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Downloadable Mac OS X?

An interesting change in OS X Snow Leopard is how the installer works. In every previous version of Mac OS X you would boot your computer up using the installer disk and install from it that way. In Snow Leopard that’s not the case anymore. The installer runs directly from the mounted DVD, closes all of your applications and then installs a bunch of files for awhile before rebooting into the installer to finish the job.

That’s interesting because it means the DVD itself is not as central to the process. It is still used in Snow Leopard, but this is a step towards removing that dependency. If the process could be tweaked to boot the system from a specially crafted disk image file, you wouldn’t need the physical media anymore. Operating Systems will certainly be distributed as downloads at some point, but will it be as soon as Mac OS X 10.7?

As a side note, this new install method makes it easy to upgrade a Macbook Air to Snow Leopard. Once you share the DVD from another computer, you’re all set. The Remote Install Mac OS X utility doesn’t have to be running.

Update: I originally thought the install process didn’t boot from the DVD at all, but while doing an update on an iMac I saw that it does indeed! Whoops!

5 replies on “Downloadable Mac OS X?”

If they gave the option on the Apple website to download the disc as a .dmg, I could just ghost it to a partition on an external drive and boot from there. It’s already possible for those out there with a little bit of brain and ingenuity… Not really for the college kiddly-winks that crap their pants over a video camera on the iPod nano. Cheers.
-Happy Dreamhost Customer

Yeah, Linux has been downloadable for so long.. it’s a bit crazy that commercial desktop operating systems haven’t started doing it yet. It is more complicated to do from an end-user perspective, but it’s not too bad and I think a company like Apple could make it pretty easy if they cared enough.

Isn’t Mac OS X Lion’s developer beta a download, that pretty much works the way you described it?

Spot on with this post. Lion is, in fact, to be downloaded through the App Store.

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