How soon will Macs ship with Lion

[el-John-o]

Hey all,

I'm gonna pick up a Macbook fairly soon, so my question is (yes, I know nobody knows for sure, which is why I'm asking the folks at Macrumors), will Apple ship lion the day lion is released on new Macs? I would assume so, but what about hardware refreshes? I'm inclined to think that when they release Lion, they will include hardware refreshes for the new Macs that run Lion, what say you?

[aristobrat]

What typically happens at Apple Stores is that the day the new OS is released, all existing inventory will be opened and an OS upgrade disc is added.

At some point after that, new stock arrives with Lion pre-installed, but the store has to sell through existing stock where the discs were inserted first.

AFAIK, there hasn't been a hardware refresh at the same time a new OS was released.

[walterwhite]

If it s due in the summer... lets say July 1... if you buy a machine on the day of release, you will get a machine with a "Drop-in" kit which you can use to upgrade or completely reinstall. The machines already installed can take a month or so... unless they do a release of a new machine at the same time, then that particular machine would most likely have 10.7 freshly installed.

[chrismacguy]

Originally Posted by el-John-o

Hey all,

I'm gonna pick up a Macbook fairly soon, so my question is (yes, I know nobody knows for sure, which is why I'm asking the folks at Macrumors), will Apple ship lion the day lion is released on new Macs? I would assume so, but what about hardware refreshes? I'm inclined to think that when they release Lion, they will include hardware refreshes for the new Macs that run Lion, what say you?

Its been more often theyve released Macs with future OSes in mind. For instance the G5, which shipped with a custom 10.2 build which had G5 support sort of bolted on till 10.3 turned up, and the MacBook Pros which came with 10.5 but were designed for 10.6 (not as significantly, but they were a little more 10.6 oriented)