Yes, but this will be for many users not easy and I am sure they won't create a DVD. Lion should just be offered in DVD also.
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Apple Details Lion Purchase Process for Business and Education
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Yes, but this will be for many users not easy and I am sure they won't create a DVD. Lion should just be offered in DVD also.
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One thing that all the "real IT guys" are concerned about, which the folks who are saying "just don't upgrade; it's not like everything just stops working when 10.7 releases" don't appear to understand, is that enterprise IT is all about process. Once 10.7 releases, it's got to become part of our process whether we want it to or not. Let me explain.
I currently have an InstaDMG-based process for creating a base image, and a KBOX-based process for deploying additional applications. It is working for 10.6.x, and I still have an emergency 10.5.x image set for the four G5s we still have on campus. Believe me, I'm in no hurry to upgrade any of these machines to 10.7. Apple will have to a) provide InstaDMG-compatible disk images of 10.7 and b) create terms (some kind of terms, anything at all, really) for enterprise use of the App Store, including volume App Store purchases AND a way to block users from purchasing OS updates because they sound cool.
Our IT department is not politically capable of (nor interested in) preventing faculty from installing software, so users have privileges to do so. Without a means to block a Lion App Store purchase, and in the absence of an actual volume licensing model in the App Store, it's guaranteed that some of our users will buy Lion. At that point, if I don't have a process for rebuilding that computer, we have a problem.
Even more problematic -- and this is a point I've seen no one raise -- is that a Lion dependency/requirement is pretty much a given on any new Macs purchased after the release. We have hundreds of college-owned Macs which are on a standard replacement cycle; we have thousands of student-owned Macs, at least 1/4 of which are new every year. Lion will be on our campus network within days after release. I give it less than a month after release before someone, student or faculty, shows up at the help desk with a failing/corrupted Lion boot volume. If I don't have Lion integrated into our enterprise desktop management systems by that point, our help desk folks will be sitting there ad hoc troubleshooting that system like a kid trying to fix his mom's computer on the kitchen table, only less efficiently. We do not have the resources to do "one-off"-style support of Lion machines, hoping against hope that Apple will eventually catch up to us with enterprise-friendly distribution and licensing. Those things need to be in place now, before Lion is released.
I love Apple's Mac products. They've made our labs and classrooms extremely flexible; their build quality is above average, and OS X is a great system. Apple needs to do more to provide basic support to higher ed, or we'll start to see the shift towards Apple turn back around here. I, and many others in higher ed IT, are not asking for handholding; we just need Apple to stop actively working against us.
One thing that all the "real IT guys" are concerned about, which the folks who are saying "just don't upgrade; it's not like everything just stops working when 10.7 releases" don't appear to understand, is that enterprise IT is all about process. Once 10.7 releases, it's got to become part of our process whether we want it to or not. Let me explain.
I currently have an InstaDMG-based process for creating a base image, and a KBOX-based process for deploying additional applications. It is working for 10.6.x, and I still have an emergency 10.5.x image set for the four G5s we still have on campus. Believe me, I'm in no hurry to upgrade any of these machines to 10.7. Apple will have to a) provide InstaDMG-compatible disk images of 10.7 and b) create terms (some kind of terms, anything at all, really) for enterprise use of the App Store, including volume App Store purchases AND a way to block users from purchasing OS updates because they sound cool.
Our IT department is not politically capable of (nor interested in) preventing faculty from installing software, so users have privileges to do so. Without a means to block a Lion App Store purchase, and in the absence of an actual volume licensing model in the App Store, it's guaranteed that some of our users will buy Lion. At that point, if I don't have a process for rebuilding that computer, we have a problem.
Even more problematic -- and this is a point I've seen no one raise -- is that a Lion dependency/requirement is pretty much a given on any new Macs purchased after the release. We have hundreds of college-owned Macs which are on a standard replacement cycle; we have thousands of student-owned Macs, at least 1/4 of which are new every year. Lion will be on our campus network within days after release. I give it less than a month after release before someone, student or faculty, shows up at the help desk with a failing/corrupted Lion boot volume. If I don't have Lion integrated into our enterprise desktop management systems by that point, our help desk folks will be sitting there ad hoc troubleshooting that system like a kid trying to fix his mom's computer on the kitchen table, only less efficiently. We do not have the resources to do "one-off"-style support of Lion machines, hoping against hope that Apple will eventually catch up to us with enterprise-friendly distribution and licensing. Those things need to be in place now, before Lion is released.
I love Apple's Mac products. They've made our labs and classrooms extremely flexible; their build quality is above average, and OS X is a great system. Apple needs to do more to provide basic support to higher ed, or we'll start to see the shift towards Apple turn back around here. I, and many others in higher ed IT, are not asking for handholding; we just need Apple to stop actively working against us.
