Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Shipping in September: $29 for Leopard Users

oxjox said:
I know I have walked in to an Apple store and purchased an UPGRADE disc for $29. I will never forget this because when I later decided to wipe my hard drive and reinstall the OS, I was stuck because it was an upgrade only disc. I believe it was a Tiger upgrade disc.
More recently, my boss went in to an Apple store and bought a $29 Leopard upgrade DVD that I have at home. I can not use this disc to do a full installation.

So as I understand it, $29 gets you an upgrade disc and I would assume the standard FULL installation disc is $129. Apple's marketing department is putting a spin on this to full the press and it's customers.

I posted this question on the Apple board and got my question removed due to rumor and speculation! Considering Pogue's recent article, I think the "rumor" of the $29 Apple OS X installation DVD needs to be put to rest. There will be a lot of unhappy customers trying to do full installs with an upgrade DVD.
Click to expand...

Apple has never before sold a $29 upgrade DVD for any operating system that was within my lifetime. We don't know how they will handle this because they've never done it before. They shipped "drop-in" DVD's with computers that were purchased during the limbo time between the operating system being available and it being installed on new machines, which are as you described (they require a previous installation to function). However, those disks were free of charge to those customers, and not available for sale. If you bought one of them, you bought it from someone who should not have been selling it.

Hate to tell you dude, but you're dead wrong. I've been selling Apple's products for a long time, and you did not do what you claim to have done (buying an upgrade-only disc).

jW
 
oxjox said:
I know I have walked in to an Apple store and purchased an UPGRADE disc for $29.
Click to expand...

They have never sold upgrade discs. They put Drop-in discs in with new machines when a new OS first comes out, but you can not buy them separately.
 
Sky Blue said:
They have never sold upgrade discs. They put Drop-in discs in with new machines when a new OS first comes out, but you can not buy them separately.
Click to expand...
Drop-in discs are not Upgrade discs, however. I have had both (I bought an Upgrade disc from eBay, and it did indeed require a current installation). I don't know what channels Apple intended for these upgrade discs, but they do indeed exist; I had one for Leopard that required an existing OS X installation in order to install. I later bought a Mac with Leopard installed so I no longer needed the upgrade disk.
 
danny_w said:
Drop-in discs are not Upgrade discs, however. I have had both (I bought an Upgrade disc from eBay, and it did indeed require a current installation). I don't know what channels Apple intended for these upgrade discs, but they do indeed exist; I had one for Leopard that required an existing OS X installation in order to install. I later bought a Mac with Leopard installed so I no longer needed the upgrade disk.
Click to expand...

There has never been an "upgrade disk" for Leopard.
 
Snow Leopard can install in 15 minutes?? It must be really relying on what's already on your harddrive with regular Leopard to do that. So I doubt we'll be able to do clean installs with this $29 disc.
 
Peace said:
There has never been an "upgrade disk" for Leopard.
Click to expand...
You may be right, it may have been for Tiger now that I think about it. But it was NOT a drop-in disc, and was clearly labelled "Upgrade"; it did require a previous installation of OS X, which a drop-in disk does not require.
 
Razeus said:
Snow Leopard can install in 15 minutes?? It must be really relying on what's already on your harddrive with regular Leopard to do that. So I doubt we'll be able to do clean installs with this $29 disc.
Click to expand...
It took me 45 minutes on my late-2008 "BlackBook." Which is actually how long it took for me to install Leopard on the same machine.

So either Apple is making up installation speed, or it's based on a not-yet-released build, which is likely. I'm sure the build demonstrated at WWDC is far better than the one developers were actually given.
 
Razeus said:
Snow Leopard can install in 15 minutes?? It must be really relying on what's already on your harddrive with regular Leopard to do that. So I doubt we'll be able to do clean installs with this $29 disc.
Click to expand...

hmm, this means a clean install (like on a new hard drive) of snow leopard takes an hour. 45 mins for Leopard, 15 mins for Snow Leopard. Which isn't really a "clean install" anyway.... I've seen weirdness in the past doing "upgrades" from one version of a linux distro to the next, so that makes me wary of not doing a clean install. that's why.

