What if i can upgrade to lion

And Apple's not saying. Although we asked Apple to clarify several aspects of the Lion upgrade process -- including whether it will make available an alternative upgrade path to businesses, organizations and schools that could have hundreds of Macs, the company didn't immediately respond. Others couldn't believe the company would leave them in the lurch without means of making physical media that could conceivably be used to install Lion.

Yes, that's what Apple says. Apple updated Snow Leopard Jan. I'm still running Leopard What do I do to get Lion? We don't know, yet. This was another question we asked Apple. Here are a few reasons why we think you may—or may not—want to upgrade right now. In our screenshot tour of Lion when it became available to developers, we outlined the major features of the new OS. These features and our experience with them present some usage cases where you may definitely want to head on over to the Mac App Store now:.

Relax and be free from anxiety Take back good sleep and help alleviate pain. You're a laptop user with sensitive data on your hard drive : A similarly unique need that Lion fulfills is for laptop users who need whole disk encryption and want it supported in the OS rather than going through another solution like TrueCrypt.

Features like on-the-fly encryption and decryption and instant wipe to remove the encryption key from your Mac instantly are very useful improvements. You rely on iCal and Mail a lot : A couple of Apple's built-in apps have been enhanced for a better user experience. We like iCal's new views, like its "heat map" to tell you when you're free during the week and the ability to quickly add new events in natural language e.

These are small improvements, but if they make a big difference in your workflow, they're a good reason to upgrade. AirDrop, for sending files to other Mac users near you by dragging and dropping, is a convenient feature, for example, but also pretty narrow in application it seems to create a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi network with other Macs but not Windows or Linux machines.

Finder's new sorting button and file grouping into folders are also really useful, but these features on their own aren't a reason to upgrade. Lion feels more organized and the interface is pleasant. Based on our testing, the Lion installer refuses to install Lion onto a drive containing Leopard So how can you install Lion over Leopard? There are three ways: the official way, the brute-force method, and the quick-but-techie way. Whichever method you choose, you should—as with any OS installation—be sure to have an up-to-date, tested backup of your drive before you begin.

As I mentioned above, the Lion installer will let you install Lion onto a bare drive when the installer itself is run under Snow Leopard or Lion. So as long as you have a good backup; a 4GB-or-larger thumb drive or external drive; and either access to a Mac running Snow Leopard or Lion, or an already downloaded copy of the Lion installer, you can perform a bit of installer razzle-dazzle.

For this purpose, I recommend a clone.