just like Leopard.
Have you considered a refurbished Air of your preferred vintage, which would come with Snow Leopard installed? http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac
I have no personal experience with refurbs, but I understand that you can purchase AppleCare just as with a new machine (best to check and not take my word, however).
OK, I may be biased because I actually like Lion (and Apple OSs in general), but frankly I can’t see how switching from Snow Leopard to Lion may be more difficult or awkward or plainly annoying than switching from Snow Leopard to any godawful OS running on PCs.
Please explain it to me.
Thank you 
What, exactly, is/are the issue(s) with Lion? Many of the “problems” people have with it can be changed, with the exception of Spaces/Mission Control–in which case you’re out of luck. If you can rethink your workflow, though, Lion is great. I find I’m a lot more productive with it than I ever was with SL, and that’s due in no small part to the extensive multitouch support baked into the OS.
The Macbook Air is a great machine. I’m typing on mine now. I loved my old unibody MacBook, but I like the Air even more.
The refurbed / second-hand Air is a smashing idea. There’s not a thing wrong with my current machine, but if i go travelling a lot this year, i want something lighter.
What Lion ‘did’ to me was mess up Scrivener. Some sort of conflict with the preferences. Smart quotes ceased working mid-document, auto spell-check wouldn’t work, backup destination wouldn’t change, double em-dash thingamebob stopped working*. Just seemed that preferences were ignored, making for an inconsistent presentation.
That’s just for Scrivener. Mail — Apple’s very own email client — wouldn’t work. Lion left a bad taste in my digital mouth; when Mountain Lion appeared over the horizon, i nearly spit my tea out. I figured they put Liza Minelli in Steve’s old chair.
(i’m using a macbook 2.26 duo… bought in… 2009 or 2010.)
*On the plus side, i now know that Shift-Option-Minus makes the long dash. (Option-Minus does the shorter dash.)
We think that Lion bug might be nailed at this point. It’s not in the official release, but in the public betas. It turned out to be some odd setting that Lion was adding the Scrivener preference file. You can actually “hack” around it with TinkerTool, but like I say the beta pre-emptively sets the option to false so the OS shouldn’t touch it.
As for Lion, did you just run the upgrade tool? I had all kinds of troubles with Lion until I figured out how to make an install flash drive and did a fresh install from scratch. It was like alpha software before I did that. That wouldn’t be a problem on a new machine though.
I use Mountain Lion and love it – you might want to jump straight to that, bypassing Lion.
However, I see you say that automatic spell-check not working is one of your issues, and that is also the case for me. I’m guessing it’s a conflict between the Scrivener spell-check and Apple’s own auto-correct?
Well, we don’t actually control the spell checking at all, that is Apple’s, too. We’re not sure what the conflict is with 10.8 at this time, only that it likely came along with the 10.8.2 update, since everything was fine prior to the release of that. It took a long time to figure out that the first problem was with a Apple’s window state saving that needed to be circumvented. None of us have ever seen it happen on our machines, which makes it all the more difficult to track down, since all we have to work with are a few scattered reports from people basically just telling us it doesn’t work for them.