Unless you have to pay the $100 "you don't trust us to make your computer work right" tax, i.e. get the Snow Leopard disc that CAN do a clean install or upgrade from tiger. darnit.

and I assumed the drastically reduced memory/HD footprint and install times derived from removing all the PowerPC code, the necessity for universal binaries, and stuff like that. (given this premise, this would not necessarily be a major technological breakthrough anyway, but a good and necessary step nonetheless)

Just my $0.02
 
Razeus said:
Snow Leopard can install in 15 minutes?? It must be really relying on what's already on your harddrive with regular Leopard to do that. So I doubt we'll be able to do clean installs with this $29 disc.
Click to expand...

Leo installs in about 15-20 minutes on my machine, so i was expecting SL to install in about 10-15. Whatevah. I would be rather upset if it were impossible to do a clean install with 10.6, it would mean that formatting and reinstalling would take twice as long because i have to install two OSs just to get up to date.
 
NoSmokingBandit said:
Leo installs in about 15-20 minutes on my machine, so i was expecting SL to install in about 10-15. Whatevah. I would be rather upset if it were impossible to do a clean install with 10.6, it would mean that formatting and reinstalling would take twice as long because i have to install two OSs just to get up to date.
Click to expand...
iLife is the bloat that really slows down the installer.
 
Eric S. said:
Only partially. Also see this:
Solving the mystery of Snow Leopard's shrinking apps
Click to expand...

good read! No matter how they do it, I can't wait till it comes out though so I can use more of my RAM and HD space for my stuff.

I guess the jury's still out on the clean-install-methodology mystery. Would be nice if it was on the honor system though. A major corporation trusting its customers, now that is an idea!
 
From the thread...

toke lahti said:
Or is that never coming?
How do I upgrade from "Mac Box Set Family Pack"?
Click to expand...

From the first page of this thread:

"Apple today announced that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will launch in September and will be priced at only $29 for current OS X 10.5 Leopard users. Alternatively, a $49 family pack will also be available. Meanwhile, Tiger users with Intel machines will be able to purchase a Mac Box Set containing Snow Leopard, iLife '09, and iWork '09 for $169 for a single license or $229 for a family pack."
 
So, if I have one Leopard then I can buy SL family pack for 49 and upgrade 5(ish) computers for that same license? Even if the other ones were Tiger? Or does that family pack mean "if you have more than one Leopard, you can upgrade them all for reduced price"?

I guess we'll have to wait an see how it is. Until the discs are pressed, it's all speculation. I'd love it if that 29 dollar disc would let me do clean install but I fear it's only upgrade. I hate those! If it was such an upgrade that asked for previous disk but would then let me do a clean install, I would be okay with it.

If the clean install option will cost me 100 extra I think I'm going to be rather pissed.
 
cosmos said:
From the first page of this thread:
"Apple today announced that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will launch in September and will be priced at only $29 for current OS X 10.5 Leopard users. Alternatively, a $49 family pack will also be available. Meanwhile, Tiger users with Intel machines will be able to purchase a Mac Box Set containing Snow Leopard, iLife '09, and iWork '09 for $169 for a single license or $229 for a family pack."
Click to expand...
So your logic is that there was no upgrade for Box Set, so there will never be that?
Owner of Leopard family pack & iLife'08 & iWork'08 can't upgrade all of these, just the Leopard?
 
oxjox said:
I know I have walked in to an Apple store and purchased an UPGRADE disc for $29.
Click to expand...

Those would be the up-to-date discs that require you have:

1) a computer sold after the OS update has been announced
*and*
2) that package did not have the drop-in disc included

General public cannot buy those upgrade discs, only select few customers that should in fact have had that disc to begin with. They're only covering up mistakes, nothing more.

I had one of those when they announced Jaguar, but I hated that I first had to run the system restore to have basic system installed and only after that I could run the Jaguar installer. Sure, it was Jaguar, but I always felt that the clean install would have been better.
 
I want the total clean install snow leopard version simply to make sure all the PowerPC code are removed.
 
There are more important things than the 29 bucks....

The Snow Leopard release is a good example of why I switched to Apple. Im going to recover 6Gb of disc space because Apple cared enough to clean up their sloppy code. They optimized so I could recover 6Gb even though most people probaby have 500gb+ of storage. Its an entirely different mindset... Its great.
 
I'm getting the upgrade along with a new 7200 RPM 500GB drive to replace my 500GB 5400RPM drive. This OS is going to freakin' sing
 
does anyone know when the machines actually come with snow leopard preinstalled? and not with drop in discs? how long did it usually take them to have preinstalled machines in the past?


also, why is everyone saying snow leopard has a smaller memory footprint? on the spec pages, leopard needed 512 mb ram, and snow leopard needs 1 GB of ram.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back