A great excuse to dust off an old computer.
Up until Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, updates to Apple's desktop operating system were paid: to get new features, you had to give $19.99 Surprisingly, this rule continued into 2021: Apple continued to pay for support for OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for users with older computers.
But now this has changed. Both installers can be downloaded from the official website for free.
OS X 10.7 Lion system requirements
- Mac with Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 processor or Xeon
- OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.6 or later, or OS X Lion 10.7 already installed
- 2 GB of RAM
- 7 GB of free disk space
- Some features require an Apple ID and internet connection
Download
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion system requirements
- OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8, Lion 10.7, or Mountain Lion 10.8 already installed
- 2 GB of RAM
- 8 GB of free disk space
< li>Some features require an Apple ID and internet connection
Compatible models:
- iMac (Mid 2007 and later)
- MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum or Early 2009 or later)
- MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or later)
- MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)
- Mac Pro (Early 2008 and later)
- Xserve (Early 2009)
< li>Mac mini (Early 2009 and later)
Download< /p>
Unfortunately, these builds won't work for experimentation: Lion won't run on Macs that came with 10.8 or later out of the box, and Mountain Lion won't work on computers that came preloaded with 10.9.
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