[ugh]

You still have to save one first time, else the OS wouldn’t know where to put the file and how to name it. Lion only auto saves after that. That is irrespective of whether your create a new file or duplicate a file. (Apple could have been a lot more radical here, I’m unsure whether they should have been. That certainly would have meant a lot more work and it would have been an even more complicated transition.)

[vacri]

I would have thought that the duplicate function would have had 'duplicate it where?' in it.

The only reason I can think of for not having this is so you could make temporary changes to a document and not have them saved - which just seems to be a different way of arranging the cart and horse compared to the 'save as' workflow. With the Save As workflow, temporary changes are simply not saved. With the Duplicate workflow, you have to dupe the document first to avoid unwanted saving, then make your temporary changes. I don't see much of an improvement overall.

[ugh]

The new behavior protects from the following scenario (which I think is very common): Someone wants to use an old document as a template and in the process overwrites the old document. That’s data loss and the user likely becomes unable to even find the new document since it’s saved under the name of the old document.

It used to be the case that users had to actually make a mistake in order for this to happen (i.e. they had to forget to do a Save as and do a Save instead – that happened to me way too often, though), with auto save they would make that mistake automatically and every time.

I think what Apple could do is add a “Duplicate and save” function, I don’t think Save as is salvageable with auto save.