But many will just download the image via BitTorrent without needing an iTunes account....
3-4 million is a lot of copies and I'm sure most of those people wouldn't sneeze if you charged them $5 extra for the physical media, which I would guess - considering the number of blu ray movies I'm seeing under $10 these days - should more than cover the costs.
I think you're overestimating the cost involved in printing commercial DVDs, especially if you're comparing this to a fundamental change in processing architecture.
Who are you replying to? I'm not getting upset, though I find it truly bizarre that you are making declarations about what people do and do not have the right to get upset about.
I quite like that Apple has been willing to push out the old in favor of the new when it matters, but in this case, it seems unnecessary and premature.
Well,
To get Lion you need to be Technologically very advanced , if you are not , then dont come onboard on Apple ship crusing at very higfh speed of technology....
simple ******* urself
10.6 (why you did not update it when we release it?)
Apple ID and credit card , buyig Retail copy with cash is not possible (you dont have credit card yet ?)
Internet connection high speed and big data plan , (even if your ISP provides high speed internet with limited data plan , you are looser dude!! )
I dont include hardware compatibility , supporting old hardware is not good idea but for compatible hardware Apple should provide upgrade option.
To get Lion you need to be Technologically very advanced , if you are not , then dont come onboard on Apple ship crusing at very higfh speed of technology....
simple ******* urself
10.6 (why you did not update it when we release it?)
Apple ID and credit card , buyig Retail copy with cash is not possible (you dont have credit card yet ?)
Internet connection high speed and big data plan , (even if your ISP provides high speed internet with limited data plan , you are looser dude!! )
I dont include hardware compatibility , supporting old hardware is not good idea but for compatible hardware Apple should provide upgrade option.
That's what the license stipulates: you can install it on any mac with your AppleID. Same rules as mac store apps. I'm pretty sure it will only ask when you download it, but we'll have to see.
maybe..
Maybe Apple intends to teach a lesson to the good folks who did not upgrade to the "worlds most advanced operating system" when it came out back then.. besides this is just a case of how said OS "advanced even further" - so maybe they have a reason?
Maybe Apple intends to teach a lesson to the good folks who did not upgrade to the "worlds most advanced operating system" when it came out back then.. besides this is just a case of how said OS "advanced even further" - so maybe they have a reason?
I give the Mac App Store Approach 6 months before you can buy it on USB.
Will they ever release it on optical media, nope, but they will release it on USB and here is why:
I currently have Verizon Fios as home and we have Fios at our business location. If your pipes are big enough we can achieve 50mbps down. If I am downloading something for one of our Windows boxes - say a service pack - excellent download speed from MS's servers. Now, if I am downloading an OS X point update speed from Apple's servers are usually half of the throughput from MS.
Ok, no problem... now on the Mac App Store go and download a huge application - because obviously none of you have. Do you know how long it took us to download Xcode? An hour and 20 minutes with Fios service! Do you know how long it took a guy we had working in San Francisco through Comcast? SIX HOURS!
Don't believe me? Think it's isolated? Read the reviews for XCode on the App Store.
This is a huge disaster waiting to happen. Love Apple, but this nonsense is Jobs knowing he doesn't have that much time left and more than anything iCloud is what he wants to be his legacy. I don't like saying that because it's morbid, but if you remember his keynote in 97 you will know exactly what I mean. I am sure this idea led to some major strife with upper management and he had the final say.
In terms of all you enterprise guys out there. Until he is officially not CEO anymore enterprise customers are third on the list: right now the order is
1.) Targeted consumer products customers i.e. iPhones, iPads and iPods
2.) Mac consumer customers and the majority of those customers are notebook customers
3.) Enterprise customers
This was a dumb way to go about this release and that arrogance IS going to affect their bottom line. Just wait until you go to download the damn thing and you're achieving 10kbps down. All you consumer customers that is who could obviously give a crap less about enterprise folks as all those people seem to get voted down.
Will they ever release it on optical media, nope, but they will release it on USB and here is why:
I currently have Verizon Fios as home and we have Fios at our business location. If your pipes are big enough we can achieve 50mbps down. If I am downloading something for one of our Windows boxes - say a service pack - excellent download speed from MS's servers. Now, if I am downloading an OS X point update speed from Apple's servers are usually half of the throughput from MS.
Ok, no problem... now on the Mac App Store go and download a huge application - because obviously none of you have. Do you know how long it took us to download Xcode? An hour and 20 minutes with Fios service! Do you know how long it took a guy we had working in San Francisco through Comcast? SIX HOURS!
Don't believe me? Think it's isolated? Read the reviews for XCode on the App Store.
This is a huge disaster waiting to happen. Love Apple, but this nonsense is Jobs knowing he doesn't have that much time left and more than anything iCloud is what he wants to be his legacy. I don't like saying that because it's morbid, but if you remember his keynote in 97 you will know exactly what I mean. I am sure this idea led to some major strife with upper management and he had the final say.
