I just checked Apple's download site for the above-captioned [dl1458].

It's a 768MB download — which I'm kinda glad I couldn't download onto a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) 4GB flash drive because the PC computer (with broadband connection) I was using couldn't recognize the flash drive. (Sheesh.)

Everything that is supposedly in the update seems irrelevant to me at present, so I doubt that my iMac and I will suffer by not incorporating it (at least for the moment).

My primary concern is in regard to iCloud, which Apple says will automatically and wirelessly do all sorts of things — absolutely none of which do I wish to have happen.

Can anybody give me assurances that by downloading the update I will not be forced to accept such a thing? I don't like the direction that Apple seems to want to take me against my will.

I don't want anything (that I don't personally countenance) to futz with my iMac and try to share things and so on.

I don't 'share' anything with anybody. Nobody has access to any part of my computer except me. And I want to keep it that way.

I'm getting a queasy feeling about 'Big Brother' vis-à-vis Apple — which would be in precise contradistinction to the 'Big Brother' ad which introduced Macintosh in 1984!

Grelber, so do you want a Lion install disk or not? I can send mine to you.

If there is a chance of more interactions with Windows boxes, you might want to consider (re)formatting that flash drive for Windows (FAT 32), since Macs can handle that format. Should you get another flash drive in the future, you'll likely don't have to do anything as these drives tend to come formatted for Windows more often than not.

You do not have to activate the cloud, but 10.7.2 will probably nag you to death to do so. Even if you have an Apple account to make iTunes and App store purchases the cloud is an entirely separate entity that you MUST activate to use. The only fly in this intently is if you have an Apple email address. All the .mac and MobileMe email addresses that have not been moved to the cloud will disappear on June 30, 2012.

Many thanks for the offer. Most kind of you.

I haven't exhausted local possibilities quite yet, but I'll let you know as and when.

I had reformatted this particular flash drive to be able to transfer my old PPC iMac file to my new Intel iMac precisely because it was trying to make sense of them in Windows format and not succeeding. (And that all worked out well.)

OK, so I'll revert to Windows (Fat 32) format so that I can use it on a PC. The various download files from Apple are in .dmg format so it shouldn't be a problem in transferring them from the thumbdrive to the iMac. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this regard.

I'm not sure that I follow your comments.
(1) I have an Apple account to make iTunes and App store purchases. Are you saying that I must do so via iCloud in future?
(2) I don't have .mac or MobileMe email addresses (and don't intend to have such, as I have more than enough email addresses). So will any of that affect me in any way?

You're correct: you can use a FAT formatted flash drive on both Windows computers and Macs to transfer (Mac) files. In a subset of (mostly older) cases there may be a resource fork issue, which can be circumvented by compressing affected files before the transfer.


No, iCloud won't affect your iTunes and App store purchase procedure. iCloud adds external storage of purchased items.


No, not in the least.

I went to a colleague's Mac on a T10 [maybe a T100] line to download 10.7.2. It started off downloading the 769MB update at 10's of MB/sec; about halfway through it slowed to ca 25KB/sec. Apple's server(s) must really be overtaxed. It completed after about 15 minutes. Sheesh.

But now it's installed.
And whoever said it [forgive the memory lapse] is right: Upon restarting, it immediately threw up a screen wanting one to sign up for iCloud (which is now a fixture in System Preferences).

That was joemikeb above.

> Apple's server(s) must really be overtaxed. It completed after about 15 minutes. Sheesh.

Based on my experience d/l'ing from Apple, I'd guess that the bottleneck was on your colleague's ISP's end.

Apple's network is handled by Akamai, so I doubt their servers are overtaxed. Akamai is a network infrastructure provider such that you provide a download, or Web content, or whatever, and it's replicated across the entire Akamai network; when you connect to Apple's Web site or download servers, you're actually talking to one of Akamai's many sedge servers, not to Apple's server directly. The net result is that it's extraordinarily difficult to knock over their server with excessive traffic; you're not talking to Apple's server, you're talking to one of about ten or fifteen thousand Akamai servers that all replicate Apple's download server.

You could be right, but the T10 (or possibly T100) line was at the university and at the same time I downloaded the iTunes update (ca 100MB) in less than a minute, all the while the 10.7.2 (769MB) download was stalling and dropping to what my dial-up speed is for a large part of the download time.

The university was probably throttling the speed after a certain amount of data was transferred to maintain good speeds for other users on the network. Also, 15 minutes to download is nothing to "Sheesh" over.