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Can I upgrade if I am still using 10.5.8?

N

novella

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 26, 2010
9
0
I never upgraded to Snow Leopard, I was wondering if i could upgrade to Lion OSX even though I am still using 10.5.8?
 
Nope, apple has been forthright in stating that you can only buy 10.7 through the app store and the App store is only available on Snow Leopard
 
I thought the whole point of mac upgrades was that you could pick if you wanted to download it or not, and now they are saying for lion Imhave to buy snow leopard just so I can upgrade to lion?
 
novella said:
I thought the whole point of mac upgrades was that you could pick if you wanted to download it or not, and now they are saying for lion Imhave to buy snow leopard just so I can upgrade to lion?
Click to expand...

Yes, they are saying that in plain grey on white. As they only distribute Lion via the Mac App Store, and the Mac App Store does only work on Macs with Mac OS X 10.6.6 and higher, that is your only option.
Unless you go the illegal route.
 
novella said:
Still, the principle is annoying.
I would rather just upgrade the lion straight but instead I have to do a pointless upgrade to snow leopard.
Click to expand...

You only have to do it once, as the download includes a DMG you can burn to a DVD or clone to an external HDD or USB flash memory thumb drive, from which you then can install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

Btw, to edit your posts, you can use the
edit.gif
button.
 
You guys have really gotten cheap... A couple years ago we were paying $100 to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5. Now apple has made it so that you can upgrade from 10.X to 10.7 for $60. You don't think that's why they priced lion at $30? If they released it on disk so that anyone could use it it would have been $100... Suck it up.
 
novella said:
I thought the whole point of mac upgrades was that you could pick if you wanted to download it or not, and now they are saying for lion Imhave to buy snow leopard just so I can upgrade to lion?
Click to expand...

It used to be that Apple never sold "upgrade" discs. All retail OS X discs were the full version and that's why you could skip versions (go from 10.2 to 10.4, for example). But those cost $129 (except for 10.1, which was free).

$60 is a very cheap price for an OS upgrade compared to the prices of previous versions of OS X and Windows.
 
You could get Lion from someone else, install it, and then buy it via the Appstore. Technically you would not need it any more, but you would legalize your installation that way.

Well, I'm not a lawyer, but that's how I see it.
 
Or find a friend with a SL mac and download it there. Copy it to a flash drive.

The Apple Store might even let you do this.
 
novella said:
Still, the principle is annoying.
I would rather just upgrade the lion straight but instead I have to do a pointless upgrade to snow leopard.
Click to expand...

If you purchase Lion (or get it some other way) and download the installer on say a friends Mac. Open package contents and extract the DMG to a disk or USB, you can clean install Lion without going through Snow Leopard.

Problem Solved.
 
rmbrown09 said:
If you purchase Lion (or get it some other way) and download the installer on say a friends Mac. Open package contents and extract the DMG to a disk or USB, you can clean install Lion without going through Snow Leopard.

Problem Solved.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure you can also upgrade from Leopard to Lion.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

novella said:
Thanks for the help everyone, i guess i'll just have to buy SL!
Click to expand...

Good choice. TBH you should have gotten SL years ago.
 
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