Apple Ships OS X 10.7 Lion 'Gold Master' For July Push

An anonymous reader writes "Apple released to developers the 'gold master' version of Mac OS 10.7, known as Lion, in a move that positions the company for a July roll-out. 'With Snow Leopard, Apple's previous Mac OS release, the time between going from gold master status to hitting store shelves was approximately two weeks. However that release required Apple to stamp and produce boxed discs to send out to retail stores. Lion will be the first by Apple to be released only through its Mac App Store as a digital download.'"

Comments

"As a digital download"

[Inquisitus]

...as opposed to? An analogue download?

"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder. What could possibly be simpler than that? And now it forces users to open an online account with Apple. That's not very nice.. There's no mention in the article, does it come down as a burnable iso? And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC cause this is NDA stuff.

1) 10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL. You only need an existing 10.6.8 installation to download it- IF you want to get it from the Mac App Store. The relevant file is called "InstallESD.dmg" and weighs in at around 4GB. It is essentially a restore image of what you would otherwise find on a shipping DVD. It comes with what you get off the Mac App Store.

2) 10.7 does NOT REQUIRE AN APPLE ID.

There is NO PROTECTION in 10.7 against piracy. There is NO ONLINE ACTIVATION. There is NO receipt checking through the Mac App Store. For all intensive purposes, it is IDENTICAL to 10.6.8 in that the Mac App Store is just another application in /Applications. The operating system IN NO WAY attempts to verify the legality of your installation, nor does it case.

You can install, configure, and use your machine WITHOUT creating an Apple ID. It is -TOTALLY- optional.

3) 10.7 Server does NOT REQUIRE AN APPLE ID. The Server administration bits come as a single app ("Server.app") that downloads and installs Server Essentials, which is basically all the server side stuff (Open Directory, PostFix, etc). This application does NOT attempt to verify the legality of your "server" NOR DOES IT REQUIRE A SERIAL. Just like #2- if you obtain Server.app from some other place, you can install and use it on a Mac OS X 10.7 system without the need for an Apple ID, or even an internet connection after the Server Essentials packages have been downloaded!

So, please, stop spreading FUD!

10.7 is identical to 10.6. You can clean install it. You don't need 10.6, except for the initial download (which Apple expects you'll do legally- through the Mac App Store). You do not need an Apple ID for anything (you don't loose functionality).

The only thing that has changed- is that Apple is going the digital *distribution* route. They have NOT gone the "digital distribution and locked down DRM and online activation" route.

-AC

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Anonymous Coward]

(Same AC as GP)

The restore system. InstallESD.dmg contains a bootable version of OS X much like the 10.6 installer. Except things work a little differently now:

1) The installer is split into two stages. The first creates a recovery partition on your disk drive, and dumps the OS X installer and a nifty repair/utility system to it.
2) The second stage occurs after the first has completed. The system reboots onto the fresh recovery partition, and restores the operating system off it.

The difference between a clean install and an install-from-your-existing-system is only the first stage. If you're installing from 10.6.x, then you're running a tool that does #1 under your existing OS and then reboots to perform #2. If you're installing from a USB key or DVD-R, then the bootable system on the disk is performing step #1 for you, then rebooting to continue with #2.

The installer might just work under 10.5, I haven't checked. Apple says you need 10.6.x to download Lion (which you do). If you already have the Lion *.app bundle saved somewhere else (this is the same bundle that contains the aforementioned InstallESD.dmg file), then you might be able to copy it to a 10.5 OS and run it from there. The only reason why this wouldn't work is if Apple is checking for it and actively denying attempts; or if 10.5 is lacking some runtime component or framework that the *.app installer requires.

Again, the situation is far more flexible and far less 1984 then people are currently freaking about. The only thing that has changed is the (primary) method of distribution. In fact, given that Server doesn't even need a serial anymore (and doesn't attempt to authenticate with the Mac App Store- that would be stupid), things have gotten considerably simpler (anyone remember the serialnumberd issues in 10.6 where a dual-homed server would see itself and invalidate it's license?)...

