Apple Makes Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion Free to Download | Hacker News Reader

Apple Makes Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion Free to Download

macrumors.com

169 pointstosh69 comments

So, um, where the fuck is Mavericks?

I love Mavericks, and I hang out in a big Mavericks thread on MacRumors. People routinely ask me for help acquiring a copy of that OS, because unless it's already in your Apple ID's download history, Mavericks is completely unavailable from Apple officially.

10.10+ has been available for years via special download links, and 10.7 and 10.8 have always been available for purchase if they were really needed. We need Mavericks!

It’s unfortunate that Apple hasn’t made special dmg downloads to allow you to download Mavericks. My understanding of the App Store link to buy Mavericks is that it only loads of your computer is “old enough” or running 10.7 or 10.8 already. It was the first “free” update, if I recall correctly, and like the updates that followed (10.10, 10.11, 10.12) there were restrictions so only specific computers could download it running specific versions of macOS. That’s why they needed special download links, I think?

I’ve had the most success installing older copies of macOS by using the Recovery Mode to install the copy of the OS that originally shipped, then updating from there to whatever specific version I needed.

Remember: you can’t install a version of macOS that is older than the hardware - meaning every Mac sold has a version that it shipped with and that’s the minimum version required. From there you can choose which updates to install… it’s a long, slow process.

Also note, just as hardware has a minimum OS version it generally has a max version too: I once tried to install a newer copy of macOS on unsupported hardware and was frustrated that the Next button was greyed out or the installer wouldn’t boot. So I used a different Mac to install it, then copied the hard drive. Still didn’t boot. Very frustrating. Turns out I needed a patch to get it to work: http://dosdude1.com/software.html For Big Sur there a set of patches too, but I imagine as time goes by it’s harder and harder to patch in support or ignorance of missing hardware features.

> My understanding of the App Store link to buy Mavericks is that it only loads of your computer is “old enough” or running 10.7 or 10.8 already.

What link? I've checked in VM's and on a real Mac running Snow Leopard. As far as I can tell, Mavericks simply isn't in the store, unless you're using an Apple ID that downloaded it when it was current.

If you know something I don't, please tell me! I've poured through Apple's update catalog files and everything! You can get the combo update, but not the full installer.

I get an email or PM asking for help finding Mavericks once every couple of weeks or so. I have a link I give out, but since it's technically Apple's copyrighted software... well, I really wish Apple was distributing it themselves. (This is also why I give the link out privately.)

Does https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id675248567 work on an older macOS version? If not I might have to agree with you, I previously used the link in my Purchases page simply as the fastest way to find it.

It does not I'm afraid!

> it’s a long, slow process

Genuine question: why do it at all? For obscure legacy apps that no longer work on modern versions? For nostalgia? Is there any reason outside of these?

The only reason I can think of besides app testing would be if you had a Mac released in late 2013 or early 2014 and you wanted to run macOS 10.9 directly. You can sometimes use Internet Recovery to re-download a copy of 10.9 as it shipped on the computer, but maybe your Internet is poor, or you want to install the OS from a different model of computer, then put it back in the computer that originally shipped with 10.9? So there are reasons, but the list is pretty small. You can see which OS was originally installed when the Mac model was first released at https://everymac.com/systems/by_capability/minimum-macos-sup... And I should have clarified that there's a difference between doing an Internet Recovery and a Recovery Boot. Your Recovery Boot is often the latest version of macOS (though I might be wrong about that, all I remember is the UI changes with new version upgrades) while Internet Recovery is the original version of macOS that shipped with your Mac. (It always looks a bit ugly...)

I should clarify: I can see why this is a good strategy for installing a past version of macOS. What's unclear to me is the motivation for doing so

Because: 32 bit, accessing features which have been removed and decrease value of products (search for target display mode via cable in iMacs pre 2014/2015 I think)...

Also there is privacy concerns because of the new telemetry (I don't know exactly but I read they are sending your app binaries to some signing servers).

Also there is products that still work great for specific tasks and why on earth would I pay a s... load of money to get a shiny new product when an old one from the dumpster will do?

I will never understand this attitude of many folks towards the waste of the resources of our mother earth. (Yes I know you look really cool with the new watch, pad, phone and pods and maybe you need it but I sincerely hope not).

Legacy software support sounds like a perfectly viable use case.

It's nice of Apple to acknowledge the existence of older versions of their software. It's a rarity these days.

