Would Lion be worth $150?

[Treeman574]

I am planning to purchase a new hard drive for my mbp, and possibly upgrade to lion at the same time. I only recently found out that my university software isn't compatible with lion, and the licence is only for the 10.6 version.

So in short I would have to purchase lion, an 8gb usb (for clean install) and the updated software for a total of approximately $150 (AUD).

Can anyone justify this amount of money, for an os upgrade? I remember when older apple software cost this much, but is lion that much of an improvement over snow leopard?

 

[marc11]

Well Lion is not making you buy the updated software and you do not need an 8 gig USB for a clean install, a 4 gig would do, a blank DVD can be used too or you can use someones USB drive for an hour or so and return it, which would be far cheaper and or free. And why do you need a clean install anyway?

As far as I can tell, your upgrade to Lion is costing you not much more than the Apple selling price. Any other costs are not the result of the Lion upgrade....if SL is working for you, stay with it.

For me, Lion with iCloud in conjunction with IOS 5 made for a nice set op upgrades, but then again it only cost me $29.

 

[newfoundglory]

I'm a bit confused by your post really. If you need 10.6, why not just have both Lion AND Snow Leopard installed on your Mac? Thats what I do with all my Macs - my Mac mini server has two hard drives - for my MBP's I just partition one hard drive into two using Disk Utility.

I don't understand why you need a USB stick - again just use disk utility to partition 4GB off the internal hard drive - or if you have an external USB hard drive formatted as HFS use that instead. Then use Disk Utility to restore InstallESD.dmg from the Mac App Store to that 4GB partition you just created. You can also do this with the Snow Leopard recovery DVDs which came with your MBP, but you need more than 4GB for this. After, just select an installer or OS at startup by holding down the alt (option) key on the keyboard.

If replacing with a brand new drive, boot from the Snow Leopard restore DVD first before doing the above.