Remember when Apple said to drag your Mac into your local Apple Store and piggyback their WiFi to download Lion if you didn’t have high-speed internet? It seemed silly at the time, but we didn’t take into account that Apple might set up dedicated Lion install servers in their retail locations to help with the load. Silly us.
In a report, 9to5Mac says that’s just what is going to happen… and that those servers will be top of the line, fully-specced Mac Pro towers.
Furthermore we’ve heard rumblings that some stores will be receiving maxed out Mac Pro towers to be used as Lion distribution caching centers. Some believe that these stations would allow customers to purchase Lion (3.5GB) from the Mac App store and download it directly from the store server in minutes. This would be a huge help to customers who do not have access to a broadband Internet connection or users who want to walk through the install process with an Apple employee during a personal training session.
It also means that the Apple Store’s internet connection won’t be bogged down by a bunch of customers slowly downloading Lion over WiFi, nor will stores be filled with loiterers waiting for a 4GB download to finish. Instead, it seems they’ll connect to a special WiFi server, which will be able to pump Lion almost instantaneously to connected machines.
Fantastic news for those who don’t have broadband. Well, laptop owners without broadband, that is. If you’ve got an iMac, a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro, things still could get a little awkward.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
50 responses to “Dedicated Mac Pro Servers Will Wirelessly Distribute Lion Almost Instantly In Some Apple Stores [Report]”
Please oh please, just let me download it once for the 4 Macs i have in my house. That is all I ask.
According to my sources that is only somewhat true. A number of the stores are getting new server systems to help handle all their online needs (their appointment management program, their POS program etc). This whole ‘local copies of Lion’ thing is just one part of that bigger gig
It’s a file that you can copy to different computers you know.
You can, Just download it once. then put the “Install OS X Lion” program thingy on a disk then just pop the disk in all your computers drag the program from the disk onto your desktop and install. It worked in the DP I’m sure it will still work on release.
They already reimage all their customer facing machines with a dedicated server in the store. I think they used to be netbooted but as stores got larger the machines were all reimaged automatically every night. So why wouldn’t they task this server with serving up Lion to customers?
if you have the money for a mac pro or imac surely you can afford a decent speed and meg/gb allowance?
But that still does nothing for thousands of users who don’t have an internet connection, have a slow connection or do not have an Apple store within driving distance. Many in rural areas of the country are locked out of Lion simply because they live in the “wrong place” by Apple standards.
My stepmother would have to drive 230 miles one way just to download the OS upgrade from the closest Apple store. The best she could get is a dialup IP that would be a long-distance call on top of ISP charches, both of which she cannot afford.
Shame on Apple for abandoning its people who live in the middle of the country in rural areas. It should be roundly chastised for such an elitist, insensitive and short-sighted decision.
It’s also a shame the country hasn’t pushed broadband out to those areas.
I think that i will worry about the best way to install Lion, once we all know, when it will be released! http://f-stopdigital.co.uk.
With all due respect, I’m sure your stepmother hasn’t been gagging for this upgrade, and neither will she be constrained by an older version of OS X.
Secondly, people living that far away from civilisation only have themselves to blame :L To make their products great for the 99% of us, unfortunately means they have to shit on a few. Or at least inconvenience them.
This still ignores the question that I have raised numerous times. What happens when your complete HDD dies (as has happened to both my Macbook and my iMac over the last four years). Okay, I know replacing the HDD in my iMac wasn’t an Apple supported fix, but they *tell you* how to install a new drive into the Macbook and Macbook Pros!
Having a Restore Partition is no good when the complete HDD dies. How are you supposed to format a new blank drive and install the OS onto it without a hard copy of the media?
I really doubt your stepmother will miss or have her life changed in anyway because she cannot download Lion at 12:01am
http://www.cultofmac.com/os-x-…“according to an internal AppleCare manual leaked to 9to5 Mac, Lion boasts a number of recovery options that can be initiated by holding Command-R on startup. Users will then have the option to restore their system from a Time Machine backup, run Disk Utility to check, repair or erase partitions on your hard drives, and “reinstall Lion over the Internet from Apple’s servers.”This should give users the ability to install Lion straight onto their machine without having to access the Mac App Store first, and will make the whole process of recovering your machine a lot easier than originally anticipated.”
Sorry, Bruce, but that pre-supposes that the HDD is still recognised on boot. In both cases my HDD died completely and suddenly. It wasn’t bootable and when I tried to use Disc utilities from the DVD, in neither case was the HDD seen, hence having to replace the HDD. In that case, having a restore partition as you describe is useless.
No surprise, figured they would do something like this when I heard people could visit Apple Stores to download Lion there.
If I may ask, what country do you live in?
I honestly didn’t think there where any countries (not any non-Developing Countries at least :p) where any of the settled part where still limited to dial-up…
“instantaneously” “in minutes”
yeah? 4GB over wifi?
show me.
Then make a bootable USB drive. Five minutes of effort, 30 minutes of baking, and I’ll never have to worry about not having it again.
Wow, you need to get out more. Huge sections of the US are still limited to dial-up and satellite, with the occasional WISP dotting the landscape here and there. The local Mac repairman here keeps all the online software updates for all OSes since Panther on a set of external drives to enable him to install them on his clients’ machines during housecalls.
You sound like you think networking is just available everywhere, like oxygen. Ever live
“on the rez?” Well, there are a whole lot of places in America that are at the same level of development.
Wouldn’t you still have to go to the apple store to get the os on a disc?
Well getting out more wouldn’t help a whole lot…
I live in Europe where at least the larger/major countries (The UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, you get it) you can pretty much get a DSL broadband connection where ever you live. If that isn’t possible the 3G network in most countries covers just about all of them so a 3G based Mobile Broadband is always an option.
I didn’t realize there was any such badly developed areas in the US, not where any kind of quantity of people lived at least. Sorry.
Well it sure wouldn’t be instantaneously, and maybe not what you would call in minutes either. But it would probably be shorter than downloaded form the net, you should be able to get 4gb over wifi in under half an hour.
get it sent to you…? Or buy it at a Bestbuy or something?
I’m sure it’s possible that someone could rip OSX Lion and send it to you on a flash drive or disc. And that best buy could get the mac pro servers, though apple might prohibit bouth of these things.