Mac OS X Lion will be available on USB thumb drive for $69 in August - Page 2

Absolutely correct. $29 download is cheap. $69 thumb drive is equally cheap. Apple could have charged $69 for a download and $129 for a thumb drive and sold just as many copies. Lion is better than Windows 7 Professional and a fraction of the cost. This is one time that Apple is actually doing its customers a favor.

Bring your own thumbdrive and download it elsewhere for $29 (likely even at the Apple Store).

That means Apple was charging $100 for the DVD copies of Mac OS X past. Those bastards!¡

Hey doesn't digital download cut out resellers completely, or is it legit to resell?

Correct, the GM is a little over 4GB and will not fit onto a 4GB flash drive.

It depends on how much effort went into making it:



I think it's clear that like the charge for matte screens, it's a way to discourage people. If it was inexpensive, a lot of people would likely opt for the USB drive.

That's a good question, what would one do to replace a bad hard drive? The Air included a thumb drive that I recall.

Granted, people *should* have backups, but often I find that's not the case. My sister bought a drive to store backups, but turns out she never even hooked it up to the computer, never mind making a drive copy. I don't know if she thought that it was supposed to magically copy or what.


A torrent can speed it up if your direct download speed is slower than the capacity of your connection. But it is copyright infringement if you didn't pay for the license.

I have a iMac running 10.6 and a Macbook running 10.5..If I buy the download on the iMac can I install Lion on the laptop as well? Or am I stuck buying the thumb drive?

The page for the MBA no longer states that it comes with an 8GB USB flash drive with the installer.


It goes on to state…


While disc typically refers to an optical disc I'd say that is enough evidence to show that any drive replacement would require shipping to Apple, bringing into an Apple Store, or installing from the USB drive they will sell or the one you can make from App Store download to reinstall Lion.

However, note the MBA don't come with HDDs but SSD cards which are unlikely to fail or be replaced by the consumers.

PS: We'll see if Apple's policy changes when their prosumer machines lose the ODD.

"AppleInsider was first to report in May that Apple planned to release Lion through the Mac App Store, but also that Apple would offer a physical copy of the operating system for those who would prefer to have one. And in June, an exclusive report suggested lower pricing for Lion could be tied to purchasing through the Mac App Store."

If AI had info in May that there would be a physical copy of the Lion software, why did it repeat many many times "Lion will only be available by download from the App Store".

If you instead you had repeated what you claimed you knew, you could have avoided a lot of upset readers. It appears to me that you choose for the sensational: AI looking a lot like a tabloid.

So please stay consistent in your reporting with what you earlier reported or at least include a note when there are conflicts.

And a lot of those cheap flash drives are, to be polite, crap. I've seen a number of cheap (PNY, among others) thumb drives fail with little use.


That's right. You assume...


This solves the problem of upgrading to Lion for those not currently running Snow Leopard quite nicely: Snow Leopard install disks ($29), Lion installer ($29), thumb drive ($9). $2 for shipping, and there you go.

Think, people, think.

You forget the Snow Leopard installation, which you'd have had to have installed before you could use the Mac App Store.

Too funny.

There's a new internet recovery feature:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...ss_repair.html

I'd still rather have a thumb drive as a recovery but if you keep a Time Machine or cloned backup and have internet recovery, I'd say that's enough recovery options and probably more convenient than finding the disc.

So the consumer should have to pay for the "inconvenience" of a business offering a product for sale? Wow how much Kool-Aid have you drunk?

The online installer can be saved for future installs. True or false?

Are you drunk? Apparently you missed the part about Apple selling Lion for less than $30 or have failed to grasp that no one is required to buy either Lion installers if they don't want to.

You can't resell a digital download. So yes, eventually the Mac App Store will be the ONLY place you can get Apple software.

Meh - in all but the most extreme edge cases, it's simply not a big deal to download it.

It takes up 3.81GB on the 8GB (7.62GB available) SD card I just used to do clean install on a MBA.

