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Snow Leopard/Lion free?
- Thread starter rumorsdan
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Not legally. And if you want to get Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, you need Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, unless you can hunt down one of the USB thumb drives with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on them, that Apple sold for a while.
Or you go to the Apple Online Store and pay 19 USD for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on a DVD.
Or you go to the Apple Online Store and pay 19 USD for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on a DVD.
Actually, it seems generous that they started offering the OS for free. That happened fairly recently in the history of OS X. As the previous post mentioned, it's probably an accounting thing. Plus, if you were running a multi-billion-dollar company, would you take the time and spend the money to change your system in order to give away something you've been charging for to benefit maybe 1% of your customer base? I don't think I would. Most users move on to the latest OS, although I'm not one of that majority.
Leopard, Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite are all freely available on the Mac Dev Center: https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/mac/index.action
Lion used to be too, but unfortunately apple decided to remove it from the Mac Dev Center, so now even developers have to buy it.
If you don't have access to the Mac Dev Center, you can buy Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion here:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard
http://store.apple.com/us/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion
http://store.apple.com/us/product/D6377Z/A/os-x-mountain-lion
If you buy it from the Apple store, you will have to pay shipping to get Snow Leopard on a disc. Lion and higher come as digital downloads to your Mac.
Yes, if you have a Mac that supports Internet Recovery (via the EFI, not the recovery partition).
I can download Lion via the EFI on my Early-2011 MBP. This requires a firmware update. The MBP came with grey Mac OS X 10.6.7 CDs (brand new).
The reason is very simple: Only Lion and newer support the Internet Recovery feature. That means all 2010 and 2011 Macs which support the Internet Recovery after an EFI update can download Lion.
See also:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1313113/
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110831105634716
It's still not "Free". You must use the Apple ID that was used to purchase the original Lion update, or at least an Apple ID that shows Lion in its purchase history.
The only computers that will download OS X via Internet Recovery without it having been previously purchased on that Apple ID, are the computers that shipped with Lion or later.
No, that is wrong. You need the Apple ID only if you download OS X from the Mac App Store. The Internet Recovery via the EFI does not need the Apple ID. I tested this on my Mac with OS X 10.6.8. You are obviously misinformed/unexperienced.
It still doesn't, despite anecdotal evidence. Computers listed in this article will gain the ability to download OS X via Internet Recovery. However it won't necessarily be Lion - it will be the version of OS X under which the EFI update was applied. So if someone had Snow Leopard and then updated to Mountain Lion (skipping Lion), then IR on that machine will install Mountain Lion and will require an Apple ID that has Mountain Lion in its purchase history.
Retrofire is probably confusing Recovery and Internet Recovery. IR will not in any circumstance install OS X 10.6.x.