Mac OS X Lion download in SA explained
During a quarterly financial results briefing call yesterday (19 July 2011), Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer confirmed that they would be launching the latest version of their PC operating system, Mac OS X Lion, today (20 July 2011).
This comes after rumours were circulated that the OS would launch last week Thursday, 14 July 2011, which were later revised when it was revealed they were “off by a week.”
Mac OS X Lion is set to offer a number of new features and will be a relatively cheap upgrade at $29.99. When Apple first announced the new OS version they revealed that it will be available exclusively as a download from the Mac App Store.
This means that users will have to download around 4GB of data to upgrade as Mac OS X Lion won’t be available on removable media such as DVDs or USB flash drives.
For South African Mac owners who use wireless broadband as their primary Internet connection this may pose a significant challenge in terms of both speed and cost.
Core Group, official distributors of Apple products in South Africa, previously told MyBroadband that they were looking into solutions, but couldn’t offer anything concrete at that stage.
Mac OS X Lion
More rumours about the distribution of Mac OS X Lion began to surface at 9to5Mac which led to speculation that customers would be able to purchase Lion from the Mac App Store and download it from an in-store caching server.
Asked whether Apple Premium Resellers (APR) in SA would get such a solution from Apple, Core reiterated that they are working on a solution from an iStore perspective, but that the decision to sell Lion through the Mac App Store was Apple’s.
“It is difficult,” said a Core spokesperson, “as none of the other regions experience the same problem with bandwidth.”
Core Group also emphasised that the latest version of Snow Leopard will be needed to upgrade to Lion.
This means that Leopard users who haven’t purchased the upgrade to Snow Leopard will first have to buy and install that (available for R299 at the time of writing) before they can buy the upgrade to Lion for $29.99.
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