Why not preinstalled full Recovery Partition?

[OSMac]

Apple installs a 'recovery partition' but all it does is allow you to connect to Apple for 4-5 hours to download Lion. Not a lot of fun. By the way it does not ask for your Apple ID/Password to download, it checks the machines signature.

I can understand the logic of cost cutting
and not including a recovery USB stick or discs,
dont agree but understand.

But, why didn't they just put a full Lion install image on the drive to save the 5 hour download?

 

[Davidkoh]

Apple installs a 'recovery partition' but all it does is allow you to connect to Apple for 4-5 hours to download Lion. Not a lot of fun. By the way it does not ask for your Apple ID/Password to download, it checks the machines signature.

I can understand the logic of cost cutting
and not including a recovery USB stick or discs,
dont agree but understand.

But, why didn't they just put a full Lion install image on the drive to save the 5 hour download?

Because it would steal space. I haven't downloaded the Lion installer but if it is as quick as normal Apple downloads it would take me 10-15 min, that is acceptable I think. So they do provide a fast way of getting it.

 

[MRU]

Because it would steal space. I haven't downloaded the Lion installer but if it is as quick as normal Apple downloads it would take me 10-15 min, that is acceptable I think. So they do provide a fast way of getting it.

Would you care to share you broadband speed with the rest of the world. It took over 8 hours to download Lion from the App Store here.

10-15 minutes for a 4gb file is a dream that is very far from reality for the majority of users, you are more the exception than the case.

 

[TobyZiegler]

Out of curiosity i did a fresh clean install right after i got my 11'' MBA.
It took me around 2 hours with 8-10 Mbit/s speeds (my line is capable of 15 Mbit/s downstream).

That's basically ok, but still i would rather have an USB drive to reinstall in case i needed to. Well anyhow, it was effective - so Apple is not to blame. It's basically we as customers, not willing to let go of the old media stuff that makes our lifes rather difficult

 

[PaulWog]

Would you care to share you broadband speed with the rest of the world. It took over 8 hours to download Lion from the App Store here.

10-15 minutes for a 4gb file is a dream that is very far from reality for the majority of users, you are more the exception than the case.

I realistically get between 800KB/s to 2MB/s of download speed when downloading from something like Apple. I pay for just regular internet (it's something like 12MB/s... but doesn't turn out to actually be that amount). Not expensive.

 

[Davidkoh]

Would you care to share you broadband speed with the rest of the world. It took over 8 hours to download Lion from the App Store here.

10-15 minutes for a 4gb file is a dream that is very far from reality for the majority of users, you are more the exception than the case.

I guess it depends on which country you live in. In Sweden it is far from rare. One of the providers cover around 30% of all households with 100Mbit or higher download speed. And that is a single provider, there are more providers which would increase the coverage. Sweden is not the country in the world with highest coverage of high speed internet either.

I myself do not have to highest I can get either, I only pay for 100 Mbit, I am thinking of upgrading to the maximum I can get though, which is 200 Mbit.

You can borrow as much as you want if you pay for the cord .

 

[Ubuntu]

Because it would steal space. I haven't downloaded the Lion installer but if it is as quick as normal Apple downloads it would take me 10-15 min, that is acceptable I think. So they do provide a fast way of getting it.

In my experience it was incredibly unreliable, timing out too often and failing to resume. Took me five attempts to restore my MBA, could have been a whole lot simpler if they just included a USB stick - but now they're going to charge us $69 for it anyway.

 

[MRU]

I guess it depends on which country you live in. In Sweden it is far from rare. One of the providers cover around 30% of all households with 100Mbit or higher download speed. .

Well some of us live in third world EU countries so have no chance of ever and I mean 'ever' seeing 100Mbit connections anytime this century...

You can borrow as much as you want if you pay for the cord .

Great Job... I'll just get a loan from my bank to pay for the cord... Oh wait my bank needs a loan from me first.... Damn this country....

 

[Kenndac]

With the amount of people complaining about the space the current recovery partition takes, I doubt they'd have gotten away with a whole installer.

That said, it's fairly trivial to make a bootable full installer on a partition on your internal drive.

 

[OSMac]

They could have put a full image on
and allowed users to burn it to disc if they wanted to recover the space.

Must a reason, all users and Apple's
time and bandwidth being used.... ?

 

[RobT]

It would take up a lot of space (4GB's) for the whole Lion install to be there and odds are you won't need to ever reinstall anyway. I really wish Apple would have still included the flash drive. With their ability to volume purchase things it would only be a few dollars for them.

Anyway, in absence of the included flash drive, it would have been smart for Apple to have added an option to the recovery menu that allowed you to create the flash drive yourself.

In other words, you could insert a flash drive of your own, boot to the recovery drive, select the create recovery disk option, and let it download Lion and put it on the flash drive for you. This way you can go through the several hours of download when it's convenient to you and not during a crisis or when you don't have access to broadband.

I could see being in a motel in a big city where wireless is expensive and you are relying on your computer for a presentation and Murphy's law strikes and your computer doesn't work. I'd much rather pull out the USB flash drive and re-install than find some way to start my 2 hour + download at a place without free wireless.