Mac OS X Lion debuts in July as $29.99 upgrade Mac OS X Lion – the next incarnation of Apple's desktop, notebook, and server operating system – will go on sale in July at a price of $29.99. According to Apple, the OS will offer 250 new features and 3,000 new developer APIs. This includes the multi-touch touchscreen technology popularized by the iPhone and the iPad; the Mac …
Okay, maybe a 700 MB CD is a bit squashed... but 4GB can easily fit on a DVD.
They sold me 10.6.3 on a DVD no problems, why does 10.7 present such an issue? 5GB is half our monthly quota... and I've got no way of paying for things on the App Store. What do I do, feed notes/coins into the DVD drive?
OS X 10.6.3 was shipped on a dual-layer DVD, but it's still a DVD nontheless. Also, what about those wanting to nuke the Mac's hard drive and do a ground-up upgrade? You can't be serious about needing to install 10.6, then downloading a 4GB upgrade package every time?
Facepalm. I've a headache just thinking about it.
So to upgrade my box I have to log a call with Apple Support, make an appointment, box up the machine, lug it to the Apple store ( my nearest is on Regent Street in London, so that's a 90 min trip on trains and tubes ), then wait 90 mins while they upgrade it and then lug the f**king thing all the way home on trains and tubes?!
You may love Apple enough to develop a hernia for them, I have better things to do with my time and health. Looks like I'm stuck with 10.6.x then!
While I'm an absolutely huge and drooling Apple fanboi, I just can't imagine dragging my iMac to the nearest Apple dealer to let me upgrade to 10.7, and nobody else should have to. Electronic distribution is all nice and good, but physical media have their advantages, too. Such as being to get where the interwebs don't.
Going to an Apple Store?!! As an Mac user I had the misfortune to have to do that. Never seen so many arrogant geeks in one place... Of the worst kind... Geniuses? Give me a break!!... I will try to stay away from any Apple Stores for as long as I am a user of their products. If I remain a user of their products, that is. They seem to slowly remove the reasons I went for an Apple product, one by one...
As for Lion - I will upgrade only after reading the reviews to check how many restrictions they will add... Snow Leopard works just fine for now.
The latest OFCOM report of May 2011 reports average wired broadband speed in UK as being 6.2Mbps and for wireless broadband over phone network 1.5 (and 2.5 in "areas of good 3G coverage").
So, for the average British customer it's not going to take a week or two at 6.2Mbps -- and at the other end of the scale, those of us with 50 or 100Mbps it will take barely any time at all.
Once downloaded the image can be shred with all the Macs in a household, so doesn't need to be downloaded multiple times.
Still, I would prefer the ability to burn a disc for vanilla installs and at this time it's unknown whether you can do this.
Statistics can be easily used to mislead an opinion.
Since the era of iPlayer, 4OD and the like started, getting that kind of speed on a 20 century line (old BT line) is impossible. How many people can really expect that kind of speed? The best you can expect and still call it broadband is around 3Mbps... and many households will start struggling with that as more and more of the above services become the norm for TV watching. First step for justifying a multi-tier internet? Maybe...
Then The Man has won!
The App Store download for the OS includes a DMG (i.e. disc image file) inside it. You can burn it just fine. Hell, you can even "restore" it onto a USB stick or media card and install from that—the Mac won't mind.
If your broadband sucks, I suggest you complain about *that*; contrary to popular belief, British Telecom and their friends are not Apple's fault. Seriously, 4GB is—as Jobs himself pointed out—about the size of an HD movie download. If downloading this amount of data over a broadband connection is a problem for you in 2011, perhaps you need to seriously reconsider your choice of ecosystem.
Apple have been banging on about their kit's internet connectivity since the very first Bondi iMacs; what the hell were you expecting? It's not as if nobody could see this coming a mile away.
It may surprise you to find out that not everywhere in the world is like the UK. Some countries, for example, are a relatively long way away from anywhere else and so building infrastructure to connect those places to the internet is reasonably pricey. Add in low population, and low population density and you get a great place to live and, unfortunately, a small number of people to pay for that pricey infrastructure.
So, whilst I am able to connect to the net through fast VDSL, I am unable to download a great deal without hitting my broadband limit and thus having to either pay large amounts of money for overage or having my connection speed dialed down to dial up speeds.
Having to use half of my download cap on upgrading the operating system isn't my prefered option. So instead I will be forced to buy a dodgy copy on a DVD from a local market. Which seems a little like shooting yourself in the foot when, if Apple were to sell me the DVD instead, they would be the ones getting the money!
I like the sound of LaunchPad, and as a developer new APIs are always welcome. Listing the App Store as a new feature is a bit rich though, given not only that it's in Snow Leopard, but that you use it to run the upgrade.
The touchscreen blah-blah was inevitable - it's one of the computing industry's current gimmicks, after all. In about 5-10 years Apple will bring out a device with amazing new tactile response technology, called iButtons, and everyone will go mental for them.
Overall, it's likely that I'll upgrade anyway for the new developer kit, but it sounds interesting enough to be worth £30. When it comes to software, you can pay a lot more for a lot less.
3000 new apis? whot?
I can almost swallow 3000 new & updated system calls, but psurely an API is whole bundle of system calls giving access to a something?
3000 new system calls would be a pointless encumberance. 3000 complete APIs would be be programmer overload.
Sounds like bollox to me.
so whichever is it, 3000 new ones, be it individual calls or whole groups of functions will be either an encumbrance or overload eh?
Enlighten us, how many would be acceptable. Say, 30 new groups of 25 calls each? More? Less?
Honestly, what a stupid thing to complain about. They are there to be used if you have a use for them. Better to have a million calls available so long as they are all independently useful, even if you personally only need a couple of hundred.
