Apple’s been promising that come Lion, OS X and OS X Server will be united… but with Snow Leopard Server costing $470 more than a retail copy of OS X, how will that go down?
New evidence suggests it’ll be simple: every copy of Lion will be able to function as a server, but you’ll need to enable that functionality by purchasing it through the Mac App Store.
By searching for “install server” in the help menu of the latest developer preview of Lion, HardMac discovered a note saying that users can turn their Mac into a server by installing the Server app from the Mac App Store.
Here are the instructions:
1. Buy the Server app from the Mac App Store.
The Server app is automatically installed in your Applications folder.
2. Open the Server app and click Continue in the Welcome to Server window.
3. Enter the name and password of an administrator account on this Mac, and then click Continue to begin installing and setting up Lion Server software.
The Server app downloads the Server Essentials software package, installs it, and configures this Mac as a server.
Interesting stuff, but while this seemingly confirms that Server support will be an app purchase in OS X Lion, the question remains: how much will it cost? Snow Leopard Server costs $499 for unlimited licenses. Will Lion’s Server.app be that expensive on the Mac App Store? Will Apple lower the price dramatically? Or will Apple have both home and professional versions of Server available on the Mac App Store?
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.
8 responses to “Lion Server Will Be A Mac App Store Download”
I’m hoping that Server is sold at a much higher cost than the standard OS. The reason being that running Mac OS X Server is not for everyone. At first, it looks very Fisher Price. Under the hood though, Mac OS X Server does have quite a bit of complexity, just like Windows Server. Since my career is to support Apple products, the last thing I want is for someone to install Server, and then expect me to support their uneducated implementation of it. Having a higher cost associated with Mac OS X Server helps to weed out those who really shouldn’t be working with Mac OS X Server.
what a sad thing to say
If you buy mac in August, what OS would be installed on it?
As someone who also supports Apple clients and servers I agree, if I now get students bringing their own macbooks in to one of the colleges with DHCP enabled and other stuff misconfigured it could end up causing chaos on our existing network, I think its best left as a high end product.