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Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit bummed out that i have to either buy multiple copies of the upgrade, or figure out how to enable my account across my wife's machine and the other machines i have. :(

I was quite liking the unrestricted installs for 30$

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Snow Leopard’s license did not allow for unlimited installs. One machine. That’s it. It has always been possible (not legal, though) to install Snow Leopard on as many machines as you wanted to. (That has been the case for every version of OS X since the beginning.) It has also always been possible to install it without even owning Leopard – even though the license didn’t allow you to. You could buy the family pack for a few dollars more but that also wasn’t unrestricted. It allowed for five users.

As for Lion, you can just log in with whatever account you want in the Mac App Store. That’s it. It’s not a problem. Logging out won’t disable any apps. You can download Lion as often as you want. (If you don’t want to use the Mac App Store you can just extract the installer DMG from the Lion app and use it to install Lion on all machines you own. This also saves you from having to download Lion twice.) The installer won’t phone home to verify whether you are allowed to install.

The license allows you to install Lion on any computer you own or control for personal use. I assume that includes your wife’s machine.

For business use you can install Lion on all machines a single person uses or on one machine several people use.

I read the licensing terms and you are still allowed to install the one copy you buy across as many computers as you own (for personal use). For business use you can install it on one computer that multiple users have access to (e.g. a shared workstation/library) or you can install it on all the computers that one employee uses (e.g. desktop + laptop).

So I guess it's more of a technical/sign-in limitation than a licensing limitation.

Launch the Mac App Store. Sign out. Sign in with the Apple ID that you purchased Lion with. Install Lion. It's really that simple.

You can install your one bought copy on "any number of Macs you own" plus "two more copies within a VM on each machine."

As far as I know, Mac OS X has always been sold with a single machine license (unless you bought the Family multi-pack).

As far as i recall, Snow Leopard was unlimited installs, that or i did toss in the extra 10-20$ for unlimited installs, i don't recall exactly (i do definitely recall buying a family pack for Leopard).

Regardless, where is that option now?

Edit: what the hell? -1 for saying that i prefer the family pack?

> As far as i recall, Snow Leopard was unlimited installs

The license was for a single machine. If you wanted to install it on multiple machine, you were supposed to get a family pack (5 machines).

Lion is single-user (since it's tied to an iTunes Store account), and up to 5 machines at the same time (all machines on which the account is active).

That can’t be it. The App Store license allows you to install apps on all Macs you own or control (that would include his wife’s Mac), i.e. an unlimited number of Macs. That’s for personal use.

> The App Store license allows you to install apps on all Macs you own or control

yeah I saw that in the Ars review. But I think your iTunes account can only be active on 5 machines, so you'd have to burn the dmg to a disk and install it on the supplementary machines (or remove auth)

> that would include his wife’s Mac

iTunes can switch accounts trivially, so that's not a problem: open his account on his wife's mac, update the OS, done.

iTunes does activations. The Mac App Store does not. You log into the Mac App Store with your Apple ID, that has nothing to do with iTunes. It wouldn’t make any sense to allow you to only activate five Macs for the App Store, given the license.

edit: Hey dude who downvoted, I made a factual claim. I have no problem with downvoting wrong factual claims but if you do you should at least clarify what is wrong.

I did not downvote you, but you're wrong all the same: MAS is a frontend to a sub-section of the iTunes Store. Similar to the iOS AppStore (which is a part of iTunes on computers, but a separate store on iPhones or iPads). In fact, if you have a tracing firewall you can see it send requests to itunes's servers.

And as far as I know MAS does the exact same thing as iTunes: you can authorize an account on 5 machines at a time.

I most certainly wasn't trying to make any claims about the technical infrastructure. Sure, MAS and iTunes use the same, no question, I wasn't trying to deny that. But are there activations? That's the question. iTunes has all this UI for managing activations, the MAS has not. You can't activate computers, you can't deactivate computers. Then there's the different license. It wouldn't make any sense if you had a limited number of activations given the license.

I see no reason to believe why there should be activations in the MAS. Using the same infrastructure doesn't mean anything.

Would burning it to a DVD and doing a clean install still require Apple accounts? I hope not.

http://www.informationweek.com/byte/howto/personal-tech/desk...

It doesn’t require any verification.

You can install this on all your machines. Just log into the mac appstore. It's like iOS not like iTunes: They don't limit the number of machines.

stick it on a thumb drive and sneaker-net over the installer to your wife's machine. there's no need to access iTunes during install.

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