Gordon, What I have read is that this is true with all of the hardware that was shipped with Lion on it. Apparently the Lion on the new systems is slightly different from the Lion being shipped via the AppStore.
One important new feature that is only available on the new Air's and Mini's is the option-command-R at boot. This will download a copy of Lion from the Apple even if the recovery partition has been corrupted or destroyed. The complaints I hear now remind me very much of when Apple decided to ship the first iMac computers with a CD and no floppy of any kind. People kept asking about how software installs would work... I don't believe that affordable high speed network access is sufficiently available at this time, but perhaps Apple is just a wee bit ahead of their time once again. There were options when the floppy was dropped as standard and there are options now for the optical storage. We won't really know if the dropping of Apple optical media was a mistake or just another branch in the evolution of the computer. One thing is definitely true, and that is it will save Apple on not only the initial hardware but on repairs to the fragile drives. I would expect that everybody in this group knows somebody who had a optical drive stop working. Jonathan On Jul 30, 2011, at 2:24 PM, Gordon Smith wrote: > Hi Nic > > It's worth pointing out again that the DVD option doesn't work on the server > hardware. > > Gordon > > On 30 Jul 2011, at 17:57, Nicolai Svendsen wrote: > > Hi! > > Yeah, the button is definitely there. I've done it, too, but it's kind of a > roundabout way of performing a clean install. The fastest way I've found so > far was to burn it to a DVD, then use Disk utilities on that DVD to format > the drive and install the operating system. Installing OS X Lion, then > launching its recovery partition only to reformat, then download the image > off of Apple's servers seems ridiculous, even though that seems to be the > method Apple even recommends. I guess, in truth, it was meant as an upgrade > from Snow Leopard to Lion given its distribution through the App Store, and I > can see why. Since the Recovery Partition it carves out needs the Application > later in order to get access to the disk image on your internal drive, it > can't format the drive nor reinstall it from scratch without a DVD or > downloading a new installer. Now, if it only downloaded an application which > contained an application to extract the recovery image, it'd be another story > as you cou ld > then download the entire operating system off of Apple's servers from the > recovery partition. > > <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> > > To reply to this post, please address your message to > [email protected] > > You can find a monthly formatted archive of all messages posted to the > Mac-Access forum at the following URL: > <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> > > The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and > worm-free! > > Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting > the list website at: > <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find a monthly formatted archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at the following URL: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
