Apple Begins Selling Mac OS X ‘Lion’ USB Thumb Drive

In a quick bit of Apple news, the Cupertino company has just released a thumb drive variant of its Mac OS X ‘Lion’ operating system, allowing those who would rather forgo the download-only option to do just that. Kicking things off with last year’s MacBook Air model, Apple decided to get rid of optical discs for install media, and as such, with Lion and beyond, it looks like a thumb drive will be your only non-download option. That’s not a bad thing, per se, though a thumb drive is a bit easier to misplace than a CD jewel case.

There are a couple of caveats with this release, though, making it an option for a select few. The cost, for one, is more than 2x, at $69.00. It’s clear that Apple would rather people download its latest OS through the Mac App Store, because a 4GB thumb drive, which this would be, is not that expensive (about $7 USD). For some, the added convenience might make that premium not matter.

The other gotcha is that the Lion Recovery software, which sits in a recovery partition, will not be accessible when Lion is installed via this method. It can be assumed that during the install, the recovery partition simply isn’t created at all (which would lead me to believe you might even save 3GB or so this way, unless a previous one is left in tact). Instead, you will have to use this thumb drive for all recovery purposes, eg: a total reinstall.

If neither of those things matter, you now have a second install option to choose from.