And, for info (straight outta Wikipedia..) API may be used to refer to a complete interface, a single function, or even a set of APIs provided by an organization. Thus, the scope of meaning is usually determined by the context of usage. In this context, I would suggest it means individual calls, as anyone who is vaguely familiar with Apple dev speak knows that the APIs when referred to as a set are given names like CoreImage etc, which was mentioned in some form as part of the keynote.
4Gb and no cd/dvd? WTF.
I have two powermacs, an Imac plus a macbook pro so at least 16Gb to down load which will take about a fortnight to download with the flakey internet connection I have. Also my one and only attempt at using the new mac app store (t download xtools 4) failed completely so I do not hold out much hope for this download only BS.
Why the beginning of the end? Well if Apple carry on like this I might have to bite the bullet and go down the dark and mysterious linux path.
It's a 4Gb download. Unpleasant, yes, but you can install on it all machines which use the same AppleStore ID. Make a disk image on a DVD (or memory stick) for future use.
(and given that Apple rely on the honesty of its users with regards to OS installs - no licence code or serial number shenanigans here - you could probably install it on as many machines in your household as you care to)
I'm puzzled why your XTools d/l failed. You can break/resume Apple Store downloads ad infinitum.
Hopefully not a glimpse of the future .. xtools is a 4.36Gb download (which I had to pay for still a bit miffed about that) when installing it does 269.57Mb then bombs out. All attempts at retrying just repeats this pattern.
Two things bother me about this, firstly it failed, secondly I had to pay for it and it failed, thirdly (sorry three things that bother me about this ..) apple support for the app store is practically non existent, and fourthly (four, there are four things that bother me about this..) can I trust it again particularly for something complex like an OS install.
My gravest concern is that apple seems to be converting MAC/OSX into a closed system like the Ipad which leaves slightly oddball developers (robotics and A.I systems in Fortran on a MAc .. yes I really am that masochistic like me out in the cold.
> 4Gb and no cd/dvd? WTF.
You mention the "dark and mysterious path" of Linux.
If I were taking a Debian approach to this problem I might create a local package repository on one machine and point the rest of them to that "cache" rather than having each of them suck down 4G in network bandwidth.
I've always found it somewhat bogus that MacOS can't do online updates like pretty much any other Unix.
I think you are just demonstrating your lack of understanding on how OSX works. This method of updating is exactly what I use in the country side on our crappy broadband link. My mini doesnloads all the updates, and my Pro, MBP, MBA, iMac all grab their updates from the mini.
Ok, so when you go down the "dark and mysterious Linux path", will you not have to download the CD / DVD images to install said "dark and mysterious linux"? In my general experience with Linux, ever since I acquired broadband internet that has been the general means of obtaining installation and update media.
Presumably, if the download package is burnable to a DVD as someone suggested, I can quickly imagine a fairly lucrative black market opening up to provide copies to those who are unencumbered with modestly fast broadband.
Still don't think 4Gb is a ridiculous download though, we only have a medium speed Sky ADSL connection and I managed to download the entire 8 CDs to install CentOS in a few hours.
Also, I imagine a DVD is relatively useless to those people with a Macbook Air...seems a waste of time to go buy an external DVD drive just for this...
By doing this, Apple can get near absolutely correct numbers of users vs machines UPGRADEd. However, I don't know why they cannot be satisfied with the number of downloads if there is not serial number issues. I imagine, too, that those owning multiple Apple machines awaiting updates/upgrades, it would be much better if Apple offered media devices/sticks to ship out. Wouldn't the install/update go much faster, then?
OTOH, by forcing people into the stores, there is probably a much greater chance of complete, correct, full updating rather than flaky connections bombing the experience for users who'll then angrily hit the web blogs.
Now, if you're paranoid, you'll wonder what those Geniouses will be looking at during some part of that 90 minutes your machine is on ThEiR side of the counter... Or, you may be wondering whether it is an attempt to put something ELSE into the machine, like a new, hidden chip (anti-theft/theft-recovery/DOD/NSA/CIS/MI5/MI6 directives related stuff?) (Yeh, that part is conspiracy theory minded, i know...)
What makes you think they are? I don't read that in the article anywhere. I strongly suspect that installing on any non-sanctified hardware will still be against the EULA. Although that won't stop people of course, since it's very questionable whether or not that is in any way legally enforceable.
"from the Mac App Store, not on CDs"
Dream on! No way I buy and O/S upgrade online, I want the discs Apple, for I dunno.....when I rebuild the flipping thing from scratch! No doubt if I did buy the online upgrade you wouldn't allow me to download it again and again each time I rebuild.
I rebuild my Mac and Macbook at least once every 6 months as I am too bloody lazy to clean it up, just simplier to blow it away and reinstall to clean up, for that I will need the discs Apple!
Strangely I have no problem with upgrading my Ubuntu box online, but I know it's always available without hoops to jump through as Apple app store would make me do.
...as I said above, just absolutely staggeringly lazy! You would not believe how lazy I can be! I could spend 2 hours cleaning up or even better keeping it clean and tidy on a day-to-day basis, but it's only 45 mins to rebuild the O/S and 30 mins to put my docs back off the time machine, job done!
It's not like you have reinstall drivers on a Mac, like you do with other O/S's on commodity hardware. I rebuild OSX more often than I used with Windows, for the very reason it's so easy to do!
I could write more but...ah sod it too much work!
If it follows the normal App Store rules, then you can have unlimited downloads for as long as the product is available. Which, I appreciate, answers only one of your very minor concerns, but there you go.
Might be smart to do a completely clean install, grab a Time Machine backup right then, and any time you want to refresh just chose 'restore from Time Machine backup' via the recovery disk that came with your machine (which was also the OS disk, at least up until now).
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