It’s not just mere acknowledgement. These versions of MacOS were, if I remember correctly, paid software upgrades. Making these previously paid released available for free download might not have been bureaucratically trivial. While it may seem like a trivial gesture a decade on, it's actually quite decent and very much unlike Apple to be so considerate towards users of 'vintage' hardware and software.

Edit: Yes, I did remember correctly. Mac OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" was the first version that was distributed for free to all Apple computer owners. Lion (10.7) and Mountain Lion (10.8) were definitely paid upgrades.

Was it ever not a rarity?

It wasn't back when software was distributed on physical media and there wasn't this "update culture". You were expected to update to a newer version of an OS if you want to, not because you have to in order to keep the ability to use the internet on hardware you already have.

This is a really glib view of the vast and complicated reasons people are encouraged to update their OS. It's not mere whimsy that in a rapidly developing malware landscape, updating your OS is a necessity.

Security patches are one thing. The constant moving things around and putting "fresh coats of paint" onto everything without solving any real problems is another.

But then, at some point, all mainstream OSes will have been rewritten in memory-safe languages and there won't be any more exploitable vulnerabilities remaining. What then?

Memory-safe languages do not guarantee absence of bugs or security issues. I remember when Heartbleed was discovered, and people were groaning how that would never have happened had OpenSSL been written in Rust, one of the OpenBSD developers wrote a blog post to explain how Rust's memory safety guarantees would not have prevented Heartbleed or a comparable bug.

It would no doubt eliminate a lot of bugs, but security researchers and black hats would almost certainly continue to find exploitable bugs. It would just get somewhat harder. But AFAIU, finding exploitable bugs at the OS-level has been getting progressively harder for a long time, to the point that these days the main attack surface are web browsers and users who unquestioningly open file attachments in email.

And people who eagerly add new features to operating systems will no doubt provide a generous supply of security problems to discover and "fix in the next release". ;-)

If that last bit truly isn’t a joke, let me be the first to point out that moving to memory-safe languages will not eliminate vulnerabilities. It won’t even really be close.

Formal proofs of correctness would probably get us closer to software that is bug-free, but literally nothing is a panacea, and at the scale of attack surface we’re dealing with most of the extreme options (even including “rewrite it in a memory safe language”) are too big to foresee happening in the short or mid-term in any meaningful way.

Not all vulnerabilities are due to memory safety!

But most are, and they usually are most devastating. Mistakes in logic can sometimes be vulnerabilities that could, for example, disclose some information to an unintended party, but I can't imagine how one could lead to remote code execution.

Yes. Not so long ago it was possible to download system6 disk images directly from a simple html page hosted on apple.com This was quite handy for emulation.

Maybe they were slightly more naive about it(?)

I’ve been trying to run a 32 bit app on my 128 GB MacBook Air and it’s been a huge PITA. Xcode requires you to be on the latest version which means that I had to upgrade after uninstalling many apps and cleaning up. It requires something like 30 GB free to get to Big Sur. Then I finally get to trying to download Mojave to install but the App Store doesn’t allow a download when you’re in a newer version - so I have to go to another site that specializes in this type of thing- and then make a VM for Mojave on a machine with no memory so I have to move your things to an external hard drive. I still haven’t finished the install to be able to run one 32 bit app I wanted to dig into. Any suggestions would be welcome.

> trying to download Mojave to install but the App Store doesn’t allow a download when you’re in a newer version - so I have to go to another site that specializes in this type of thing

You can download the Mojave installer directly from Apple:

% softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.14.6

I just tried this and got "Install failed with error: Update not found".

A few days back I was searching around for how to download old macOS/OS X versions, so that I could run a VM to test my app [0]. For the first hour or so, all I could find was sites that linked to the official App Store downloads for the last 3 OSes, which didn't work. The page would open in the App Store app, I'd click "Get", and it would say that it wasn't found.

This command unfortunately did the same, which makes me wonder if this is something to do with my Apple account, or maybe that they've taken down those downloads?

What ended up working for me was dosdude's patchers:

10.12 Sierra: http://dosdude1.com/sierrapatch.html

10.13 High Sierra: http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/

10.14 Mojave: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

10.15 Catalina: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/

These tools are meant for patching old OS X versions to run on unsupported Macs, but that wasn't the feature I needed. The important thing for me was their "Download" button, which downloads the installer directly from Apple's servers.

It was a huge relief and I was finally able to test my app properly on older (virtualized) OSes using Parallels [1], which was even having a sale at the time (maybe still?).

0: my app is Recut, an automated video editor - https://getrecut.com - which supports back to 10.13 High Sierra

1: https://www.parallels.com/

> I just tried this and got "Install failed with error: Update not found".

