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Computers that come out after lion will come with a USB drive that hosts a small app that allows you to download lion by putting in your Apple ID and password.

^ That is the only solution. What happens if lion is the first OS of the computer it self?
 
Actually, from what I'm hearing, many of the new machines require a hard drive with Apple's special firmware on it to work (or some sort of thermal monitoring?).

So replacing the drive yourself it out anyways...

True, so it's a non-issue in reality. People need to chill. :rolleyes:
 
I know this is far fetched, but this is Apple afterall :)

Is there a remote chance that new hardware coming with Lion (new MBAs, Minis) will have some sort of designated SSD just for Lion? The SSD has Lion and in case of a crash, the mac will boot into that, and have options to repair or do a fresh install? Is that even possible? :confused:

Sure, it's possible, but it's still a piece of hardware that can fail, then you're SOL.
 
I don't believe it simply because Steve Jobs is not misspelling "leopard" in that kind of message from any place he is responding to that e-mail.
 
Apple has gone crazy with this release?

What happened to user experience and ease of use? C'mon.

Its because they want to get as many credit cards on file with iTunes/Appstore/Mac Appstore accounts as possible as a way to hopefully secure you as a long term buyer from the appstores.
 
False Information

I have installed Lion on a fresh harddrive using a DVD and it works great! I had issues with a upgrade from Snow Leopard so I made a Lion Dev4 DVD put a spare hard drive in and formated it. Then it installed like 10.6 would.

It did take about 20mins to boot to install menu though. I will say this if you are running 10.7 and try to boot to a 10.6 install DVD it won't even recognize the 10.6 DVD. (Or maybe my disc was bad or something?) I had to burn lion to a disc then I was able to repair the harddrive, but still had the issue. So I put my spare harddrive in, formatted it, and did a fresh Lion install. Runs great now :)

EDIT: This was done on a 15-inch, Mid 2010 MacBook Pro
 
Apple is getting worse than Verizon, they nickle and dime us at every turn. The cost to produce and sell DVD's of LION for those who wish to have one is so small it's not even funny.

But let's not forget, it's not about the customer experience any longer it's about bragging rights for Apple. They have an insatiable need for more cash. It goes hand in hand with their need to bully everyone who wants anything to do with Apple.
 
It's pretty sad how many people assume this rumor is true and respond with outrage.
It's very easy to spoof e-mail headers MacRumors. As if Steve Jobs is sitting around responding to these kinds of e-mails. It's laughable.
The current developer version does not require this and it is extremely unlikely the release version will either.
Happy now?
 
It might not be brilliant, but it works. Just reinstall Snow Leopard and you can download Lion again for free from the Mac App Store with your Apple I.D. Makes sense to me...

What makes sense? If the whole point is to move away form physical release then obviously that hasn't happened. You still need to use a physical copy in the form of 10.6. If we're doing that then we might as well have a physical copy of 10.7 and have cleaner + faster installs.

Having said that. This seems so outrageously poor for the end users that I don't believe it's true.
 
I just got a Dell, and it came with an OS recovery disc.

I feel like the world just flipped upside-down. Is Apple serious?

EDIT: What happens if your hard drive fails on a mac that comes preinstalled with Lion? If you replace it, and the new hard drive isn't from Apple, there's no recovery partition, there's no restore partition, and there's no DVD to boot off of...

If it fails on a iMac you cant replace the HDD anyway so doesn't matter. Probably all Macs will ship with un-replaceable HHD's
 
did you try developer beta?

In order to perform a "clean install" of Lion -- on a new hard drive or when restoring a machine to sell it, for example -- users will need to install Snow Leopard first
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1. get developer beta
2. select Lion Installation app, do "Show Content" and go to Shared folder
3. extract (copy it to any folder) dmg you find there. This is Lion installation disk image.
4. Open/mount dmg you just copiedand run installation directly from it
5. now you can select clean partition with NO SNOW LEOPARD on it.

The deal is - entire app which is on the top of LION installation dmg is NOT necessary if you want to make clean install. I just simply assume it is gonna be same with final release... and yes, I know, I may be wrong ;-)
 
I can't believe this is actually true, that's a really flakey and onerous solution and I find it hard to believe Steve is OK with that. I expect better.
 
It's pretty sad how many people assume this rumor is true and respond with outrage.
It's very easy to spoof e-mail headers MacRumors. As if Steve Jobs is sitting around responding to these kinds of e-mails. It's laughable.
The current developer version does not require this and it is extremely unlikely the release version will either.
Happy now?

Okay.
That still doesn't answer how we can do a clean install without SL.
 
I wonder how many people are really running Leopard though for this to be a problem? I am sure the majority are PPC people, especially for the $29 it cost for SL.

Also, who knows, perhaps Apple will put Leopard and SL on the Mac store if this snowballs out of control. No reason why THEY CANT do that.


You have to have SL to use the mac store. That is part of the problem. The Mac Store does not work on Leopard.
 
If it fails on a iMac you cant replace the HDD anyway so doesn't matter. Probably all Macs will ship with un-replaceable HHD's

You can replace the hard drive now... a german company has made a custom chip you put on the SATA cable that contains a thermal sensor and emulates the signals sent by the custom firmware. 30 bucks or so.

The real issue here is to open the iMac ;)
 
Not the first time Steve replied to something he doesn't really know very much about. I suspect it's more of a standard PR response at this point because they haven't announced anything yet, but either way there will always be easy work arounds as mentioned by many posters in this thread.

The main thing I think we will see happen though is Apple releasing a Lion/iLife/iWork pack similar to the current one that exists with SL/iLife/iWork. Though it will probably only be available through Apple's online retail store, and not advertised much.

I suspect a lot of people will hear about the way to do it through the DMG file that comes with the installer from the Mac App Store and won't need any other method.
 
Okay.
That still doesn't answer how we can do a clean install without SL.

No, the answer has been mentioned countless times but you keep missing it. It's already been discussed that you could burn the image to a DVD, and even a USB key I believe.
 
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