Leopard - Lion Upgrade

I am still running 10.5.8 and am thinking of upgrading to Lion but I don't have the foggiest of how to do it. It seems I need to upgrade first to Snow Leopard and then to Lion. Why the hassle of needing to spend yet more money on an interim that I had no intention of upgrading to.

I would like some help please on putting me on the right track of what to do, how to do it and what I might need. I do have a Time Capsule and a LaCie 500gb external drive, but I have mapped that to MS-DOS so I can use the drive at home and at work.

If I do need to obtain Snow Leopard to maintain legalities, am I able to purchase it as a download? I cannot find anything that would allow me to do this.

I am running 10.6.8 on my MacBookAir and am wondering if since I own both machines, can the OS from the MBA be transferred?

Any help that can be offered, I would greatly appreciate.

Many thanks
Alonya

SubH2OChick said:

I am still running 10.5.8 and am thinking of upgrading to Lion but I don't have the foggiest of how to do it. It seems I need to upgrade first to Snow Leopard and then to Lion. Why the hassle of needing to spend yet more money on an interim that I had no intention of upgrading to.

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Because Snow Leopard contains the technologies you will need in order to use and download Lion. Plus, you should have upgraded to Snow Leopard a long time ago.

If I do need to obtain Snow Leopard to maintain legalities, am I able to purchase it as a download?

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No. You buy it in a store. Most Apple retailers and official Apple Stores will gladly sell you a copy. You'll also want to update your iLife (actually you sorta have to) and might also want iWork 09, so I'm going to suggest springing for the whole Snow Leopard Box Set.

I am running 10.6.8 on my MacBookAir and am wondering if since I own both machines, can the OS from the MBA be transferred?

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No. The OS installs you got with your machines are machine-specific and don't work with other models.

Thanks for that. I went to a retail Mac store today and they had no box copies in store at all, so I will have to head out tomorrow to the main store in Sydney city centre and see if they have one, otherwise the secondary outlet of David Jones Dept Store has them.

The current OS works just fine for what I want and it seems that my MBP 5.1 is just about at the minimum specs for this upgrade anyway. It is 3 years old now and I have only just reinstated it after I tried to retire it in favour of the MBA.

It would make sense for an OS to be autonomous and not require an interim OS in order for an entire new release being reliant on it. At least the Evil MS got it right that you could go from one completely outdated system like '95 to an entire new one and not require '98, XP and (bleurgh!) Vista also be installed first. I hate MS with a passion, but at least they got that bit right.

So tomorrow, I am prepared to purchase Snowleopard even though I don't want it AND upgrade to Lion. Now to work out how the backup will work. Time Machine or SuperDuper? Yes I bought that too as it was recommended as a good way to go with a backup in preparation for the upgrade.

I don't use iWorks. I have the older '08 version that came with this Laptop and I hated it so badly that I instead purchased Office For Mac '08 and have recently upgraded that to 2011. Much better and they have fixed things that were broken though I have found a number of features that are not compatible with the MS version of Office. As for iLife, I barely even use it except for the occasional image in iPhoto. I only have it as my partner will eventually want to do video editing.

I may sound like I am whingeing (frustration venting really), but frankly I don't care. I paid a boat-load of money for these computers (in excess of $8000 for 2 laptops, peripherals, software and warranties) and it would be nice to have some freedom in how I manage my upgrades.

Alonya
Alonya

I agree with your sentiments about the requirements of a certain previous OS and have already stated so in another thread.

However, there is a big difference in the price of any MS OS software and the price of OS X. With the price of OS X for the last couple of editions, you could purchase 3 of them for the same price as an OEM MS copy and 6-10 of them for the price of a single MS retail copy.

And with Lion being available for install to every single C2D Mac you own that is running 10.6 for one $30 price, I really don't think bringing up the $100 per computer upgrade pricing of windows is a very good argument. A person with 5 Macs - $30. A person with 5 Windows machines - $500. That's a big, big, big difference.

Fiscally what you say makes a lot of sense, however the requirements that you need to have one to support the other is extremely illogical and quite limited for those of us who are not techno whizzes and do not have the need to get everything the second it is released (I only just decided to get my iPhone4, 3 weeks ago). I am happy with my Leopard OS however it is time for me to upgrade (this will be the last OS upgrade for this computer) and it is awkward and inconvenient to be needing to track halfway around a city of 4m people to find a copy of SL in order to be able to upgrade it right away. I would prefer to pay a little bit more in order to purchase something that is autonomous and then apply any patches/updates as I go. Thankfully the store is an hour bicycle ride away.

