Mac App Store: Where did Lion go?

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
July 30th, 2012 • 5:00 pm

In the “Boggles my mind” category, along with the disappearance of the default font setting in Safari 6’s preferences mentioned yesterday, here is another one that simply does not make sense.

At the same time that Apple released OS X Mountain Lion via the Mac App Store, Apple also removed Lion from the store:

appstore-nolion

This effectively means that, if you have a machine running Snow Leopard that can run Lion, but not Mountain Lion (and there are quite a few of those perfectly good Macs, including two 2006 Mac Pros in my own family), you can no longer purchase Lion from Apple.

Is Apple trying to promote software piracy or what? How does it make sense that these people are no longer able to purchase Lion? Simply because they decided to wait and not upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion during the last year and a half, now Apple no longer supports them if they want to upgrade to Lion?

I realize that those who have already purchased Lion (like myself) can still redownload it via the Mac App Store — at least that’s what people say; I haven’t tried it myself — but how does that help people who have not purchased Lion yet? Why force them to go through a third-party and obtain a copy of Lion by any means necessary? Would it really cost Apple too much to continue to support those users?

It simply make no sense whatsoever. And in the absence of any official explanation from Apple, we’re just left shaking our heads and wondering, “What on earth are these people thinking?”

[UPDATE: Macworld and this discussion on the Apple forums mention that it’s supposed to be available by phone order. It still does not make sense, and it doesn’t help that Apple’s own phone sales representatives don’t seem to be aware of the policy. If Apple knew that they were going to make that change, the least that they could have done is explain it properly by giving proper reasons, and make sure their own staff is aware of it. Who wants to spend 10 minutes or more on the phone to obtain a piece of software that used to be available via a simple click?]


One Response to “Mac App Store: Where did Lion go?”

  1. Michael Tsai - Blog - Where Did Lion Go? says:

    […] Pierre Igot: This effectively means that, if you have a machine running Snow Leopard that can run Lion, but not Mountain Lion (and there are quite a few of those perfectly good Macs, including two 2006 Mac Pros in my own family), you can no longer purchase Lion from Apple. […]