I have installed Lion without an Apple ID

[treestar]

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?

[Cozmo85]

Originally Posted by treestar

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

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

[Clark Kent]

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.

[apunkrockmonk]

The only thing keeping you from doing that is the honor system. Same as every OS X release in the past.

[LIVEFRMNYC]

You will need your Apple ID & wifi/ethernet connection if you want to reinstall new from the Recovery Disk Assistant.

[treestar]

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]

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.

[treestar]

Originally Posted by Intell

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.

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]

Originally Posted by Intell

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.

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