OS X Mountain Lion has barely been in the Mac App Store for half an hour at this writing, and already it appears Apple has taken OS X Lion out behind the wood shed and put a bullet in its furry skull.
As first noted by MacStories, it appears that Apple has wasted little time in getting rid of OS X Lion now that OS X Mountain Lion has arrived. A search for last year's software now throws up an error message.
"Your request could not be completed," the error message says in bold type. "The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store."
Given that OS X Mountain Lion is a better deal by 10 bucks and users on the older Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 can leapfrog OS X Lion and go directly to Apple's latest big cat, this shouldn't be much of a surprise.
It's currently unclear how users who choose not to upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion will be able to reinstall OS X Lion -- the option to download it has also been removed from the Purchases tab of the Mac App Store, so those who didn't save the downloaded installer could be out of luck.
Anyone out there going to miss the king of the jungle?
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lannen
July 25, 2012 at 9:55am
Perhaps a bit more concerning than Lion disappearing is that Snow Leopard is no longer available from the online Apple Store. My MacBook is capable of running Mountain Lion, but without Snow Leopard there is no upgrade at all. I've been waiting for a while to upgrade and decided that when Mountain Lion came out I would do it.
I'm hoping that the disappearance of these older versions is going to be temporary, perhaps just in an effort to prioritize server resources during the launch.
mrdanpratt
July 25, 2012 at 9:02am
I own an early 2008 Macbook running Snow Leopard. I started reading about Mountain Lion a couple weeks ago and I found that it is incompatible with my machine. I can live with that and it just motivated me to upgrade to Lion, since that will be the last OS my machine can handle and I want support for as long as possible. Lion was $30 and I saw that Mountain Lion was going to be $20. I thought maybe I would wait until Mountain Lion came out and maybe they would discount Lion. I wasn't in a hurry to upgrade so it was worth a shot. Imagine my surprise this morning when Lion was nowhere to be found! As far as I know this is the first time that it is officially impossible to upgrade to an OS that is one version old. What am I to do?
drdavedmin
July 27, 2012 at 12:21pm
Apple also sold an upgrade disc for that. Maybe you could find one at an Apple store or ebay. Also, do you have a friend that kept the installer for Lion?