I appreciate the feedback that I am receiving (you guys are great) but I am just frustrated at the inconvenience incurred by non-autonomous software for the end-user. I am getting the SL Box today and I have already downloaded Lion. It is simply waiting for me to do the bit in the middle. I also need to get a different external drive so that I can do a secondary backup before I do the upgrades.

Can someone please tell me how long this will likely take? Just so I can time it right as I am at the end of a Uni module and don't want to do it before I am done with that.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend.

Alonya

SubH2OChick said:

I am happy with my Leopard OS however it is time for me to upgrade (this will be the last OS upgrade for this computer) and it is awkward and inconvenient to be needing to track halfway around a city of 4m people to find a copy of SL in order to be able to upgrade it right away.

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I know that you mentioned that up to this point you've been happy with OS 10.5.8 Leopard...but OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" was released 2 years ago...and now that OS 10.7 "Lion" has been released...retail copies of 10.6 are getting harder to find. So waiting 2 years to upgrade is basically the reason for the troubles.

As far as cost. Things could be worse. Apple traditionally (OS 10.5 and before) was selling OS upgrades for up to $129. Snow Leopard 10.6 costs $29, and the Lion 10.7 download costs $29.99. So you're basically paying $58.99 for two OS upgrades rather than traditionally would have cost as much as $258.

Maybe the cost is not a big deal to you...and if so great. Waiting the 2 years to upgrade to 10.6 (so you can upgrade to 10.7) is where the trouble lies. At any time in those 2 years...obtaining a 10.6 Snow Leopard install disk would have been easy easy easy! It's only now that 10.7 has been released that a 10.6 disk is harder to obtain.

Don't blame Apple...blame procrastination.

- Nick

chas_m said:

Plus, you should have upgraded to Snow Leopard a long time ago.

No. You buy it in a store. Most Apple retailers and official Apple Stores will gladly sell you a copy.

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Nah. I still have Leopard, and everything is swell.

It seems people in the US have had trouble finding SL in a store, from what I've read.

Procrastination is part of it however it is only due to increasing requirements from other software that the upgrade is necessary. Having an autonomous OS upgrade is preferrable for a number of reasons. There are a number of people I know that simply don't have the requirement to do an upgrade every 18 months or so. I am one of them. Being able to skip a version would be fantastic. MS do it and the business model actually works. I can go from '95 to W7 without the need to spend $1000 in the middle. Sure, sure the prices are more expensive, however what comes out of the box works without the need for anything else unless you upgrade a number of months later and there are service patches available.

Now about the retail copies. Apparently Apple have put the recall on ALL unsold copies of SnowLeopard world-wide and you can only purchase it from the Apple Store with a processing time of up to 2 weeks before they ship the parcel. Amazon can ship something they have in stock on the same day as the order is made. What is wrong with this picture?

Anyway, never mind about obtaining a retail copy of SnowLeopard. I have just been given and unused one and this makes me happy. So when I have finished this module for Uni I will be doing a full system backup and installing SL. Once that it done, I will be overwriting it for Lion. This will be the last OS upgrade for this laptop and that is fine.

Thanks to all you wonderful people who have provided feedback, you have been great. As for the moderators, chill dudes, it could have been a lot, lot worse and in 7 languages.

Alonya

Don't worry about upgrading iLife if you don't use it. I'm still rocking '08 as well which came with my MacBook Pro.

I'm in the same boat, still running 10.5.8 on my Mac Mini. Despite the sluggishness, I haven't seen a ton of reasons to upgrade as it is mostly a media center for me. That said, I have heard iCloud functionality will only be supported as far back as Snow Leopard. Is that true? I sure would like to be able to sync my mobile devices wirelessly, for example. Forgive me if this is a dumb question.

As a follow on, should I need to upgrade, it seems I would need to go to Snow Leopard first regardless if I'm interested in going directly to Lion. So SHOULD I go to Lion? Will my 2007 Mini be able handle it or should I bite the bullet and purchase a new Mini?

Thanks in advance for the advice and the patience with my ignorance on the subject.