14 DAY TRIAL // Despite offering Mavericks for free to any Mac user running Snow Leopard, Apple continues to sell the newer Lion and Mountain Lion operating systems for $19.99/€17.99 apiece.
OS X 10.7 (Lion) and OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) have always sold with a $19.99/€17.99 price tag, and you’d think that if Mavericks – the successor to these two – is now free, Apple would make older Mac OS versions free as well.
Wrong. Apple continues to sell the two aforementioned OSes with a price tag but, instead of accessing them through the Mac App Store, you need to make a transaction on the Apple Online Store to get a redemption code. That code can then be used in the Mac App Store to download the software.
If you’re asking why anyone would want to pay for OS X 10.7 or 10.8 when they can have 10.9 for free, there’s a plurality of reasons for that.
Perhaps you want that precious tiny feature that Mavericks doesn’t offer and your business depends on it. Or maybe you’re running OS X 10.5 Leopard and you have no way of getting to Mavericks other than upgrading to a Mac OS that offers the Mac App Store application.
There are other scenarios as well. Plus, if you’re running Leopard and want to jump straight to Mavericks, that’s like skipping $60 (€43) worth of software upgrades just because you wouldn’t play ball with the rest of the world.
Then again, there are few Macs out there running Leopard that can also take Mavericks.
Regardless of your reasons, you can visit Apple’s Online Store to buy OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion for your Mac and, if you decide to move on, Mavericks is just a free-click away in the Mac App Store.