Sorry, the option requires Catalina or higher. Just tested under Big Sur:

  % softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.14.6
  Scanning for 10.14.6 installer
  Installing: 16.0%

Interesting! I'm running Big Sur too, 11.4. Weird. Maybe I need to refresh my Apple login or something.

You can find the direct download links manually by looking for the package in the sucatalog for the OS version of interest:

https://gist.github.com/meyer/b14c87d162366f0428a99cd2ff0d0b...

There's also this interestingly named tool which essentially automates the process: https://github.com/corpnewt/gibMacOS

I saw that the dosdude patchers were downloading those (or similar) .sucatalog files but they're pretty large and I had trouble figuring out which URLs in there corresponded to the OS installers I needed, or whether the installer was maybe broken up into parts or something... so after a brief period of desire to figure out how that file was organized, I downloaded all 3 patchers and clicked the Download button, heh.

That gib tool looks helpful, and... wow, I haven't seen that word since the Quake days!

You can download older versions of Xcode via https://developer.apple.com/downloads — if you don’t care about shipping anything to an Apple walled garden but just want to dig into some old software, definitely stay on an older version of OS X and grab an older copy of Xcode.

EDIT: additionally, I’d recommend going for a version of Xcode as close to the version used for developing the software you’re interested in as possible — balancing out what version of Mac OS (you have / are targeting / most up to date) is compatible with the versions of Xcode close to it. Some major Xcode updates will break compilation and you’ll have to fix minor issues to move forward, which could be brutal in a larger codebase.

I have VM's of different major OS X releases and corresponding versions of xCode. It's super valuable for getting stuff on Github from different eras to actually compile.

If the thing you are trying to run has/had a Windows counterpart you could try using crossover which can run 32 bit Windows apps on Mac.

Archive.org has OS Retail DVDs for at least Tiger: https://archive.org/details/macosx10.4tigerretaildvd

But this is awesome! Lots of old photo software will no longer run on modern MacOS

Super cool, didn't know about this, only that you could order them from Apple

Note that, I, um, don't think that the Internet Archive actually has permission to distribute this. And while downloading abandonware is 100% okay in my book, I do think I'd rather it was distributed by a less socially indispensable resource than the Internet Archive...

Any chance of getting Snow Leopard? That was the most stable version I've ever used.

Snow Leopard, for anyone who doesn't remember, was famously introduced on stage as having "0 New Features":

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/

If only Apple had the confidence to do that again. Imagine an entire update of MacOS dedicated solely to stability, and not iOS parity.

Snow Leopard did have fewer new features than prior releases, with a focus on stability and polish, but "0" was only ever a marketing line. Snow Leopard added QuickTime X, Dock Exposé and exchange support in Apple Mail, to name three. Plus, major new under-the-hood technologies like Grand Central Dispatch absolutely would have been touted on stage in other years.

I really think the "0 new features" was a fluke of history that elided with marketing. Wikipedia better describes it as, "no new major visual changes." [1]

- Finder was completely rewritten in Cocoa

- Microsoft Exchange support was added

- QuickTime X introduced

- Grand Central Dispatch introduced

- OpenCL support added

- and a bunch of other stuff

Each one could have caused issues, but thankfully didn't. However, Snow Leopard did have an issue that could delete all user data [2]. The accident of history is the transition from paid upgrades on physical media to free updates via the web and an increased release cycle. Previous updates were $129, Snow Leopard (Lion and Mountain Lion) was $29, and Mavericks was free. This also was when the 2-3 year release cycle moved to an annual one. The App Store was added as a point release of Snow Leopard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...

[2] https://methodshop.com/snow-leopard-bug/

One can hope that with the combination of ARM, Swift/SwiftUI, and unification of their OS's it will be easier to focus on stability since they can get more of the apps/frameworks "for free" (aka less, but still something that would free up time).

When I heard a new OS release actually made things load faster and uses less disk, I was shocked as I was spoiled to think every new OS release requires more hardware resource by the dumb engineering of Windows which relies on hardware improvement to sustain its lazy bloat.

Until very recently, you could actually still buy Snow Leopard from the Apple Store in boxed format until early 2021. Apparently, MacOS versions 10.5 and earlier couldn't upgrade to MacOS Lion or later without updating to Snow Leopard first. Probably had to do with the Mac App Store distribution, and for that reason, Snow Leopard was on sale for a long time.

Some users on Reddit though said that until Apple removed it, there were long shipping times... almost as if some lackey was manually burning discs and putting stickers on them, but who knows?