No telling why various people are getting different sizes for the installer.

True. That's how I did the installation on this MBA.

I'm sure he means that his 4 million byte Flash drive is slightly too small after being formatted to the less than 4GB DMG. He may have that hidden "U2" partition that comes on Sandisk drives or some other brands hidden volume taking up too much space.

My 4GB USB flash drive has 3.86 GB available after being formatted with the GUID Partition Table.

No it's not. The market is shifting and your not. The world won't end, Mac OSX 10.7 will be a success, and the pessimists will find something new to whine about.


Click on the Purchased tab in the App store and you will see your download and estimated time.


Apple isn't, their CDN partners (mainly Akamai) are.


Maybe your cable company is throttling you? I just downloaded Xcode a half an hour ago and it took about the same time as Lion did this morning - 45 minutes. Apple's content distribution network seems to be handling things just fine at least from my perspective.


Only if you are too stupid to make a copy of the Mac OS X Lion installer in the applications folder before installing (as has been outlined in NUMEROUS articles on every Mac site today!). Just make a copy of it before installing it and you can copy it to as many Mac's as you need. My MacBook Pro I'm typing on right now was upgraded to Lion from the installer that I downloaded on my Mac Pro early this morning (that took less than 45 minutes at 10:00 AM EST on a standard Comcast home account).

Oh, and move the installer out of the Applications folder before running and it won't delete itself when done.


Complaining about self-induced problems are dumb. There is nothing wrong with the way Apple is distributing Lion - other than getting used to the differences. Overall I'm much more happy with this. Not ever having to worry about loosing an install DVD is something I'm really looking forward to - esp. since I spent a few panicked hours looking for my SL DVD after a recent hard drive crash. Never again!

No kidding. simply being able to resize windows from any size (FINALLY!) was worth every penny.

The fact that iTunes and Safari are now fully 64 bit and haven't slowed down yet is also well worth it. And I haven't even started playing with everything else yet! I could stop right now and be completely satisfied!

Thanks for the answer. Does the installer get left behind somewhere after the install process is completed?

Oh for crying out loud - it's a way to cover costs for a minor amount of users.

If your in the minority, you should expect to pay more - costs are higher for lower volume purchases, especially for low volume purchases that have the overhead of physical goods that have all the related logical requirements.

All this "discourage" nonsense is just that - pure nonsense.

Seems pricey for a small thumb drive?

Safari still has the memory leak, though. You'll notice that once you start using it for extended periods of time. Shame.

Yup - having just went through finding my Snow Leopard disk to recover from a dead drive, I welcome being able to have the option to download or use the Internet instead.

Well, the alternative is we could have all waited until August for Apple to manufacture and stockpile enough media for a traditional launch.

Personally, I have no problem with the few who won't be able to download having to wait for physical media to be prepared while I am typing on a Lion machine mere hours after it was released without leaving the house. That's progress indeed!

Sucks to be in the minority, but if you aren't going to have the means to download that's exactly what you are - and now Apple has a solution - wait for it if you have to.

Five hours in and so far none of the same memory leaks, and no spinning beach ball! I'm more than pleased with Safari's performance so far.

Huh. What's the build number of the release version of the Lion version of Safari 5.1?

Only if you move it out of the Applications folder first. If you leave it in the Applications folder it will delete itself.

Sure, if you were just buying a generic thumb drive

Don't forget the overhead of duplicating software onto it, packaging, and then distribution.... UPS doesn't prattle on about "logistics" in their ads for the heck of it...

Version 5.1 (7534.48.3)

Ugh. Great. Same as mine. Stupid RAM hog...

"Those who opt to buy a new Mac won't need to worry about downloading Lion from the Mac App Store, as all new computers sold by Apple will come preinstalled with the next-generation operating system."

So will they put in an OS X install disk in the box with the computer?

Likely won't be a disc anymore. Maybe the USB drive with every new computer...

Okay, so it doesn't auto-run? You have a chance to move the installer somewhere else before it does its thing?