Well, OS X Lion didn’t hit yesterday as many expected, but it appears that Amazon is now running out of Snow Leopard DVDs. Amazon UK is now showing that copies of Snow Leopard are out of stock, and Amazon USA is relying on third-party vendors to ship Snow Leopard.
The above screen shot from the Amazon UK website shows their lack of stock. This is an interesting and surprising matter, really – currently, the only officially sanctioned way to perform a “clean install” of Mac OS X Lion is to first do a clean install of Snow Leopard and then upgrade through the Mac App Store (although there is a simple yet unsanctioned way to create a Lion restore DVD).
With Snow Leopard being a required fixture for upgrading from Leopard, and for doing an “official” clean install of Lion, why would stock of Snow Leopard discs be running low? Will Apple be producing more Snow Leopard DVDs? The below image shows Amazon USA as relying on 3rd-party sellers for their shipments:
This matter makes me wonder if Apple might not have something interesting up their sleeve – might they start offering Snow Leopard as a free download, or even making Snow Leopard available as a download that’s burnable to a DVD or thumb drive?
Another interesting bit is that Amazon still has copies of the Snow Leopard family pack in stock, so maybe this is just a matter of being in-between shipments. Only time will tell if anything comes of this – but we’ll be sure to inform you if it does.