In terms of all you enterprise guys out there. Until he is officially not CEO anymore enterprise customers are third on the list: right now the order is
1.) Targeted consumer products customers i.e. iPhones, iPads and iPods
2.) Mac consumer customers and the majority of those customers are notebook customers
3.) Enterprise customers
This was a dumb way to go about this release and that arrogance IS going to affect their bottom line. Just wait until you go to download the damn thing and you're achieving 10kbps down. All you consumer customers that is who could obviously give a crap less about enterprise folks as all those people seem to get voted down.
some people don't get it. it's not about making things easier for the masses. the upgrade process was easy enough, you pop in the dvd, wait for the disk to mount and proceed with the upgrade.
as some people here already pointed out, it's about apple forcing everybody who wants to use their newest os to have an apple id. they've done it with ios and now they're gonna do it with lion, too.
piracy was never an issue for apple, at least not to the extent it is for microsoft. i mean c'mon people, how high is the % number of pirated copies of os x? and compare that to the % of pirated windows copies out there.
it's all about gathering credit card info (so they can brag about it on the next wwdc ..)
i want to buy it (lion) on physical media, even if i have to pay a little more, so please apple give me that option!
and in a few years time, the mac app store will be the only way to install software on "your" mac. i know steve jobs said otherwise, but seeing the way os x is going, i don't believe him.
just my 2 cents ..
as some people here already pointed out, it's about apple forcing everybody who wants to use their newest os to have an apple id. they've done it with ios and now they're gonna do it with lion, too.
piracy was never an issue for apple, at least not to the extent it is for microsoft. i mean c'mon people, how high is the % number of pirated copies of os x? and compare that to the % of pirated windows copies out there.
it's all about gathering credit card info (so they can brag about it on the next wwdc ..)
i want to buy it (lion) on physical media, even if i have to pay a little more, so please apple give me that option!
and in a few years time, the mac app store will be the only way to install software on "your" mac. i know steve jobs said otherwise, but seeing the way os x is going, i don't believe him.
just my 2 cents ..
I wonder if Apple will embed the Apple ID used to purchase Lion into the image itself? Could make things unpleasant for a few people who decide to distribute Lion illegally (assuming they are dumb enough to use a real ID to get hold of the original install image).
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It seems this change will make a little more work for those who get paid to install oses for a living and less work for those who don't. Seems reasonable to me.
dashiel said:
It seems this change will make a little more work for those who get paid to install oses for a living and less work for those who don't. Seems reasonable to me.
Actually yes, including walking. We cover about 25 Macs, Usermachines, laptops and Lab machines. Which in my opinion is a common amount of devices for a small company or an higer educational lab. Which is what Mac OS X once was targeted for. Too few devices to start a whole freaking project just for an upgrade but too many devices to just ignore the time used per device.including walking from machine to machine? How many machines?
That's why I said "you may". I haven't tried it myself and it can cause issues yes, but it may not as well. Until someone tries, we won't know.
Is it that hard to open Disk Utility and press Burn -> then select a dmg file? If this is hard they shouldn't be using computer at all.
IMO, this is either ignorance/inexperience or disingenuousness talking.
We have about 50/50 Windows and Mac servers, been running both for many, many years. There's no doubt that the Windows servers are higher maintenance and way more buggy than the Mac servers. Both have their issues, but the ones on the Mac side are far easier to deal with and less serious.
I have so many Windows stories of BSODs, corrupted NTFS (where HFS+ keeps on truckin'), crazy/crappy drivers that are a crapshoot to install, inability to image/migrate easily, external storage issues, BIOS silliness that locks up the machine at the boot screen, terrible utility software for things like RAIDs, inability to tell what the heck chipsets and other components are in the box, vendor confusion and a morass of conflicting versions and drivers, inability to run multiple versions of software on the same machine, the list goes on and on and on.
Some people just know what they know and love to putter around forever with driver versions and DLL nonsense: it becomes their hobby and their life. In their minds they construct a straw man about "The Mac", that it's absolutely perfect and never has an issue, then when they see a few small issues (which all systems have, of course), they throw up their hands and bemoan the "unstable" Mac. In the meantime, they've somehow skipped over in their heads the absolutely hell that they go through on a regular basis with Windows.
It's pretty clear preference bias based on a detailed knowledge of how to navigate the various Windows Hells that exist, with concurrent lack of knowledge about the far less significant (but nonetheless present, of course) challenges that Macs present.
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I have a question which I've not seen answered anywhere yet...
Since Leopard was a whole new operating system compared to Tiger and Snow Leopard and Lion are like $29-$39 updates (IMHO), is Apple going to continue to do security updates for Leopard after Lion is released?
