Cannot update pre-installed iLife suite from App Store.

Here is what you could do. Reboot while holding Command + R key. It should boot to recovery utility. From there run Disk Utility. You should see 2 partitions there, one for your existing Mac and one for Recovery Partition - erase both. Reboot and your Mac should fail to start from the disk (as there is neither OS there nor Recovery Partition), and it should start from Apple server from Internet. Then it downloads fresh copy of Lion (it takes a while), creates Recovery Partition and installs Lion from the scratch. I have done it that way and it worked.

Hope that helps, good luck.

Before wiping out your Lion make sure that you can dowload it. Otherwise you will be waiting for them to send you a USB stick.

Verify that you can run the Internet recovery by doing an Option-Command-R. You should see a spinning planet earth as it tries to go to Apple's servers to load the recovery software. Mine doesn't get past that. I get a message to go to apple.com/support with error code -3400F.

Got the iLife update issue resolved today. I followed these instructions from Apple support:

1 - Exit iTunes and the App Store

2 - Delete /Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/com.apple.appstore/adoption.plist

3 - Reboot

4 - Open App Store

5 - Select updates. Enter iTunes username/password when prompted.

It then started downloading and installed.

🙂Yay!!!!🙂

Thanks a lot. It works. You are better than the Apple product specialist.🙂

Thanks Saul in PA. That worked for me also. 🙂 I am fully updated and I have no "update notifications" on the App Store icon. I knew a fix would eventually come out. I see a few have reinstalled the whole OS trying to fix it . Sometimes it takes patience. Thanks again.

I have spent a frustrating month searching for a solution to this problem, engaging in phone calls to apple care who knew of no solution, and then endless emailing with iTunes support reps who refused to issue new purchase codes -- which was one way to remedy this problem as reported on these forums, because they claimed that since they knew of No "real" solution to this as of Sept 14th they wanted more time before issuing the codes.

I was therefore delighted to find this post from August 27th, that presents a real AND SIMPLE fix to this mysterious problem on our new MacBook Air which was purchased in July. (This was not the only .plist problem on our MBAir--I also, through the user forums, was able to find a simple .plist deletion to deal with my Bluetooth turning itself back on after every restart, despite my setting it to off.)

I am left wondering how in the world Apple's own system for communicating to its Apple Care engineers and iTunes support reps can be so ineffective as to allow a problem like this to persist for this long even after a SIMPLE solution becomes known--a problem which obviously affects a significant number of customers, some of whom have wasted countless hours on this, including being told to reinstall their OS !

Maybe Apple engineers and support people ought to spend a little more time reading and cataloging the fixes that these user discussion forums reveal, rather than spend all their time trying to reinvent the wheel themselves.

Heartfelt sympathies to all those who have searched in vain for a fix till now. And thank you Saul for your post.

Thank Saul, it works

The "Saul" trick did not work for me, after deleting the adoption.plist file I get asked to accept the apps on my account/computer (a unique hardware id needs to be sent to apple it says) but then get the message

These application cannot be accepted on this computer, for updates use Software Update...

which offcourse does not work and no updates come in for iLife...

Apple support could not figure it out either and asked me to reinstall iLife (which I don't have since it came pre-installed)

Hopefully you have an Apple store nearby. Take it in and let them re-install everything. If that doesn't work they may swap out your computer.

Thanks, likewise Apple support had no idea what to do. This fix worked!

What do we do if we don't have a file named adoption.plist?

Week #1 down of waiting for Apple Express Lane support to remember me :{

I tried Sauls idea and now all it tells me that i need to dowbload any upgrade from thre the account that i bouhgt them from , when they were already installed

legend

this worked for me. been trying to find a solution to this for ages

Thanks so much

Thanks Saul, you’re the best! I’d pretty much given up any hope of updating the built-in iLife applications. Apple’s support was rubbish but this did the trick.

Thanks a million!

FIRST TRY THIS! Before going and deleting anything, open up the mac app store. Make sure you are signed in, then go to purchases. You might see that you need to "accept" certain apps. In this case, you should see the 3 iLife apps. Accept them and your problem is over!

Hopefully this works for some of you!