-AC

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[RedBear]

10.7 can be burned to a DVD or dumped to a USB Flash Key and installed off of. It does NOT require an existing installation of 10.6.8 to INSTALL.

Uh...doesn't there need to be a Mac OS X installation somewhere if you want to install Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? Otherwise, what's going to magically read your DVD or USB Flash Key? And I rashly assume that you can't run the installer if your machine has booted into 10.5.x...

Umm, no. You are very confused. Unless that was meant as a joke. How could anyone ever install an operating system if you needed an operating system installed to install an operating system? Google "BIOS" and "bootable DVD".

Every OS X intall disc has been a bootable image (already containing a fully bootable copy of OS X) that allows installation onto a clean hard drive. The Lion installer contains the same standard bootable disc image. The only difference is that the computer can apparently be booted from that disc image while it is still just sitting on the hard drive (if you are running Snow Leopard 10.6.8). That is, Lion REQUIRES no external boot media, but it can still be used from external boot media if you so choose, and if you have the very simple knowledge to open Disk Utility on ANY Mac and "restore" the DMG file onto a DVD or USB flash drive or external USB or FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drive. Anyone who "administrates" Macs should already know how to do this, so I'm really not sure why so many Mac admins are freaking out about the no-media policy. Some "Real" Mac admins are probably out there somewhere NetInstalling the new Lion install image on hundreds of machines at the same time as we speak.

If you are running anything prior to Snow Leopard 10.6.8, you will of course have to either upgrade your machine to Snow Leopard first or or use external install media just as you would with a clean machine. Either way, not really a big deal. Seriously.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[Jane Q. Public]

This is not criticism. I am taking the opportunity to point this out because it is a pet peeve of mine. So I'm saying this for my own selfish reasons, not in order to criticize or to troll. Anyway:

The phrase is not "for all intensive purposes". It is "for all intents AND purposes."

Everybody who did not already know that, please take note.

Thank you for your attention.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay attention! Xcode 4.x is free from the Mac App Store if you are running Lion. They said this 2 weeks ago.

That leaves Hughesnet users out.

[JohnG]

I am stuck with Hughesnet, due to living in the boonies. They impose a 425 megabyte limit on my downloads even at the $100 a month plan. The only time it is unlimited is between 2am-7am, which I'm betting isn't enough time to grab an entire OSX distribution. Just getting XCode and the iOS SDK became a race against time once the file hit the 4gb range. I guess I can stay up until 2, then set an alarm for 7 to pause the Mac App Store download until 2 am the next morning. But still, I'd really like to just pay a few extra bucks and have them ship me a DVD. It doesn't even have to come in a fancy box.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[RedBear]

XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Anonymous Coward]

$ du -c -h -s *
312K About Xcode.app
234M Applications
2.3G Documentation
  62M Examples
  29M Extras
1.8M Headers
4.0K Icon
159M Library
1.1M Makefiles
151M Platforms
468M SDKs
244K Tools
509M usr
3.9G total

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[Shin-LaC]

Apple contributed a lot of changes upstream, but they were not merged. At some point, they stopped and decided to focus on LLVM instead.

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[TheRaven64]

Apple is unable to ship the version of GCC benchmarked there, because of GPLv3. LLVM produces much better code than GCC 4.2.1, which is the last GPLv2 version, and the version that Apple ships.

Also, be aware that none of those benchmarks were for Objective-C, which is the language that Apple cares the most about. In terms of features, GCC now lags there. It doesn't support automatic reference counting, for example, and this gives a nice performance boost when coupled with the optimisations in LLVM (fewer autoreleased objects, faster reference count modifications, complete elision of some operations where it can prove that retains and releases are not needed).

Clang is also pretty modular. If you use XCode, the IDE is doing syntax highlighting using the same front end that it uses for compiling with clang. It's displaying error messages as you type via the same mechanism. The integrated static analysis and ARC migration tools are also implemented as Clang libraries and just called from XCode.