Anyway, you can still find them on eBay for that reason. https://www.ebay.com/itm/203505863379?hash=item2f61e50ad3:g:...

Still have the original Snow Leopard disk that came with my older Macbook. I agree it was peak MacOS.

Last version of OS X before mobile ate the world.

I suspect the reason Apple didn't make 10.4-10.6 freely available -- at least Intel, anyway -- is because they pay for the Rosetta license seats (QuickTransit wasn't free).

There's a copy of Snow Leopard server here: https://archive.org/details/osxserver-10.6

The platonic ideal of an OS.

It was easy to lose work because state restoration and autosave weren't added until the next one.

Only in theory. In practice, the new document paradigm often resulted in users accidentally overwriting their work. It didn't help that Lion was also the buggiest OS Apple has ever released.

After Snow Leopard, every update made the Mac slower and slower. It seemed intentional to make you update the hardware because sometimes after restarting the OS behaved normally, but most of the time MacOS was sluggish and didn't reach full CPU usage.

It's funny even though hardware had improved significantly over the years, nothing is faster from the user's perspective, moreso for Windows and it doesn't even mean we get satisfied proportionately.

Installers for 10.10 through 10.15 can be downloaded here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683

Great! So my 2011 mbp that originally came with Lion now won’t internet recovery earlier than High Sierra, I think it updated the firmware, but I would love to bring it back to Lion, as it was so much faster, heck Snow Leopard would be even better if possible. Use case: strictly offline running old audio software that I like better than new audio software

This is definitely good move. Maybe it's a their response for right to repair?

Cheer for such move.

I have 2 Mac Pro, and 1 mac air dedicated to 10.13 forever. Sometimes things work well and you do not need to or cannot upgrade.

Guess same for someone with some old computers.

They finally remembered - hey, why are we charging for this?

I thought they were all free to download?

"Apple has kept OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion available for customers who have machines limited to the older software, but until recently, Apple was charging $19.99 to get download codes for the updates."

10.9 was the first "free" macOS release, prior to that, it was a paid upgrade.

10.1 was kinda free https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/2/

"Mac OS X 10.1 was released on September 29th, 2001, but that date depends on your definition of "released." Update CDs were handed out for free after Apple's keynote speech at the Seybold publishing conference in San Francisco. People who did not attend Seybold have several ways to get the update. Starting on the 25th, free update CDs are being handed out at Apple stores and some other retail outlets. This free update does not include the developer tools, but those can be downloaded by all ADC online members (free registration required) from Apple's web site. Finally, owners of Mac OS X 10.0 can order a full update containing a Mac OS 9.2.1 CD, a Mac OS X 10.1 update CD, and a developer tools CD through Apple's Mac OS X Up-to-Date program at a cost of $19.95 (plus state tax). The 10.1 update is not available for free download."

I picked up the 10.1 CD at my university bookstore. It was still incredibly slow. I'm pretty sure I was using it on a beige G3 PPC with 256MB of RAM. I thought it was super cool, the new version of NeXT, but I was still doing actual work on a PC running RedHat or Win2000.

It didn't really become fast until 10.2 and even then you needed a GPU that supported Quartz Extreme to get that. My G3 Imac never ran it well because of that. I had to disable basically every graphical effect to get anything remotely resembling speed. Mac OS 9 on the same machine even with an eighth the RAM (64MB) was way way more responsive. Unfortunately even by the time I got that machine in 2005, the OS 9 browser situation was a problem for a lot of sites.

10.0 was effectively a beta OS, which was probably why Apple felt compelled at that time to offer the 10.1 update for as close to free as they could to those who had suffered through the developer previews. 10.1 still had plenty of issues too.

IIRC the next paid upgrade 10.2 was the more typical for the period 129 dollars. I was in a line of three people at my local Apple store for the free disc back in 2001.

Well time to upgrade the 2014 MacBook Pro!

Remember when people actually wanted updates, so much that they'd pay for them?

are there still security updates for those, making them safe to use directly exposed to the internet?

Mountain Lion support ended November 2015. Lion support ended October 2014.

Looking through this page, it looks like the last mention of 10.8 was 2017. Definitely not safe on the Internet.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

Strong disagree on the second part - if you don't have ports listening to the Internet by default, there's nothing an attacker can do (except trick you to go to a site in your browser with JS enabled, but that's something that can happen with much newer OSs too, and requires your deliberate action to initiate.)

...and I'm willing to bet these older versions don't phone home much if at all compared to the latest ones, eliminating another attack surface.

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