Past is prologue, make a USB installer todayĪpple's behavior with Lion is a good indication of how things will likely proceed with Mountain Lion once the next version of Mac OS X is released. I seem to recall that the installer connects to some computer at to verify that you are 'eligible' to install Lion, but it has been a long time since I installed Lion and have not tried using someone else's installer.

If you purchased Lion from the Mac App Store but no longer have a copy of the installer app, you should be able to use someone else's Lion installer, i.e., from a USB thumb drive. 'Can I use someone else's Lion installer?' Fortunately I saved a copy of the 4 GB 'Install Mac OS X Lion.app' before it was removed from the Mac App Store in case I ever need to do a clean installation. I also assume that if I needed to reinstall Lion from a recovery partition which is already set up on a computer running Lion, then I would be able to do that, but I have not tested that theory. That seems like something Apple should be able to easily confirm that I have already purchased and allow me to download for free. I was surprised to learn that if I wanted to download Lion again, I would be expected to pay for it again. If you bought Lion when it was available, you might be disappointed to learn that it no longer appears in your 'Purchases' list in the App Store. That connected me to the right person.įolks who aren't in the US should check the Contacting Apple for support and service page, and may have different voice prompts. When I called their automated call routing system I said 'Sales' at the first prompt (what department I wanted), 'Lion' at the second prompt (what I was calling about) and 'Personal' at the third prompt (personal, business or education).

In the USA, the number for Apple Sales Support is 1-80. I'm not sure why that is, but my guess is that if you haven't upgraded to Lion yet, waiting another day or two won't be a huge deal. The only weird part is that the Apple Support salesman said that it may take 'up to a couple of days' to get the redemption code. It will cost you US$20 and will come to you as a redeemable code that you will use in the Mac App Store, which means that you will need a Mac running at least 10.6.8 to use the code. The good news is that Lion is still available from Apple. It's also not available on Apple's website, or, or anywhere else (with very few exceptions which all looked extremely unreliable). Here's the twist: his MacBook cannot run Mountain Lion (10.8), and Lion (10.7) is no longer available for sale on the Mac App Store. A reader contacted us the other day with an interesting problem: he wanted to use the latest Java update, but it requires an 'Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.7.3 (Lion) or later' and his MacBook was running Snow Leopard.

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