Like most people that work on Macs we were excited when Apple released Lion a few weeks ago. With it’s promises of optimizing computing processes and it’s fancy new UI based on the iOS platform we were all excited when we heard that we would be upgrading our Mac users to the new platform. That is, until we started looking into how we would deploy the upgrade throughout the office. We wanted to only make one purchase to avoid having to reimburse each employee or make multiple $30 purchases for no reason.
Problem #1 – Buying the upgrade for less than 20 machines.
Currently, Lion is only available through the Mac AppStore. Your only other option is to purchase at least 20 licenses to be eligible for volume licensing. For a small business looking to upgrade less than 20 machines you will have to manually upgrade each mac using AppStore, but there’s a catch.
Probelm #2 – Accounts, Credit Cards and purchasing the upgrade.
Each machine will need to use a DIFFERENT AppStore/iTunes account to login and purchase Lion – Oh, and using the same credit card for multiple accounts will raise red flags at Apple, stopping you in your tracks. After talking to multiple Apple business reps however I was offered one solution that sounded helpful. You could purchase iTunes/AppStore gift cards and use those to purchase Lion on multiple accounts/machines. Sounds easy, right? Think Again.
Problem #3 – Purchasing Apple Gift Cards
This should be easy right? Buy a bunch of $30 gift cards, no problem. Wrong. Apple iTunes gift cards ONLY come in denominations of $10, $15, $25 and $50. What does that mean? For each upgrade you will have to purchase two $15 gift cards because once you attach a gift card to an account you can’t put the remainder toward another account. But there’s another problem with gift cards…if you order them online or over the phone, you have to WAIT FOR THEM to come in the mail before you can use them.
Problem #4 – I’ll wait and just buy it in the store.
Nope – well, yeah, you could do that but it’ll cost you $70 instead of the $30 it cost through the AppStore.
If you ask me, the whole process seems a little crazy for such a simple task. I can understand why Apple wants to push their AppStore and why not having to produce and package a disc or thumb drive is more economical (for Apple) and better for the environment but seriously, it shouldn’t be this difficult to upgrade a half dozen machines. We’ve decided that we’re going down to the local Best Buy and purchase our gift cards there to avoid having to wait for them in the mail.
If you’ve found another way to circumvent the 20 license minimum or a way to avoid waiting for gift cards to arrive, let us know in the comments below.