Leopard to Snow Leopard free upgrade for MobileMe users?

I've recently acquired an iMac and wanted to upgrade to Lion, however I believe I need to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard first - which could prove to end up costing a fortune!

Snow Leopard costs $29 and Lion costs $30 ... however, see thisarticle.

Also, while the Lion minimum memory is 2GB, many have found poor performance at 2GB, which was fixed by upgrading to at least 4GB. In addition, you probably know that Lion no longer supports running PowerPC code in emulation mode, so programs like Office 2004 will no longer work under Lion. You can set up a dual boot system, with Snow Leopard on one partition and Lion on another, if you need to run any PowerPC programs.

dmf9483 wrote:

Hi

I've recently acquired an iMac and wanted to upgrade to Lion, however I believe I need to upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard first - which could prove to end up costing a fortune!

I've read recently that Apple are offering the upgrade to Snow Leopard free of charge for MobileMe users, however when I've followed a link to fill in a request form, this just takes me to the Find My Phone feature on iCloud.

Does anyone know if this free upgrade is still available, and if so how can I go about getting it?

Thanks

I recently received the free Snow Leopard Install DVD by logging on to MobileMe. However, I am dragging my feet until the end of the month to upgrade to iCloud.

It sounds like you already upgraded to iCloud. Since it requires Lion to upgrade to Lion (or your claim that you already have Lion to upgrade to iCloud), there would be no reason for Apple to offer you the free SL DVD. It is only for MobileMe subscribers who want to go from Tiger-Leopard to Lion and save the $29 SL fee.

However, once you get to Lion, if you have any PowerPC applications that require Rosetta, they will not run in Lion. You will have some options, but they all require Snow Leopard, so the purchase would not be in vain.

Do you have any continuing PowerPC applications?

Then why do you say it will cost a fortune to upgrade from Leopard to Lion? As noted before, Snow Leopard $29 from Apple store (free shipping) and then you use the App Store to buy Lion for $30:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573Z/A

Which model iMac is it? Go to the Apple Menu to About this Mac, click on More Info and tell us about your iMac.

Looks like this is your iMac with either a 20" or 24" screen:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-2-duo-2.66-20-inch-al uminum-early-2009-specs.html

or

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-2-duo-2.66-24-inch-al uminum-early-2009-specs.html

By saying "cost a small fortune" we interpreted this as meaning that you would have to spend monies to upgrade PPC applications, but your answer to BGreg corrected that misinterpretation.

Yes, this iMac can easily be upgraded to Lion at a total cost of $59. I do not see any way for you to avoid this cost to upgrade; since you have already upgraded MobileMe to iCloud.

How did you get iCloud without Lion? And did you previously have a MobileMe account?

Since you're new to mac systems, and you want to upgrade to Lion, you should plan to follow the Apple path, which is upgrade to Snow Leopard then upgrade to Lion. Start with buying the Snow Leopard retail disk. See Kappy's post on steps to upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6.

Pardon me, for getting into the middle of this post, but how long did it take for them to send you the DVD to upgrade to Snow Leopard? I just found the free link, so I logged in to get it.

Took me about 1 week to receive the DVD...