Posted by TJ on 7/27/2012Tags: Linked, Notes, Opinion, OS XNotes on Siracusa’s Review - Upgrade through Mac App Store

By any measure, Apple’s transition from physical media to networked OS upgrades has gone smoothly. Perhaps most customers get their OS upgrades by buying a new Mac with the new OS preinstalled, while the few who do want to upgrade an existing Mac are tech-savvy (and bandwidth-endowed) enough to handle a multi-gigabyte download from the Mac App Store. Whatever the explanation, it seems that most people who wanted Lion were able to get it with a minimum of hassle. The same will likely be true of Mountain Lion.

The process is actually quite brilliant in my estimation, and the actual install time is much reduced from physical media, although the download can indeed take some time. And yeah, I know a lot of people who do not upgrade their OS after buying a computer. That computer came with 10.6, and that’s what it will have forever.

As has been the case for all non-server versions of the Mac operating system, Mountain Lion has no serial number, no product activation, and no DRM of any kind. The standard Mac App Store license terms allow customers to install a copy of the software on “each Apple-branded computer […] that you own or control,” including two additional copies on each Mac inside virtual machines.

I have always loved the lack of DRM and product activation in OS X. Having been in the Windows world for the earlier part of my computing life, the Windows XP and beyond product activation has always been such a pain. And the worst of both worlds. I’ve had to get on the phone with Microsoft before to convince them that, no I’m not pirating Windows or putting it on another computer, but indeed your garbage OS crashed and was unbootable and I’m reinstalling again (for the 4th time this year).