Upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.7

You would have to purchase v10.7 Lion from Apple > http://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion

They will send you an email notification with a redemption code you can use at the App Store to download and install Lion.

v10.7 Lion System Requirements

An Intel Core 2 Duo, i3, Core i5, Core i7 or Xeon processor

• Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.6 or later (v10.6.8 recommended)
• 7 GB free hard drive space
• 2 GB RAM

You don’t need to buy it; instead, click here and download El Capitan from the Mac App Store.

(145842)

rstark1 wrote:

I need to have 10.7 to go to Sierra

Really? You can purchase Sierra in the App store from 10.6. You should also be able to erase & install to run Sierra. Make a backup first.

10.6 & 10.12 are so far apart I would not recommend simply upgrading - all your PowerPC apps that run on 10.6 won't work for example. You may just be making more work to clean up later.

Once 10.12 is installed you can manually copy the old user home folder over & get the OS to make a proper account using that data. just use a different user name during setup & then you can move the old data to the users folder later.

I'm not sure of the merits of purchasing an OS you will barely use at all.

You can purchase Sierra in the App store from 10.6.

No, they can’t. It isn’t possible to download Sierra from a system running Snow Leopard; in addition, both El Capitan and Sierra are free.

You should also be able to erase & install to run Sierra.

It isn’t possible to perform an Erase & Install straight from a Mac App Store download of any OS version; people would either need to create an installation thumbdrive or install it onto a blank volume.

(145845)

Oops my bad. Is the inability to download Sierra on 10.6 explained anywhere?

It seems shortsighted to prevent purchase/ download on a valid system.

I was planning to explain making bootable install media for the OP if they posted back to erase the internal should they want to go that route.