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Apple Starts Selling $69 OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive

Nah, the $39 surcharge is mostly for convenience, not the hardware.

You know, like when you buy a two-dollar bottle of water instead of just turning on the faucet. You're not paying $1.97 for a plastic bottle.
 
compatibility with new MBA and Mini??

Haters, hate, no matter how illogical. Fanboys defend, no matter how irrational.

To anyone who's not preoccupied with flaming the other side...

I have a 2011 MBA, shipped with lion etc., and want physical media. I am curious about this option from Apple-

* The "Emergency" usb keys that shipped last week/weekend for "some users" were NOT COMPATIBLE with the new macbook airs and minis, due to firmware differences in the version that was included on the usb compared to what was imaged ON the shipped hardware versions.

* I am on the phone with Apple senior advisor right now about whether or not the RETAIL USB LION COPY is compatible with our systems that shipped with Lion... At first they said it was not. But I am insistent on them providing documentation and explaining why this "Physical Media Solution" does not in fact provide a solution all across the board. I can't see why the usb retail option for sale publicly wouldn't work on certain new models.

Stay tuned
 
this is for the utter most laziest people. or rather want the beauty of the usb design



don't even complain about the price lol.
get it via app store. dl recovery utility and make usb and done.
 
gr8tfly said:
I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist, but I would point out that a similarly designed drive (Transcend White 8GB) goes for $27 retail at Amazon. Add in the Apple branding factor, and you're well within shooting range of Apple's $69 pricing.

C'est la vie... :apple:
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Apple's drive is a ROM, and cannot be written on any more than a BD/DVD/CD.

Surely the drive on Amazon is a FlashROM, i.e. possible to write to - thus much more expensive.

Anyway, I still have all my floppy-disks from my C64, but all the cartridges are lost or broken.

Strange how disks are more durable in the end. I would have preferred a BD of the system (or DVD) simply because I have no idea where my pocket Flash-drives are and I know where my 10.6 install DVD is. :cool:
 
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NOV said:
why usb and not on DVD?
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And if you have a new Nini or Air what would you recomend they do? I know external CD/DVD drives are available but who wants one?
 
jdechko said:
jnpy!$4g3cwk, That was my thought. Why would Apple even include this. And the sites I listed thought it was important to note as well (even though they all learned of it through 9to5mac). Obviously most people will just use the App store anyway, but the language is curious. Maybe maybe it's designed to be used with the recovery image creator tool that was released a few days ago. Beats me.
Click to expand...

I think they did that because if you bought their stick you presumably did that because your internet connection isn't fast enough to downloaded it. In which case you wouldn't want to re-install from the recovery partition.

In other words:

1. You can create your own stick off the original app store download. It contains the full 3.9Gb Lion, so you can install it fine with no internet connection. I did this myself the other day when I installed a new 1Tb hard drive in my MBP. This also creates a recovery partition.

2. You can buy Apple's stick. Same thing. It contains the full install so no internet conenction required. I don't know if this creates a recovery partition.

Either way, the recovery partition is pretty useless if you have a stick too. The recovery partion doesn't contain the full OS. Just 650Mb worth of utilities etc. To actually re-install Lion from it you will need an internet connection to download the actual OS. Of course it can still come in useful if you want to run Disk Utility to repair your main partition or something.
 
o.0

So does this mean that I could use this on as many computers as I want? If so then thats much cheaper than the download ppl... lol somebody get back to me with that?
 
nonameowns said:
this is for the utter most laziest people. or rather want the beauty of the usb design
Click to expand...

What about the other people who might want this ? The ones without proper broadband. The ones not within driving distance to an Apple store to download it free there. The ones who don't give a flying hoot about the MAS and would rather not use it ?

You forget quite a few people there in your list.

The fact remains : more options for Lion distribution will mean greater adoption rate of the OS. That can only be good for Apple.
 
Dmac77 said:
1) Jobs hates optical media, and is on a crusade to kill it (see recent mini update, refusal to add Blu-Ray, etc.)

2) Flash based media is much faster and much more resilient than optical media (ever had a disk rendered unreadable by scratches? It especially sucks if you don't have a backup)

-Don
Click to expand...

Point no.1 everyone can agree with.

Point no.2 yes, flash based media is faster, but not by that much, with ~30 MByte read on a good flash-ROM vs. 22 MByte read on optical DVD drive. Flash has better seek time (i.e. near to none, but that doesn't matter so much for an optical disk meant for installing, there are very few times it needs to seek)

But being more resilient. That's not so correct. Sure disks can scratch (although BDs not so much), but so much that the disk is unreadable - no, I've never seen that. Sometimes a file or two become corrupted if the scratches are serious.

A flashROM either works or not. When it fails it fails completely 100%. When a disk fails, it's less, 1% or so.

In this discussion we are talking about commercially made DVDs vs. ROM.

