It had surprised me when Lion came out that the installation was done by an "app", not as a bootable image. This is an unnecessary complication for those of us that need to maintain machines. Earlier, when updating a different machine, I had learned how painful this could be when the installation app destroyed the boot sector and I needed to reinstall Snow Leopard from DVD, and then upgrade that to a version of the system recent enough to run the Lion installer app. As will become apparent, had Lion come as a bootable image things might have gone more smoothly.
Lion and Mountain Lion installers contain images which can easily be converted to ISO:
I think the point isn't that is impossible to be able to do a clean install of an OS and apps (Time Machine included) you have already paid (premium!) for but the fact that it is non-trivial and very much involved - all the things for which the Apple system stood against. Most of the newer Apple products are a black box which cannot be fixed unless even the technically competent users take extra efforts(^).
And this is coming from Rob Pike[1].
edit: (^)Or you take it to the Apple Genius people, who just have the correct tools.
> I think the point isn't that is impossible to be able to do a clean install of an OS and apps (Time Machine included) you have already paid (premium!) for but the fact that it is non-trivial and very much involved - all the things for which the Apple system stood against.
I'm not sure I agree?
Apple's always optimized for the average person's average case. "Those of us that need to maintain machines" aren't the average person engaged in the average case activity; they're engaged in a corner case activity and should have the knowledge to swing the non-trivial (but still trivial) ISO extraction method.
This is a small inconvenience for a small section of their customer base with a big upside: updating one OS version to the next over the internet is dead-stupid easy for the non-technical majority.
It beats the hell out of what for years has passed as Microsoft's version of selling you an OS upgrade over the internet; paying for a download of an .iso, figuring out what to do with an .iso, burning it, and using it is easier for the "those of us that need to maintain machines", but way out of reach for the non-technical majority. It's optimizing for exactly the wrong case.
I fail to see what is "non-average" about wanting to restore a machine from a Time Machine backup after a hard drive failure. Time machine is the only backup solution an average user will ever use, and is supposed to be a backup solution, not a placebo. As indicated in the article, it doesn't actually work for the the most (or second most) common case.
Rob Pike is most decidedly average in this case, he is most interested in working on his projects, not understanding the trivialities of maintaining the Apple Macintosh. Just like most people who have work to do that doesn't really revolve around shuffling boot disks around.
The "experts" (that, those who read macrumors regularly), will, of course, have not trusted time machine and will have a carbon copy cloner backup they can clone onto the new drive. They're ok. Meanwhile, the "average" folk who trust that an Apple provided backup solution... I dunno, backs things up... will be screwed.
Is windows worse? Maybe, but you know what -- as shitty as their incremental backup to a series of .zip files is -- at least it takes a complete image of the boot drive by default as part of the backup.
many things are wrong with this story.. FYI: the Lion installation app, as well as ML installer, is just a wrapper application with preflight functions for the installer. This app wrapper contains the disk image of the Lion installer that functions just like any other disk image of OS X. To find the disk image for lion in the "Install Lion.app" app wrapper, you right click on the app and click show contents, find a resources folder and bam, there it is. The disk image can be burned to DVD or restored to a flash drive using disk utility. No excuses now, they didn't fail anyone. He scratch his SL install disc, not apples fault.
Your last paragraph is just totally wrong. Ever since MS has been selling Windows online, they've also been providing a tool which will put the ISO onto bootable DVD or USB (your choice).
They point to this tool pretty clearly as part of the purchase process.
So with MS you can do it anyway you like: Installation as an app, or an ISO which you may trivially burn to a DVD or flash to a USB drive using a tool that they also provide.
FWIW, Apple also ships a tool inside the Lion and Mountain Lion installations that does the same thing, writes a bootable disk from the recovery partition onto a USB flash drive. It's found at "/Applications/Utilities/Recovery Disk Assistant.app"
Why can't you have both? In Ubuntu, you can update your OS version from the update manager, but you can also download the *.iso and do a clean install. After they tack on payment and drm to the system, what about this can Apple not emulate?
What about this does Apple not emulate? I download and pay for the upgrade, I right click, show contents, resources, and voilá there is a perfectly good disk image sitting right there for me to burn to disk or write out to a USB stick.
That is so incredibly un-user friendly and undiscoverable, it is absurd. How would my mother know to do that? Why didn't customer support have Rob do that?
Your mother would simply bring her machine to a genius bar at one of the Apple stores where they have all the required tools and media to re-install her computer. She wouldn't have had a tech come out to her house to replace it.
My mother does not live near an Apple store; the closest one is in the next state. Nice thought though. How exactly are consumers supposed to know which official support channels are the good ones, and which are the bad ones?
”I think the point isn't that is impossible to be able to do a clean install of an OS and apps (Time Machine included) you have already paid (premium!) for”
Huh? Mac users don't pay for OS X licenses, they only pay for upgrades. Time Machine is included in the OS, free of charge. OS X applications, and especially Apple's apps, are often cheaper than similar software on other platforms.
Yeah. I remember going through Snow L -> Lion. I wanted a clean system so had to make an ISO. Process reminded me a linux install from USB from 10 years back.
And I lost iPhoto. Because suddenly my Macbook Air stopped being eligible for free iPhoto.
I reinstalled Snow L on an older machine and then could no longer reinstall iphoto. I'd paid for it on my app store account but there was no way to install the older version (and I couldn't upgrade to the newer version).
Once again reinforced the danger of the cloud hosted licensing model; software I paid for wasn't actually mine to keep/use.
If I remember correctly, when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion I too lost my iPhoto, but that was because a newer version was required than the one I owned, so I had to re-purchase it.
Also, Lion did actually come on an installable USB drive (which is more expensive than the App store Installer app). Not Mountain Lion though. Creating bootable disks (USB or DVD) from the installer app is trivial.
Also his other point about losing all installers is actually a point in favor of the app store distribution model. They're always there unlike a physical disk which can go bad on you.
Time machine and Migration Assistant errors he rightly cribs about though. It is imperative that they work right.
All in all it's strange that one of the people who did seminal work in the early days of UNIX and C comes off looking like lost layperson. You'd expect him to be able to be able to deal with this way better.
Lion and Mountain Lion installers contain images which can easily be converted to ISO:
http://tinyapps.org/blog/mac/201209130700_convert_dmg_to_iso...
and there are many more options and approaches:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2628/install_os_x_from_dmg_fi...
http://0xced.blogspot.com/2009/08/booting-from-dmg.html
http://blogchampion.com/2011/03/12/how-to-create-a-bootable-...