Download Only OS X Lion Upgrade Will Be A Challenge For Some Users – Apple Stores To Offer Free WiFi for Lion Upgraders

GigaOM’s Darrell Etherington riffs on Apple’s OS X Lion major operating system update being available only through digital distribution, noting that a download-only OS upgrade of 4 GB is going to be a challenge for some consumers, either because of the quality and speed of their Internet connection, or because of bandwidth caps that limit how much you can download in a month.

Darrell notes that Canadian ISP Rogers’ entry-level Ultra-Lite Internet plan only allows for 2 GB of monthly data throughput, so you would technically have to wait two months to complete the Lion download without incurring over quota charges, and even Rogers’ next step plan only gets you15 GB, so Lion would account a full quarter of the monthly allotment with that plan.

Apple is suggesting that users should bring their Macs in to their local Apple Store and use the free Wi-Fi connection provided by the store to download the update.

Ethrington notes that there is a certain irony in Apple, a company that prides itself on claims that it makes things easy for consumers, resorting to such a clunky workaround solution, but that it at least indicates that suggests that Apple aware of the broadband problems facing a subset of the population. However, schlepping your Mac to the nearest Apple Store (which in many instances for users living in areas with mediocre or nonexistent broadband access will likely be not so near — for example, the nearest actual Apple Store to me is nearly 1,000 road miles from here), and even if you have one reasonably close by, the carry-in upgrade will only be really practical for laptop or perhaps Mac mini users unless they’re really desperate.

UberGizmo’s George Wong observes that the good part of Apple going all-wireless download with the OS X 10.7 upgrade is that Apple won’t have to waste money on physical packaging and getting CDs duplicated, and software can be released globally at the same time easily and its good for the environment as well as keeping the price low.

However, for folks with dial-up or slow DSL connections and/or a monthly throughput data cap, 4 gigs of data to download could take days or even weeks for some people, and others, it would be a huge chunk of their data cap, or both.

Apple’s workaround is for users to bring their Macs to Apple Stores to hitchhike on a free WiFi network to download the update, but as Wong observes, while this is a sign of goodwill from the company, it is fraught with many potential pitfalls.