A printed DVD is physically etched with every line of data, it is forever. It's not comparable to burned DVDs, for instance. And flashROMs aren't invincible either. They die if they get wet, a DVD can just be cleaned.

It's not so clear cut advantage to flashROM, and when price is added to the equation, I'm sorry to say, optical media is so much cheaper. FlashROMs are a luxury item and in the end no more reliable than a DVD/BD. More difficult to store perhaps and easier to lose. :cool:
 
Atlantico said:
And flashROMs aren't invincible either. They die if they get wet, a DVD can just be cleaned.
Click to expand...

Not to mention these Apple branded USB sticks are quite flimsy and get ruined easily in normal use. Apple really did a botch job on these. All of us with MBAs can testify to this.
 
ChazUK said:
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Still cheaper than Windows on a DVD.
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Why do so many people always have to compare Apple to something else?
 
colinwil said:
I think they did that because if you bought their stick you presumably did that because your internet connection isn't fast enough to downloaded it. In which case you wouldn't want to re-install from the recovery partition.

In other words:

1. You can create your own stick off the original app store download. It contains the full 3.9Gb Lion, so you can install it fine with no internet connection. I did this myself the other day when I installed a new 1Tb hard drive in my MBP. This also creates a recovery partition.

2. You can buy Apple's stick. Same thing. It contains the full install so no internet conenction required. I don't know if this creates a recovery partition.

Either way, the recovery partition is pretty useless if you have a stick too. The recovery partion doesn't contain the full OS. Just 650Mb worth of utilities etc. To actually re-install Lion from it you will need an internet connection to download the actual OS. Of course it can still come in useful if you want to run Disk Utility to repair your main partition or something.
Click to expand...

From the Apple store, there is a special note at the bottom stating it does NOT create a "recovery partition" and you must use the USB drive again to install the OS if needed. No big deal though as you said, that's why you either made one to begin with or bought one.
 
The Price Makes Sense -- Stop Whining About It

It costs that much because people can "skip" over buying snow leopard by using the thumb drive. Purchasing lion on the mac app store requires access to the mac app store, which requires snow leopard. Snow leopard was $30 and lion is $30. So it's really only a $9 premium.

(And it's on a thumb drive, not dvd, for obvious reasons.)
 
I assume the USB version isn't tied to a particular Apple Store account. They may have disabled internet recovery since there is no way to verify that it is a legitimately purchased version.
 
It's not expensive for the drive- it's cheap for the download

Apple lowers the price of a FULL new version of OX (Snow Leopard was a minor upgrade so doesn't really count) from the traditional price of $130 to $70 and people complain? Weird.

If you want the physical version at a $60 price reduction from past OS X versions then there you have it- and it comes on a USB drive because the newest Macs don't have DVD drives. If you don't mind downloading it you can get an even deeper discount of $100 off the past OS X price.

The fact that it is on a USB drive doesn't make a difference. If it was on a DVD people would complain it's expensive for a plastic disk. Adobe is charging HUNDREDS of dollars for plastic DVD disks! Can you believe it!?!? Sure, those disks contain Photoshop and Illustrator but that is of no consequence.

By the way, the USB version is not tied to an Apple iTunes account so it can be installed on any Mac you wish, regardless of the iTunes account that Mac is tied to. So you pay a little more for essentially unlimited installs on any Lion compatible Mac. Makes it even a better deal. Buy it once for $70 and install it on as many Macs as you want.
 
World Citizen said:
Guys,

this is just a normal price...

Keep in mind there has to be employees selling it, and an distribution channel.. Cost to create and design it, the box, License .. etc etc...

AND they have to ship it...

Remove to cost of Lion an you come close to what it should cost...

Come on guys keep it real!!!!
Click to expand...

It also makes a great gift :D
 
Mark Jimmy said:
It costs that much because people can "skip" over buying snow leopard by using the thumb drive. Purchasing lion on the mac app store requires access to the mac app store, which requires snow leopard. Snow leopard was $30 and lion is $30. So it's really only a $9 premium.

(And it's on a thumb drive, not dvd, for obvious reasons.)
Click to expand...

Except not everyone is jumping TWO OS's. So for SOME it's a $9 premium. For others it's a $39 premium.

If Apple was concerned about people jumping two OSes - they could have sold two USBs. One for $39 and the other for $69 to handle any concerns over lost revenue.

But given time - anyone can justify anything. That's what keeps threads like this going :)
 
KnightWRX said:
Considering all Core 2 Duo Macs can run Lion, you're pretty much wrong there.
Click to expand...
Considering the numbers of people still running Tiger on an Intel C2D machine I could probably count on one hand, and even then wouldn't be interested in upgrading to Lion anyway, I'm not wrong.
 
I'd like to know if this is the same version that is downloadable.

The download version - even when burned to a DVD, still expects an Internet connection before install, and even required me to sign into my Apple account.
 
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