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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

This App Store-only distribution has me concerned about small business upgrades.

Let's say I have an office with 10 workstations. How do I upgrade? Do I have to create an iTunes account for each computer, and enter a company credit card number on each one? Can multiple iTunes accounts even share the same credit card number?

Perhaps I could get by with two accounts, since iTunes allows sharing on up to five Macs. But that's still far from an elegant solution, and it doesn't scale any better. And what about users who already have their workstations activated with their home iTunes accounts?

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Agree. I use Mac's at exhibitions all over the world. Anything without physical media of some sort (USB/DVD/CD/HDD) is as good as useless to me as often I don't have an internet connection or it's painfully slow.

Same situation. Not sure how that’s going to work for us as we’re a Mac shop with the exception of the sysadmin’s box and the internal servers (Ubuntu throughout). We don’t have a company App Store account - not sure such a thing even exists - and we don’t have any OSX servers. Maybe it’s time to consolidate some of our elderly rackmount equipment onto virtualised systems on a MacMini server or two? Hmm.

Historically you could use OSX Server as a local update/patch server, and have other Mac's on the LAN use it instead of downloading the same stuff again.

They say they're making Lion Server free and easily configured, and I'm hoping that they're integrating the App store components as well.

Unless I missed something in the presentation, Lion Server isn't free. It's a separate app that costs $50

https://www.apple.com/macosx/server/

Ahhh... I was just going by what was reported by someone at the keynote. Still, it's priced way cheaper than the previous versions, and I'd gladly pay the $50 for the convenience of a local patch/app server. (I have 5 macs in the house).

My biggest peeve is the download-only for the OS, as I have rather crappy internet access, and dread the thought of downloading a multi-GB update.

Perhaps the fact that they've recently discovered delta updates would make the download process a lot easier.

From my understanding of it the delta updates are only for the y part of x.y versioning, not whole point upgrades, and only for iOS. OS X already uses delta updaters and has done so for years.

You can "burn" the DMG to a USB key or DVD-ROM.

But first he has to figure out how to pay for N copies.

Apparently, there will be some sort of netboot option. Although that in itself will require you to have server for the role...

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