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I have installed Lion without an Apple ID

T

treestar

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 28, 2010
366
5
I have installed Lion on two of my Macs without registering or entering an Apple ID. At least once I installed on a new partition without SL. My version of Lion came from the App store. How many times will this be possible? There has been a lot of chatter that Lion can be installed on up to 5 systems with the same Apple ID, but I have done so without my Apple ID (unless it is unknowingly tied to my copy of the Lion installer). Does this indicate an opportunity to distribute a single copy of Lion to a limitless number of systems?

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C

Cozmo85

macrumors regular
Oct 2, 2007
211
0
treestar said:
I have installed Lion on two of my Macs without registering or entering an Apple ID. At least once I installed on a new partition without SL. My version of Lion came from the App store. How many times will this be possible? There has been a lot of chatter that Lion can be installed on up to 5 systems with the same Apple ID, but I have done so without my Apple ID (unless it is unknowingly tied to my copy of the Lion installer). Does this indicate an opportunity to distribute a single copy of Lion to a limitless number of systems?

Image
Click to expand...

You are allowed to install Lion on as many machines as you own.
 
C

Clark Kent

macrumors member
Mar 31, 2009
75
0
No different than any version of Mac OS. You could install it on any number of systems, but that doesn't give you the right to do so.
 
L

LIVEFRMNYC

macrumors G3
Oct 27, 2009
8,780
10,844
You will need your Apple ID & wifi/ethernet connection if you want to reinstall new from the Recovery Disk Assistant.
 
T

treestar

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 28, 2010
366
5
Ahh, very well. I haven't installed OS X on my own before now. I didn't know the rules were so easily broken. It's surprising.
 
Intell

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,955
509
Inside
Lion installations get counted when you download Lion from the App Store. The App Store send your Mac's UUID to Apple's servers and ties the purchase of Lion to your Apple ID. It will then increment the purchases or downloads of Lion by one for every new UUID that get tied to your Apple ID. Of course, you can burn the Install_ESD to a disc or use the Lion Reinstallation Utility to bypass this restriction.

The feat of getting past the screen where Lion requests your Apple ID upon installation isn't that hard. All you do is press Command+Q and click Skip. Its been like this since 10.4.0.
 
T

treestar

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 28, 2010
366
5
Intell said:
Lion installations get counted when you download Lion from the App Store. The App Store send your Mac's UUID to Apple's servers and ties the purchase of Lion to your Apple ID. It will then increment the purchases or downloads of Lion by one for every new UUID that get tied to your Apple ID. Of course, you can burn the Install_ESD to a disc or use the Lion Reinstallation Utility to bypass this restriction.

The feat of getting past the screen where Lion requests your Apple ID upon installation isn't that hard. All you do is press Command+Q and click Skip. Its been like this since 10.4.0.
Click to expand...

For the sake of providing information for others on this forum, I downloaded Lion with my free Lion upgrade from the App store. I followed MacRumors instructions on creating a Lion install disc on a DVD, I made a USB install disk with Lion DiskMaker, and I've updated from SL using the Apple Lion Installer saved on a Windows network share.

"[G]etting past the screen" was even easier than that: I just hit next without entering information and continue and it finished the installation.

Lion installs fine with the full ESD on a USB disk to a clean partition.
 
Mal

Mal

macrumors 603
Jan 6, 2002
6,252
18
Orlando
Intell said:
Lion installations get counted when you download Lion from the App Store. The App Store send your Mac's UUID to Apple's servers and ties the purchase of Lion to your Apple ID. It will then increment the purchases or downloads of Lion by one for every new UUID that get tied to your Apple ID. Of course, you can burn the Install_ESD to a disc or use the Lion Reinstallation Utility to bypass this restriction.

The feat of getting past the screen where Lion requests your Apple ID upon installation isn't that hard. All you do is press Command+Q and click Skip. Its been like this since 10.4.0.
Click to expand...

Not even remotely accurate. It doesn't track your "purchases or downloads" of Lion. Mostly because there's no restriction in the first place. There's no 5 computer limit. There's no limit on the number of times you can install it, or download it. You never have to enter an Apple ID at startup, you can simply hit continue without entering it and it will proceed to the next step, it's only used for registering the computer for warranty purposes.

jW
 
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