Do I need OS X 10.6 to upgrade to 10.7?

Question

I recently purchased a MacMini w/ MacOSX 10.5.8. Do I have to upgrade to 10.6.x first before upgrading to 10.7 (due out later this year) or can I upgrade from 10.5.x to 10.7.x?

Answer 1

OSX 10.7 Lion is supposed to be available in July 2011 ONLY through the Mac App Store, which is added in OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. OSX 10.5 Leopard and OSX 10.4 Tiger has no access to the Mac App Store. This implies that in order to get the upgrade, you need to first upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Answer 2

just go to the apple icon in the upper left and click on 'software update'. I don't know if it will go directly to the new version, but just keep doing that until it says no more updates are available.

Answer 3

You can wait, upgrading is not a forced incremental upgrade process. If you buy the CD it will simply upgrade to that OS.

Regards!

This post should be update to note:

OSX 10.7 (Lion) is ONLY available through the App Store which is ONLY available on 10.6 (Snow Leopard) systems up. It is NOT available in stores via a tangible physical copy, digital download is the only option. Cheers!

Answer 4

You cannot upgrade 10.5 to 10.7. However, you can install 10.7 directly. Buy the Lion USB Drive http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD256 from Apple and you can do a fresh install.

When installing the OS X should try to preserve that.

Or my personal preference - boot into recovery, open Terminal and backup.

sudo mkdir /backup
sudo mv /Users /backup/
sudo mv /System /backup/
sudo mv /Applications /backup
sudo mv /Library /backup

I also go even further and remove any other folders I can see and usually even remove /System as I know I will not recover from that

Install OS X and then you can restore your Applications and your settings for each application from /backup/Users/(yourusername)/Library/Application Support and /backup/Library/Application Support