Again, available on eBay for 99p, or from Canonical for £5 (for five).

Now, call me paranoid if you like, but I wouldn't buy an OS from eBay.

And also you have to account for the fact that Lion contains... stuff. Other than the basic OS and GUI. They give you a bunch of apps that, generally speaking, you would have to pay for.

Jon

How about without an internet connection?

You might want a thumb drive or DVD to reinstall in an emergency. If you have Lion then there is a way to create your own thumb drive without paying Apple anything other than the cost of Lion (assuming you can download the installer).

One quick Google search later

If you want the Apple branded thumb drive then you have to pay Apples prices (and be punished accordingly for daring to contradict chairman Jobs view of the world that everyone has a fast internet connection).

All new macs after Lion is released will also have Internet Recovery built in: Linky. Only the new Mac Mini and MacBook Air at the moment.

I would. But just an old version, and for a machine that was not going to be connected to the internet.

Wow, the Internet Recovery option looks very clever, I wonder how the hell you boot the Mac directly from Apple's servers? I'm very impressed and it answers one of my main worries which is what happens if you replace the hard drive or have a hardware failure and don't have a bootable Lion volume to hand. It even offers you the iLife apps you've purchased previously and downloads them again free of charge. Sounds very slick and clever in theory, I wonder how it works in practice?

Get yourself to a library, or buy a copy of Linux Format for £4.99.

Also, as for the "value added" nonsense, clearly Ubuntu includes most, if not all, the apps. most users require pre-installed.

For many many years, all my apps came from cover disks - or listings to be typed in. Oh those were the days, eagerly awaiting the next copy of PC World to see what wonders my 8 bit machine could be made to perform

I would assume they've got a very small block of flash memory soldered onto the motherboard somewhere that contains just enough code for the machine to establish a link to a router and dial the mothership. From memory a lot of PCs (whether Windows, OS X or Linux) have had some sort of net-booting function for years although I'd always assumed it was primarily aimed at booting off a local server. With all the cloud gubins these days there's very little reason (other than connection speed) for the server not to be somewhere else on the internet.

it looks like Apple's IR option downloads enough stuff to enable the hard drive to be formatted and for it to create the Lion recovery partition (Lion apparently creates a recovery partition automatically during installation). All very clever although you're proper buggered if you don't have a decent broadband connection (hence the usefulness of creating a boot thumb drive or DVD).

Not.. entirely true. Most of your existing 'remote boot' technologies rely on certain aspects of networking (like broadcast packets) that don't exist on the wider internet (your router won't pass them on). So I don't think this is using standard technology, they've obviously got something else going on. I'm going to assume all they've done is put a basic network kernel - enough to open a pipe to a known host IP - in the firmware but that relies on the known IP being awake and listening. Apple are basically going to have to keep the server up forever, or at least have a way to update the firmware should they wish to change the server. That IP sends it a basic boot image, which it then starts up form the download the 'full' boot image.


Yeah, pain in the arse if it happens to your macbook air and you're in some hotel that charges for wireless broadband by the hour. However, even then you're less stuffed than you'd be if you still had SL - if you didn't have the install DVD then, you'd be utterly buggered.

Jon

The media, with Windows, is "free". You are paying for the licence. As we know the licence costs 29€, that is a hell of a lot of money for the media for OS X Lion.

With Windows, it costs the same, whether you buy a licence or a licence with media, generally.

I'm guessing that as the usb drive bypasses the need need to have Snow Leopard installed they're charging it at "full version" price rather than "upgrade" price.

They are probably charging a higher price to discourage its use.

Or for people with Snow Leopard who are on dial up, or people who have multiple machines...

I read the instructions for making a boot DVD / USB Stick after doing the upgrade, which means I've got to download another 4GB to do the next machine (and try and get a DVD), otherwise I'll have to download it a total of 3 times...

The instructions I read showed you how to do it before the upgrade, so you only downloaded once...