As soon as Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” was only going to be available through their App Store, I knew that’d be a mistake.
Seems I’m not the only one. Read this TidBITS article.
The first things that came to my mind was 1. bandwidth caps, 2. people without bandwidth. I think Apple said it’d be a 4GB download. Holy crap that’s a lot of data. More and more ‘net providers are working to impose bandwidth caps, throttling, and other similar restrictions on how much bandwidth someone can use. I’m not sure exactly how this install will end up rolling, but let’s say I needed to update all the Macs in my house (and I have more than 1)… what sort of bandwidth am I going to have to chew up? And is my ISP going to throttle me? What about how that affects the rest of my monthly bandwidth allotment for things like general web browsing, YouTube, and I’ve even been thinking about getting that NetFlix online service.
Then I think about a lot of my friends in rural areas that just don’t have this sort of bandwidth available to them.
In talking with foo.c, he doesn’t have Snow Leopard. He contacted Apple and they said you will have to update to Snow Leopard first… because you need at least Mac OS X 10.6.6 in order to run the App Store. So now the cost has risen significantly.
If you read the TidBITS article, they raise many more issues and problems this sole means of distribution create.
You know, I think it’s a great idea for Apple to offer Lion through the App Store. I think it’s good to start moving the world in that direction. But come on Apple… you know how long it took for us to move from 680×0 to PowerPC… how long it took to move from Classic Mac to Mac OS X… then the shift from PowerPC to Intel. All of these major shifts took many years and we were always given a transition strategy. It was always evident as soon as the ball started to roll that the writing was on the wall for the “old style”, but that always gave us time to move along. To suddenly end optical discs for the OS? That’s rather abrupt and not in line with every other transition that this platform has undergone.
So, I’m adding my voice to the cries of “WTF?” regarding this requirement. I do think Apple should offer it through the App Store and encourage folks in that direction. But I also think Apple should offer optical discs, and I think it’d be reasonable to offer it at increased cost, say $10 more to cover the costs of the discs, packaging, etc.. As well, something like Lion Server can be offered solely as a download, since it seems you get that as an additional purchase on top of your Lion install… so, buy “consumer”, install it, then you can buy and install Server on top of it via the App Store. I see no problem with that strategy. It all helps to push people to prefer the App Store, but it doesn’t leave those without such ability out in the cold.
Stuff From Hsoi 
Silly rabbit…Apple products aren’t for Walmart-shopping, truck driving hicks living in rural areas with low bandwidth. They are for kewl electric-car-driving, $4 coffee drinking urban hipsters who live in enlightened online meccas like the Bay Area, Austin, Seattle, NY, LA …not for the Great Unwashed in Flyover Country. I’m sure the elites in Cupertino can’t even grasp the concept of a world where free high-bandwidth WiFi isn’t available absolutely everywhere. Information wants to be free, and all that.
Hear, hear!
My problem with this dumb idea is that you have to buy Snow Leopard first.
Since I run the Server version of Leopard, an upgrade costs me $500, and there just wasn’t enough difference to justify that price.
Supposedly I can upgrade to Snow Leopard, and then to Lion, and then install the new Server app, but I’m skeptical about that. I see myself having to install a fresh copy of Snow Leopard.
I was surprised to see this as well. I think it’s great to offer Lion as an upload, but it seems far to early to offer it ONLY as an upload. I only recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and haven’t yet played with the app store, though I’ve used it extensively on my iPhone. Apple also offers the upgrade to Aperture 3 via the app store, so I’ll be getting that as well.
I wasn’t familiar with bandwidth caps. I did a little googling and apparently Time Warner/Road Runner attempted to implement caps a couple of years ago, but abandoned the idea after the public blowback.
Time warner does throttle your connection though, whether they admit it or not, cause they do it to me if I leave something going.
I guess I am one of the few who actually applauds that they are going digital distribution only. The move re-inforces that the cloud is the present and the future. I think the last time that I used an optical disc in any of my machines (that wasn’t a DVD movie) was to do an OS upgrade when Snow Leopard came out.
I am not so sure about the rural argument. The 4 folks who I know who live in the middle of nowhere US have average, but decent broadband, including my Wal-Mart shopping, truck driving hick of a sister, who shocked the hell out of me when she bought a 27″ iMac last year. It is not only her family’s main computer, but she uses it for bandwidth gobbling Netflix and YouTube so she doesn’t have to pay $60/month for satellite TV.
Give it some time, I bet the retail Apple Stores will probably have some kind of workaround for folks where it is a problem.
Oh, I think it’s good that Apple is moving to “the cloud” but it’s an abrupt change, not a smooth transition. Any time in the past Apple’s tried to move people to some new world order, there’s always been a transition strategy… like I mentioned. But this? There’s no transition, it’s just BOOM.
Read the TidBITS article… there’s a lot of sound reasoning in there as to why this could be a problem, at least until a lot more greater infrastructure is put into place.
And the rural does matter…. come on out here to Texas and we’ll show you. There’s lots of places in this country that are still stuck on dial-up.
I do imagine Apple’s going to come up with a solution, because there’s a lot of unhappy buzz around this. I do think it’s good Apple moves this way, I hope they ultimately do push for this, but I think they need a better transition strategy, not an abrupt strategy.