Apple has released installers for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion that allow the old operating system versions to be downloaded and installed on certain Macs free of charge. The manufacturer has so far offered both operating system versions for sale at a price of 22 euros each. The product pages can currently still be found in the company’s online shop.
Mac OS X has only been free since 10.9
Mac OS X 10.7 can be installed on all Macs that are equipped with at least an Intel Core 2 Duo processor; Core i3, i5 and i7 as well as Xeon processors are also supported, as Apple states. Around Lion or Mountain Lion To be able to install, the Mac must already be running at least Mac OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard – but no more than Lion or Mountain Lion. The older versions can no longer be installed on Macs that have already been shipped with newer versions of the operating system. The download sizes are each a good 4.5 GB.
Mac OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8, released in 2011 and 2012, were the last two versions of Mac OS X and macOS, respectively, that Apple still sold as paid upgrades; operating system updates for Macs have been free since OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
iCloud-Support ab OS X 10.7.5
Apple did not give a reason for the sudden free provision of the old versions. On Macs that have OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installed, newer versions of the operating system usually also work – so installing them may be advisable. 10.9 cannot currently be downloaded directly from Apple as a standalone update; this is only possible again from OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
With Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 it is possible to use certain iCloud functions, Apple may want to persuade Snow Leopard users to update. Security updates have not been available for the old OS X versions for a long time, and current browser versions of Safari, Chrome or Firefox cannot be installed on them, Firefox ESR 78 requires at least OS X 10.9.
(lbe)
