Download or Bust

Lion only exists only in the digital world. that’s right: no physical copies for you. Apple is not planning (nor will llikely ever) offer Lion in a physical form: you have to download it (or, y aknow, buy it new on a nice and shiny Macbook Air). And at 3.5 GBs, it’s not something you’re just going to download on a whim.

Now, this initially appears to be a win. You don’t have to go to a store or wait for a disc to be shipped: you can have your new OS zappped straight to you. But what about when your Mac takes a dive and you need that disk to get it up and running again? Well, Apple’s thought that through and has structured the install to automatically partition the boot drive and include a utility called Lion Recovery on there. It actually functions like other OS-recovery utilities, with it allowing you to repair or comepletly reinstall Lion before the machine boots fully.

That’s a nice feature and all, but what about if the drive is dead? Well, then you’ve got a slightly bigger problem. Slide in a new drive, and the machine will actually still boot in what Apple calls “Internet Recovery” mode, which will connect to Apple’s servers get you back up and running again. Not exactly ideal, but it should do.  The bad news is that you obviously need an Internet connection to do it, and of course it takes a heck of a lot longer to download a 3.5 GB then to just have a disc on hand that you slide in.

For most users, this will probably almost never be an issue, but it really is something to consider before jumping on the back of this Lion.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is available for $30 in the Mac App store.