OS X Mountain Lion to Be True Mac App Store Exclusive

Sucks for people who don't have fast internet access....

At nearly 3 times the price, no wonder no one was interested in getting the USB stick. Sigh. I don't want to redownload an OS every time I need to format.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10454133-94.html

Actually there are still quite a few living in rural areas who cannot get affordable broadband. There is always sattelite, which is what I used to use when I lived in a Rural area. But it was over $1,200 to install, $75 a month for 512kbps connection, and limited to 5GB per month. Eventually 3G came available so that became our ISP. So it's still not a decent solution for downloading Lion / Mountain Lion. Though, admittedly, if I were in that situation, I'd probably go to somewhere with an access point. Nearest place was 30 minutes away but everything was 30 minutes away. No biggie. Just go get a coffee and download Lion.

I also think it's unfair to tell these people to 'move'. Don't knock it till you try it! It's awfully nice living in a place where you don't lock your doors and you can leave your keys in your ignition, where you don't have the sound of cars driving by... there's a lot of great reasons to live in a rural area. And there is more to life than internet!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10454133-94.html

Actually there are still quite a few living in rural areas who cannot get affordable broadband. There is always sattelite, which is what I used to use when I lived in a Rural area. But it was over $1,200 to install, $75 a month for 512kbps connection, and limited to 5GB per month. Eventually 3G came available so that became our ISP. So it's still not a decent solution for downloading Lion / Mountain Lion. Though, admittedly, if I were in that situation, I'd probably go to somewhere with an access point. Nearest place was 30 minutes away but everything was 30 minutes away. No biggie. Just go get a coffee and download Lion.

I also think it's unfair to tell these people to 'move'. Don't knock it till you try it! It's awfully nice living in a place where you don't lock your doors and you can leave your keys in your ignition, where you don't have the sound of cars driving by... there's a lot of great reasons to live in a rural area. And there is more to life than internet!

You got that right there are a lot of people who have slow internet. Everyone who says just move is a child who doesn't have a mortgage or any bills. Or a snooty jerk.

Wrong. A lot of people out in rural areas do not have broadband of a speed sufficient to make downloading OSX feasible. The world is not yet interconnected at high speeds. It is attitudes like yours that creates the digital divide. Reality check, please.

A Government survey reveals that 40 percent of United States residents have no broadband access and 30 percent have no Internet access at all.

Hum, with a 12 month update cycle like iOS, I would not be surprised if this and future updates are under $10.

I think people would have been more interested if it had been priced appropriately. I didn't take much work for me to find the proper dmg in the app store download and put it on a thumb drive myself. The issue was never that people didn't have broadband - it was that they wanted a backup of the OS installer they could restore from.

Sucks for people who don't have fast internet access....

-also

Data limits?

I may be a cynical hater but...

Well, of course they got a lukewarm response to an offer of a $69 thumb drive. For $69 I can get an ticket on Southwest from just about anywhere in California to fly to Cupertino to download Lion! They can't be surprised if they price something unreasonably high that they then find that nobody wants to buy it. Had the premium for a physical copy been more like on the order of $10, their "test" would have been far more meaningful. Even then, for me, if I had nothing more than my iPhone's 3G data plan with which to download Lion, the overage from doing so would have only been $10 (assuming that I didn't have to do it more than once - Apple's retry stuff had better be perfect).

Hi, I'm from the UK.

Over here, our average downspeed is currently 0.5mbps. Yeah, that's the whole country.

Downloading Lion is a pain in the ass unless you live in a big city over here.

+1

I think many here are forgetting Apple is an International company and needs to think about solutions for different markets around the world.

We don't have 'local' Apple stores in England.
All public hotspots have a capped speed limit of around 1mbps
I don't have friends that live in cities with fast internet, they are all in the same situation.

I have a reasonable connection speed, it took about a day to download lion, so it is do-able, but not practical. Apple TV is a waste of time here, I can't stream anything. So I have a boxee with my own content on it.

But what made me post was the ignorance of some people here.

It isn't a minority of people with poor broadband. A lot of people have poor broadband in England. And it's nothing to do with ISP's, its to do with the technology we have.

And moving is really stupid comment made by some people. My family are here, my life is here. If I move I'll have to get a new job, but I've been working 10 years locally to get into the job I wanted, I can't afford to give all this up just so I can have a small increase in broadband speed. I'm sure many people are in the same situation.

By all means comment about how the changes affect you, but think before making ignorant comments like 'move' to others as the solution.