Purchasing 10.7+ Apps in Mac App Store on Mac Running 10.6?

[Crell Vorlem]

Hello,

There's a number of apps on sale right now in the Mac App Store which I'd like to purchase, but they require Mac OS X 10.7 and my Mac is running 10.6.

With OS X 10.8 coming out soon (hopefully), I wanted to purchase these apps now and keep them until 10.8 is released and at which time I'll upgrade and be able to use these apps.

Is there any way to simply purchase these apps now on 10.6?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Lunfai]

I'm not sure, there might be a requirement before purchase the application, so that people don't buy an application by accident, when it isn't compatible. However, some applications like CCleaner have an in-built requirement of OSX, so it doesn't work in Mountain Lion, so it might work like that.

Is it possible to run Lion in Virtual Machine?, and buy them from the Appstore within there?

 

[Crell Vorlem]

Is it possible to run Lion in Virtual Machine?, and buy them from the Appstore within there?

Doing that would require purchasing Lion and with Mountain Lion coming out soon, I'd rather not do that.

Perhaps there's a way to trick the Mac App Store into thinking I'm running 10.7?

 

[Member(TM)]

Doing that would require purchasing Lion and with Mountain Lion coming out soon, I'd rather not do that.

Perhaps there's a way to trick the Mac App Store into thinking I'm running 10.7?

I haven't tried it myself, but it seems that editing the file "/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist" does the trick. You simply need to replace inside that file both occurrences of "10.6.8" (or whatever minor version you are using) with "10.7.4". To avoid permission errors, you may need to start the editor from Terminal with sudo. It's probably a good idea to modify again the file with the real system version after your AppStore downloads are complete.

ETA: I have just tested what I've said and, while I haven't tried to make any purchases, it indeed changes the system version displayed in the "About This Mac" box. To quickly edit the file as root, the method I find simplest is running the following command from the Terminal:

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

and then from the Finder I simply drag SystemVersion.plist to the TextEdit icon in the Dock.

 

[Crell Vorlem]

I haven't tried it myself, but it seems that editing the file "/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist" does the trick. You simply need to replace inside that file both occurrences of "10.6.8" (or whatever minor version you are using) with "10.7.4". To avoid permission errors, you may need to start the editor from Terminal with sudo. It's probably a good idea to modify again the file with the real system version after your AppStore downloads are complete.

ETA: I have just tested what I've said and, while I haven't tried to make any purchases, it indeed changes the system version displayed in the "About This Mac" box. To quickly edit the file as root, the method I find simplest is running the following command from the Terminal:

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

and then from the Finder I simply drag SystemVersion.plist to the TextEdit icon in the Dock.

Your suggestion worked perfectly! Thank you! I was able to purchase a 10.7+ only application on my Mac running 10.6.