Apple to Sell Lion on USB Thumb Drive Starting in August for $69

I think it's great they're going to offer a physical option - the part I cannot understand is how it apparently asks for a $40 markup? Sure I understand production and distribution costs, but they managed to ship Snow Leopard on a disc for only $29 a couple years ago, I wouldn't imagine a ~4GB thumb drive to cause that much of a price increase.

They are really pushing the App Store. $40 for a flash drive, come on man! those are dirt cheap these days.

Apparently the thumbdrive can transform into a 3d lion ala transformers.

i'm pretty sure apple is just doing the price hike because they want to discourage people from buying the physical OS and instead use the Mac App Store to download it. They've been doing this for years by taking away CD/DVD drives in things like the Macbook Air and now the MacMini. They want to move everyone into digital downloads, and one way to push people is to make it more expensive to purchase a hard copy.

Perfect for those on a bandwidth budget :)

Yeah woo hoo. Welcome to the future!

Where if you are in an area with sh tty broadband speeds and providers Apple will do you the favor of selling you a $5 USB drive for $40 when previously a DVD would have cost you nothing.

Thanks Apple!

Steve's personal gigabit line to his house has made him forget what the rest of the country has to put up with.

Of course this is welcome news. In the other threads, people have been crying for months about some weird hypothetical case where they can't download Lion and need a physical copy. Now, I'm sure they'll find something new to complain about, ie the price, or that it's not on a DVD, or something else.

I'm glad to read this!

You do realize that all State and Federal institutions can not order stuff off of an 'App Store,' right? It's also the same for most academic instituions as well. Budgeting rules set in place prevent that from being possible.

So until Apple releases physical media, and allows their Government and Education sales teams to start issuing purchase quotes, they will not see a dime in Lion sales for state/federal agencies, and will also get hardly a dime from academic institutions.