I know the standard policy is to only support the last operating system and provide normal updates to the current one, but people paid a lot more money to Apple for Leopard than for Snow Leopard and Lion.
Considering how long Microsoft has continued to support Windows XP, I think it would only be fitting that Apple continue to provide Leopard security fixes.
Has anyone read anything about this yet? I wonder this because obviously that factor might affect some peoples' purchasing decisions, including mine.
Since Leopard was a whole new operating system compared to Tiger and Snow Leopard and Lion are like $29-$39 updates (IMHO), is Apple going to continue to do security updates for Leopard after Lion is released?
I know the standard policy is to only support the last operating system and provide normal updates to the current one, but people paid a lot more money to Apple for Leopard than for Snow Leopard and Lion.
Considering how long Microsoft has continued to support Windows XP, I think it would only be fitting that Apple continue to provide Leopard security fixes.
Has anyone read anything about this yet? I wonder this because obviously that factor might affect some peoples' purchasing decisions, including mine.
Sounds to me like your problem is not the lack of a proper Lion VL program, it's the lack of a proper IT policy. Our 20,000 or so PCs are standardised to Windows XP. We haven't upgraded to Vista and I think we're just now starting to look into Windows 7 (I'm not in the PC group).
We moved to Windows XP from Windows 2000 circa 2006 or 2007 just to give you an hint. Want to scrap your laptop and install Linux or whatever (I did with mine) ? Fine, but don't expect IT to work on it. That's the crux of the issue. As a department, IT needs clear guidelines and needs to draw lines. You can't just support a big mess and free-for-all and you can't make your users force upgrades that might or might not require tons of infrastructure upgrades along the way. That's just paving the road to unwarranted spending.
Manage your IT better.
At my company we have two kinds of users: managed(Windows XP) and unmanaged(Windows, Linux, OS X). The managed users are not allowed to install software and the unmanaged users can do what they want. When a managed user experiences problems, helpdesk will reinstall their machine in the worst case. When an unmanaged user experiences problems they're officially on their own (although we'll get some help if we really need it which we rarely do). The unmanaged users number less than a hundred and are mostly developers so it is not a big expense for IT to answer the odd question once in a while.
I find this to be reasonable and it sucks that you're forced to support users that mess up their stuff in various way. Faculty might be one thing but students too? Why not let the students at least pay for the privilege of having access to support?
That being said I completely agree that Apple are screwing enterprise customers over in a number of ways but that isn't really news.
Two questions:
1) What about businesses with less than 20 Macs? The way I read this article it seems we can buy Lion only if we pay for 20 licences ie 20 x $29.99 = $600?
2) Not everyone has fast broadband - there are still large parts of the country that still only have dial up available. Are these folks to be left out of the Apple moneyfest?
1) What about businesses with less than 20 Macs? The way I read this article it seems we can buy Lion only if we pay for 20 licences ie 20 x $29.99 = $600?
2) Not everyone has fast broadband - there are still large parts of the country that still only have dial up available. Are these folks to be left out of the Apple moneyfest?
I'm still hearing "blah blah blah we are going to make it more difficult to do business with us for bulk licenced products" from Apple. I hope they don't mind hearing "blah blah blah turns out you're not the only game in town" in the reply they get.
How so and in what way? XCode 4 was an improvement over 3 and distribution methods was a complete non-issue.
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I'm actually not estimating the cost at all. My (rhetorical) question is whether Apple considers it worth the cost (WHATEVER the cost is) to upgrade the users who are lagging behind. Given the lack of a Leopard upgrade path, I'm confused as to why you'd even question that. It certainly gives me the impression that they don't. If the profit they'd gain was worth the cost and effort, they'd probably do it.
Also, "cost and effort" does not just mean pressing and distributing media. There's also the support resources that need to be retained to support these users once the system is released, development resources that need to be re-tasked with ensuring that the actual OS code that runs the update works properly with Leopard, internationalization resources (translators) to work on the Leopard binaries, QA resources that need to be retained indefinitely to test every future change they make against a system upgraded from Leopard, etc, etc, etc. The distribution costs may be trivial (or maybe not, I really wouldn't know). I can assure you, the development and support costs are not.
That was a poor choice of words, yes. It wasn't a reply to anything, and not directed at you; just a general statement. People have the "right" to get upset about whatever they like. It would have been better to say that there's no real justification for the level of upset.
I never find this sort of thing unnecessary and premature. As a developer and a technology enthusiast, I'm very conscious of just how far back the technology world gets held by people who won't upgrade regularly. I'm thrilled any time Apple (or Microsoft for that matter) puts those users on the spot and forces them to make the choice to join the rest of us or get left behind.
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Apple's response would probably be that it's time you start demanding better than dial-up from your providers. It's 2011.
Because historically Apple has always immediately buckled every time someone threatens to pay Microsoft's licensing fees instead?