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Dear Aunt TUAW: Will Lion ship on disc?

by Erica Sadun May 20th 2011 at 5:25PM

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I keep reading about how Lion is most likely to be distributed through the Mac App Store. I think this is great, and a huge convenience. I see how this would work for upgrading, but what happens if you have to wipe your computer and reinstall it? If you have no disk, how can you boot from it?

It would be a rather large pain to boot from Snow Leopard and then reinstall Lion after logging into the Mac App Store and re-downloading Lion again.

I was wondering what your thoughts were.

Love,

Your Nephew Andrew Q

Dear Andrew,

We're on the train to Speculationopolis here, but Auntie doesn't think that Apple will jettison the box upgrade any time soon. Although the "disc is dead" catchphrase never fails to amuse Auntie, it's still early for Apple to adopt digital-only releases, especially with a public that likes purchasing physical form factors. Discs and USB drives continue to ship with new Apple products and probably will for a while more, even if there's a move toward digital as a primary OS distribution method.

As for the process of digital-only, Apple already has that way under control. Oodles of developers are doing quite well with their disk image Lion installs, so it's not the technology that's holding things back.

Auntie imagines this scenario: existing customers could use App Store on Snow Leopard to purchase a disk image at a discount. The image could then be burned to the customers' discs or stored on USB keys. Or, they could purchase an official Apple box.

If you consider 10.6 to have been an aberration, then upgrade prices might run US$99 for the Mac App Store route or $129 for a retail box. If you feel 10.6 defined the new OS retail pricing, then perhaps $39 and $69 might be more reasonable price points, or even less than that considering that 10.6 was $29 on disc. In any case, discounts could reflect the marginal improvement to turnover from the absence of physical media.

Apple still needs to invest in developing, testing and deploying the software. If Auntie's guess is correct, however, that the company will start treating the OS as service to maintain an ongoing hardware investment -- in other words, following the iOS model rather than the traditional Vista model -- lower prices will help pressure Apple's customer base towards modern updates at a more rapid pace than we've previously seen in the industry.

Apple will, as always, make a business decision. Auntie suspects that boxes will be a part of that decision for at least the next year.

Hugs,

Auntie "will make educated guesses for food" T.



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Dear Aunt TUAW, I keep reading about how Lion is most likely to be distributed through the Mac App Store. I think this is great, and a...
 

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27 Comments

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BMPE

Given the negative comments in the App Store about downloading XCode via that manner, Apple has a lot of work to do to release a whole OS update that way.

May 23 2011 at 10:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tomsmith

just got the lastest AutoCAD at work.. a 16Gb USB stick. Probably the norm now for big installs.

May 22 2011 at 5:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Andrew

Well my point in asking the original question, has nothing to do with upgrading, as many commenters have assumed it has. I know I'm not the average user, and I have reinstalled Snow Leopard multiple times now (both because of fiddling around in the OS and because of Boot Camp mess ups).

I agree that upgrading to Lion via the App Store is overly convient and may be a perfect solution for most. I may download the upgrade or I may buy a disc. I have the developer preview and the App Store Way works well. I don't believe for a second that Apple will remove the disc or USB key option entirely.

My point was that I'd be overly pissed if I had downloaded Lion from the App store, and then had to reinstall only to find out I had to boot from Snow Leopard, open the App Store, download the huge file again (few hours) then go about installing Lion, before even transferring files or Time Machine backup let alone anything else. It just seems very unApple-like to make people do it this way.

If you don't have disc drive you can't burn it to disc. Yes as TUAW has pointed out to me via Twitter (thank you for the response by the way) that I can use Remote Disc, or copy the disk image to an 8GB flash drive. But remote disc still involves you having a second machine, which leaves you with the thumb drive. I'll probably personally go this route. However its still not as clean and simple as most Apple products are. Just seems weird to me.

May 21 2011 at 5:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
frank.lowney

Lion 10.7 Preview 3 weighs in at 3.82 Gigabytes! It took 3 hours to download via my 3 Mbs DSL and, now, I will have to re-download it because I get a kernel panic whenever I attempt to use it.

May 21 2011 at 8:54 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
henry

While I live in a FiOS served area, so have fast internet of 25/25mbit service with option of 50mbit, many people in the US do not, and overseas bandwidth is very poor in some countries. I just returned from Kuwait, and many neighborhoods only have DSL speeds at best, if at all; and Kuwait is a fairly high-tech country. Even in areas of Kuwait with cable, and speeds up to 10mbit, the access out of the country was very slow, as was access between ISP's, so Apple would have to have servers very distributed throughout these countries which would be high-cost, low yield.

May 21 2011 at 8:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
uzerzero

I'm banking on a disc. That way I can repair my computer when I've been fiddling around too much and whacked something out. Plus, I can have another disc to add to my collection of OS install discs, right next to my collection of AOL discs.

May 21 2011 at 2:10 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
alansky

Access to high-speed internet is not universally available. It would be really dumb to make the installation of something as basic as the computer operating system dependent on a service that many Apple customers do not have.

May 21 2011 at 1:13 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to alansky's comment
gshearman

Also, here in rural Australia I get 10 GB downloads a month, I don't want to download a whole OS, it's bad enough doing software and iOS updates.

May 21 2011 at 9:30 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MNJayW

Dear Auntie,

Just got my first iPhone, but the ringtones stink! How do I take my super awesome Star Trek midi file and use it as a ringtone?

May 20 2011 at 11:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to MNJayW's comment
hfwbr

You can use iTunes, an app, or an application to do it. In any case, you have a little Googling to do.

May 21 2011 at 1:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
milkmage

FWIW I instaled lion preview 1 right over 10.6 by mounting the image and running the installer (I "acquired" preview 1 through unofficial means).. last night I upgraded to 10.7 preview 3 via the app store.. it was a pretty big installer 3-4GB, so I'm pretty sure it didn't just patch.

looks like you don't need to boot from a disc at all.

not saying discs won't be available, but they're certainly not necessary.

install on a new (blank) drive will require some kind of media, but upgrading appears to be media free (unless this is just a dev thing).

May 20 2011 at 10:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh

Seems likely that even if you can download through the App Store you would still be able to burn that to a disc if you so choose to?

May 20 2011 at 10:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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