You can also do a VM of 10.4.11 if you can find the Intel version. I did that a while back on VirtualBox. Haven't tried it on the more recent versions of VB.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Makes OS X Lion and Mountain Lion Free to Download
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Everything was better when I was younger. Oh, and you kids. Get off my lawn.
I have an ISO image of Snow Leopard, but it would almost be worth the 20 pounds to have the box. The photo on the box is incredible, and I think Snow Leopard was the coolest cat of them all!
Be careful with those flash drives, they will one day be unreadable.
I am not the original owner, but I also have a 10.6.2 Snow Leopard install disc, but only the OS install. If I was doing a fresh install from this disc, do I absolutely need the second disc with applications? Is it only iWork stuff on that second disc?
Thanks for your reply.
Yeah, I'm logged in and think I already tried that and tried it again now without success,
but I guess my free account isn't enough or it's a matter of your past (stored) downloads.
I have the paid developer status so that gives greater access to many more things in there.
That’s probably why I can see it and you can’t.
I’m not suggesting that you upgrade to paid status just for Leopard, but you might want to consider it for all the other stuff in there too.
Otherwise it would probably be cheaper to get the DVD on eBay.
Last edited:
Lion was bad, but Mountain Lion (and later Mavericks) fixed most of its problems and were very good releases.
These particular downloads won’t appear unless you have a paid (!) developer account.
Edit: Oops! Beaten. Sorry!
Lion work better with more memory. There are advantages to use Lion (ability to either boot in 32 or 64 bit mode). It was the last to be able to do that if I remember correctly. Plus, running older programs still creates the need for it. If you have hardware that is still good today that you still used during that transition period then Lion is useful.
Mountain Lion was (and is) excellent if you have the need for it (old programs and hardware). Very fast and I still use it on occasion. Literally, I had and never had a single issue with it as it was the only OS from memory that I didn’t have an issue. That is my experience and is probably due to my needs and it fulfilled it all for me at the time.
Yeah, Mountain Lion fixed what was wrong with Lion. I'm assuming the only reason to use Lion is if the machine can't run anything newer.
Awesome... i was waiting to get my hands on installers (sine their in .dmg form, i'm guessing Apple also updated certificates too like all the others). We'll see if this break in VM...
10.9 and earlier don’t need updated certs, the verification was added in 10.10.
I kept Lion for historical reasons as one of my working OS because it bears the Steve Jobs era UI: on a grand scale, it's no more buggy than High Sierra, significantly more stable compared to Yosemite and performs way better than High Sierra, Mojave and even Mavericks on my machine (features - that's another topic) and Mojave flies. I know this since I've been using it for longer than just 3 years support cycle and had many opportunities to became aware of its ins and outs - so it's more about software, not hardware. On the other hand it's about hardware in the sense that 16GB RAM and SSD make it rock. ML brought some changes that I disliked such as the metallic Dock with tiny indiscernible active app indicators which was an awful path for the design direction in which macOS was creeping.
The most annoying "change" was how Apple broke Preview for good - features-wise and Preview is the most often used app. Lion's Preview is more suited for long annotations which are scrollable, it's more useful for any kind of student work, careful reading and learning. You also can have the outline view of those by summoning Inspector and read them gathered under one roof, quickly go to any point on the page they're anchored to - all of that is no longer the case in any macOS beginning with ML or Mavericks: you can make sure of that by yourself, just launch Inspector in Preview and if your document has many annotations try reading them - you'll fail as there's no text which defeats the purpose. So yeah, Lion still can hold a candle (a terrible shame, of course, especially having in mind how "the most advanced operating system" becomes more and more advanced year by year).
Last edited:
For whatever it's worth, I took a quick look and it's not impossible to get the Lion Preview to work on Mavericks. It crashes because it's looking for a class called
_SCNExportOperation, but this class was renamed to SCNExportOperation (without the underscore) in 10.8. So, you need to tell preview to look for the new name:
C:
#define DYLD_INTERPOSE(_replacement,_replacee) \
__attribute__((used)) static struct{ const void* replacement; const void* replacee; } _interpose_##_replacee \
__attribute__ ((section ("__DATA,__interpose"))) = { (const void*)(unsigned long)&_replacement, (const void*)(unsigned long)&_replacee };
Class OBJC_CLASS_$SCNExportOperation;
Class OBJC_CLASS_$_SCNExportOperation;
DYLD_INTERPOSE(OBJC_CLASS_$SCNExportOperation, OBJC_CLASS_$_SCNExportOperation);The app launches, and can open PDFs, make comments and annotations, etc. But it's more than a little buggy—my mouse's scroll wheel sometimes doesn't work, the magnifier (when enabled) is stuck to the left side, and the highlighter highlights the wrong text. Oh well! Maybe it would be better on 10.8?
(I don't actually mind the 10.9 Preview, but I agree 10.7's version is just a tad nicer.)
@Wowfunhappy It's not only dylib linking, it's a different PDFKit, so the whole another level of difficulties. I read somewhere that people were able to make SnowLeopard's Preview work on 10.7-10.9 by copying PDFKit framework to one of these newer macOS.
I mean, it worked though. I didn't relink anything, I just injected my library.
Compiled library attached if you really want to play around; inject with DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES. As I said though, while it's technically usable it's definitely buggy, just a curiosity really.
Not sure if this is the right thread to ask but maybe someone knows what's the deal here. For some reason neither iMessage nor FaceTime are working in ML for me. They just wouldn't let me log in with my AppleID returning an error of some sort. I have no problem logging in there in Mavericks though.
My first MacBook was in around 2008 or 2012, it was the first MacBook with Retina display. Never had to Pay for OS upgrade I believe. Even now with the latest released. So previously to this, Apple used to charge for new OS? Now they scraped that for new OS's?
@otetzone Since around 2017-18 Apple upped the min requirements to 10.9 for everything FaceTime and iMessage. See System requirements for iCloud https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204230
I'd be happy if someone figured out a hack to restore FaceTime in 10.7 and 10.8: apparently those connect to port 80 which is not what TLS requires (443) and this could be the main culprit.
I'd be happy if someone figured out a hack to restore FaceTime in 10.7 and 10.8: apparently those connect to port 80 which is not what TLS requires (443) and this could be the main culprit.