Lion may not have been released yesterday, much to the chagrin of rumor mongers, but all signs are pointing to a release being imminent. Oh yeah, by imminent we mean between now and August 1st, just like Apple intended. One of the first major tells that Lion is approaching is that Amazon seems to have run out of Snow Leopard install discs, and now only have family packs and the Mac Box Set available from Apple.
It’s not exactly unexpected, but there is a little added twist here. How are people who don’t currently have Snow Leopard, but who want to use Lion, to get the new OS on their machines without currently having access to Snow Leopard? Two emails sent to Steve Jobs, and posted on MacRumors, have clearly suggested that Lion, like Snow Leopard before it, would require the installation of the previous operating system before installing Lion.
The same philosophy was in place when Apple updated Leopard to Snow Leopard, at least according to the marketing material. Users were given the option, a $30.00 upgrade that required Leopard, or if running Tiger users could purchase the $170 Mac Box Set. But, here’s the twist. That $30.00 Snow Leopard DVD that was labelled as an “upgrade” could actually do clean installs and upgrades from Tiger.
If we had to hazard a guess, we would assume the same would be true of Lion. Although, as of today there’s only one price on the Lion website ($29.99) and no mention of other alternatives for people not running Snow Leopard. Apple clearly states on its website:
Make sure you have the latest version of Snow Leopard.?Get up to date with the latest version of OS X Snow Leopard to purchase OS X Lion from the Mac App Store. If you have Snow Leopard, click the Apple icon and choose Software Update to install version 10.6.8.
Currently, Apple is telling everyone they need to be running Snow Leopard before they can install Lion, but without Snow Leopard disks available for purchase, it could be impossible for some extremely late adopters who have yet to upgrade to Snow Leopard to get in the Lion game.
We recommend running out and grabbing Snow Leopard if you haven’t upgraded yet before it’s too late. If discs dry up, you could be on the hook for a more expensive alternative, like the Mac Box Set.
We don’t know for sure, but if Snow Leopard discs are drying up, Lion has to be standalone, doesn’t it?
Source: AppleBitch
