And despite all the talk about Lion being available only via the Mac App Store, the company plans to release a $69 version of Lion on a USB stick in August.Īpple doesn’t provide an easy way to burn a DVD or format a USB drive as a back-up installer, though even Apple execs admitted that technically adept users will be able to figure out how to create a bootable installer from the contents of the Lion installation package. Company executives told me that users without access to a high-speed connection will be able to bring their Macs to an Apple Store for help in buying and installing Lion. What if you aren’t running Snow Leopard, which is required for the Mac App Store? What happens if your drive crashes and you have to reinstall Lion onto a new, blank hard drive?Īpple has answers to many of these questions, but the rules of the game have definitely changed. What if you have a really slow Internet connection or low bandwidth cap? Downloading 4GB of data could be painful. While the experience is clean and simple for the most common installation scenarios, things can get weird if yours isn’t one of them. However, relying on downloading alone for an OS release has its drawbacks. And the $30 price is remarkable-in the past Apple would’ve charged $129 for an upgrade of this scale.

With the release of Lion, Mac users can get near-instant gratification. Double-click that, and the installation begins.īack in the day, getting an OS X upgrade involved going to a store or ordering online and getting an optical disc. After a 3.5GB download, there’s a new Install Lion app in your Dock and Applications folder.

That’s because Apple has decided to release the upgrade primarily as a $30 download from the Mac App Store. Even before you boot into Lion for the first time, you’ll feel just how different it is from previous versions of Mac OS X.

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