Mac Cant Download 10.6 but Is It 10.7 Updated

Mac Cant Download 10.6 but Is It 10.7

I approached the WWDC Keynote with a chip of anticipation. All indications I've seen pointed to Mac Os Ten 10.7 King of beasts including many unlike aspects of iOS. Gestures, Launchpad, full screen apps, the Mac App Store… to me, they were annoying extras, but they were like shooting fish in a barrel plenty to disable/avoid and didn't offset some of the new, more useful features like Versions and Mission Control.

However, Apple did i thing to ensure I'll probable never accept King of beasts on my MacBook Pro.

They fabricated it download-only.

Information technology's long been a beef of mine that Apple seems to marketplace its iDevices nether the assumption that everybody has a constant broadband connection without data caps. Their new iCloud service is a attestation to that; there are going to be a lot of unhappy iPhone/iPad users discovering they've eaten up their information usage for the month when iOS 5 comes out.

Unfortunately, Apple is extending this theory for Bone distribution. While possibly more prevalent than uncapped wireless data plans, broadband service is still not available everywhere, especially not in more rural areas and downloading a 4GB software update over dial-upwards does not sound like a practiced time. Furthermore, in many instances where you tin can get broadband, many telecoms are capping and/or throttling their information throughput as well. A big download like this tin eat upwards a skillful portion of your allotted data. So already nosotros're backside the 8-ball.

Fifty-fifty if you lot practice have broadband service at habitation, if you desire to do any of these things, this "download but" OS makes them much more hard:

Upgrade a single motorcar: The chief people affected past this are those who, similar myself, either take no broadband access at domicile or have a data cap on their service. So, in order to update, yous take to become somewhere with gratis WiFi and try to download from there. Ever attempt to bring a 27" iMac into a Starbucks? They look at you lot kind of funny.

Upgrade multiple machines: Got multiple machines you want to update? Even though you lot'll only take to pay once, information technology's still a 4GB download for each machine. Combine a multi-Mac household (such equally a family with a main computer, one for each of the kids, and perhaps an extra MacBook Pro thrown in the mix somewhere) with a capped data plan… you're in a earth of injure if yous want to stay current.

Upgrade a not-networked auto: Believe information technology or not, there are still a lot of people who don't have their computers hooked upwards to the Internet. Whether information technology's that Mac Pro you go along in your garage music studio, a MacBook you keep at your summer home so you lot tin download photos into iPhoto and transfer them to a portable hard drive, or something else, rather than but popping a DVD into the optical bulldoze and installing, y'all need to bring that estimator back home/to the nearest hotspot and and then install.

Replacing a crashed hard drive: This one actually hurts. Permit's say that a year from at present, the hard drive in your 2009 Mac Pro running Lion completely fails. You had Time Motorcar running, and then you at least take all your data available to migrate back. To install Lion, you'll now need to:

Install & Drift from your 10.half dozen.x DVD.
Download and install the 10.6.x Combo Update (ane.15GB to get to 10.6.vi, which is the start version of the Mac App Store)
Download the Lion installer – at least 4GB, probably closer to 5GB one time we figure on updates and patches to get to 10.vii.2 or whatever the version is at the time..

So right there, it'south 6GB but to get back to where y'all were. With a DVD, all you'd have had to exercise is pop in the disc, install and migrate, and download the OS updater, which would be a fraction of the corporeality of data and time involved.

Rolling back to an earlier version: Apple doesn't e'er get it right; sometimes an OS update causes more troubles than it solves, forcing users who need that "broken" feature to become dorsum to a previous version. In ten.5.x and earlier, you'd perform an "Archive and Install" and so manually download the Combo updater for the version prior to the most recent. With x.half-dozen, it'due south even more than straightforward; merely install correct over the current version before downloading/installing the Combo Updater. How're y'all going to practise that with Lion? You lot can pretty well guess that the download version will be the near contempo, with no power to get an older version. Then when Apple tree makes a mistake, y'all have to alive with it until they set up it.

Of grade, these are only a few examples. Other situations, such as repair of a piece of work car on the road or the maintenance of a lab of computers, are variations on one or more of those themes. All of them valid, and all of them now more than difficult.

A Reasonable Solution

I understand Apple's potential reasoning for wanting to go with this "download" model: less concrete inventory, better command over distribution, "green" distribution, et cetera. This download model allows for all of that.

However, every bit outlined above, that model doesn't necessarily work for all users. Not everybody is a family unit of four who stay comfortably within Apple'south walled garden, checking email, watching YouTube videos, and making iPhoto albums for Grandma (not that at that place's anything incorrect with that, per se).

There are many people like me who tinker, who set up, who create, and who exercise things "outside the box" with our Macs that don't fit this paradigm. We are "the crazy ones, the misfits, the circular pegs in square holes" that used to be championed by Apple. Now, they're cutting u.s.a. off at the ankles because the manner we use our Macs crave a petty more flexibility when updating/installing the operating system—flexibility that existed up until now.

Give u.s.a. the pick to make our ain installer disc/pollex bulldoze a la the mode Ubuntu does. Let us download a disc image and install information technology on the drive or the DVD we want to utilise in instance things go incorrect. Heck, charge us an actress five bucks for the privilege, if absolutely necessary.

Simply give us our installer discs back!

The opinions expressed hither are those of the author and do not necessarily reverberate the position of Other World Computing.