Installing Lion

I took the plunge and updated on Lion’s release day. The process was easy enough. I started by making sure I had enough free space on my hard drive and then made sure software update didn’t have any updates waiting for me. Plugged my MacBook Pro into an external drive to let Time Machine get a back up of my machine and I was ready to go.

The first step is downloading Lion from the Mac App Store. You can grab lion for only $29.99 which is a great price when compared to previous OS releases prior to Snow Leopard. Apple has announced that Lion will be available to purchase on a flash drive for $69.99 in August for those who prefer a hard copy or don’t have the bandwidth to download Lion. I am sad to see the end of physical releases. That means no more shirts handed out at the Apple retail stores on launch day. Once Lion has downloaded you are ready to install.

Open the install and click continue to set up Lion's Installation.

As with any software install, click agree to move forward with the installation.

Choose the drive or partition you would like to install Lion on.

Lion will take a few minutes to set up the installer, cool your jets, you're almost there.

This will be the last click you make in Snow Leopard.

After clicking restart you computer will boot into the installer and take a few minutes to install. On my late 2007 MacBook Pro the install took around 45 minutes to complete. I have seen reports that newer Macs are completing the install in less then 30 minutes. Post in the comments how long it took your install on your Mac.

Oddly enough, the installation process deletes the installer from your computer so be sure to create a copy of the installer on a hard drive somewhere before running the install if you don’t want to have to download it again from the app store. As with any app purchased from the app store, Apple allows you to redownload the installer as much as you like. Licensing for Lion allows you to install it on multiple computers as long as they are all yours and for personal use.