Apple Begins Selling Mac OS X 'Lion' USB Thumb Drive

[Rob Williams]

In a quick bit of Apple news, the Cupertino company has just released a thumb drive variant of its Mac OS X 'Lion' operating system, allowing those who would rather forgo the download-only option to do just that. Kicking things off with last year's MacBook Air model, Apple decided to get rid of optical discs for install media, and as such, with Lion and beyond, it looks like a thumb drive will be your only non-download option. That's not a bad thing, per se, though a thumb drive is a bit easier to misplace than a CD jewel case.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[MacMan]

It's actually far cheaper to make your own Lion USB stick, but as far as $69 for the Apple version goes, you have to admit that it's a hell-of-a-lot cheaper than paying Microsoft $179 for a upgrade that comes on an easily breakable 50 cent DVD, or $300 or more for a full upgrade! Thumb drives might be more easy to misplace, but DVD's are definitely bulkier and far more easy to break!

Now that I think of it, I honestly only use my DVD about three or four times a year... seriously! The day DVD drives die, the better as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't be too surprised if Microsoft starts replacing DVD's with USB soon as well.

 

[Rob Williams]

It's actually far cheaper to make your own Lion USB stick, but as far as $69 for the Apple version goes, you have to admit that it's a hell-of-a-lot cheaper than paying Microsoft $179 for a upgrade that comes on an easily breakable 50 cent DVD, or $300 or more for a full upgrade!

This argument never gets old. OS X fans love to call their OS inexpensive, while at the same time they pay twice as much money as PC users to get decent hardware. Unless you go Mac Pro and want to spend $4,000 on it, at least, no performance hardware Apple puts in its computers would ever make me think that a $30 OS is a good deal. I'd happily pay $179 for an OS given all the control I have.

Now that I think of it, I honestly only use my DVD about three or four times a year... seriously! The day DVD drives die, the better as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't be too surprised if Microsoft starts replacing DVD's with USB soon as well.

This I can agree with. The only time I ever use an ODD is to rip music, or burn the odd Linux distro because I am too lazy to copy it to a thumb drive. Our benchmarking PCs don't even have ODDs anymore, and when I build my HTPC, it's not likely to have one, either (still contemplating it for Blu-ray, though).