Snow Leopard giveaway: Apple showing a light touch

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Snow Leopard giveaway: Apple showing a light touch

20 April 2012 1,902 views 7 Comments

Apple’s much maligned MobileMe service will go dark on July 1 and is being replaced by iCloud, which is free for Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners. The catch for Mac users is that they must be running OS X 10.7 Lion or later and the other catch is in order to install Lion you must be running Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6.6, 10.6.7 or 10.6.8.

Big deal? In the cosmic scheme of things, buying Snow Leopard ($29) and Lion ($29) costs little, only $58 plus tax.

However, Apple being Apple, they want to make the transition as painless as possible, so they’re giving away free copies, one assumes DVDs, of OS X Snow Leopard to registered MobileMe users. In fact, the company seems to be giving away Snow Leopard to any current or former MobileMe user that asks.

Whereas Apple’s target audience is the hold out OS X 10.5 Leopard user, it seems they’re spreading the joy just a bit thicker, which is a good thing™.

For example, although I upgraded from MobileMe to iCloud sometime last year, a free Snow Leopard DVD is on its way to me just because I went to Apple’s free Snow Leopard registration page, confirmed my account information and logged in — boom, done.

Having lent my original copy of Snow Leopard to someone that later moved, I really appreciate Apple’s small act of generosity…

What’s your take?

7 Comments »

Steveo said:

I think Apple is desperate. Snow Leopard users are not moving on to Lion. They need to motivate them somehow.

# 20 April 2012 at 6:08 pm

Philip Machanick said:

Steveo: how is giving someone a free copy of Snow Leopard going to encourage Snow Leopard users to move to Lion?

# 21 April 2012 at 8:35 am

Leland said:

Isn’t Snow Leopard required to fully use iCloud?

# 21 April 2012 at 9:41 am

the rocr (author) said:

@Phillip

This promotion is primarily targeted at Leopard users — i.e. Mac owners with at least an Intel Core 2 Duo.

See: http://fairerplatform.com/2011/04/can-my-mac-run-os-x-lion/

# 21 April 2012 at 9:53 am

the rocr (author) said:

@Leland — Nope, gotta have OS X Lion v10.7.2 or later

http://www.apple.com/icloud/setup/mac.html

# 21 April 2012 at 9:54 am

Is my Mac iCloud compatible? | FairerPlatform said:

[...] over from June 30 to July 1, time is running out to make the leap. However, comments posted on my Friday note about Apple’s liberal policy of giving away copies of Snow Leopard made me realize folks [...]

# 22 April 2012 at 6:00 pm

MobileMe subs with extra storage get more of the same with iCloud | FairerPlatform said:

[...] Leopard users, Apple’s giving away free copies of Snow Leopard, a $29 value that sets you up to spend $29 for OS X [...]

# 6 May 2012 at 11:34 pm