How to upgrade your Mac to Mac OS X Lion 10.7

Mac OS X Lion 10.7 is right around the corner this week, and many of you should be saving all your bandwidth to grab a copy of it from the Mac App Store.

Apple’s new Mac OS X Lion features over 250 features and I’ve already posted about “What you need to know about Mac OS X Lion before you buy it from the Mac App Store“. So, you might be wondering on what you’d have to do exactly after the huge 4GB file gets downloaded.

Here’s what you need to do after you grab a copy of Mac OS X Lion:

You can choose from two choices to use Lion on your Mac. You can check the compatibility of your Mac here.
1. Do a clean install of Mac OS X Lion (The regular method)
2. Upgrade from Snow Leopard

If you are looking at doing a clean install of OS X 10.7 (Lion), there’s a tutorial I’ve posted already here.

Let us now look at how to properly upgrade your 10.6 to 10.7.
The upgrade path is really very simple. You need to have Snow Leopard 10.6 to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion. The download will happen just like all other apps and once downloaded, the install will start with the Splash screen. Apple has really made some significant improvements to their upgrade process and the upgrade process is just like other software upgrades you do. Once you are done with the upgrade, your Mac will boot into Lion with iOS style splashy screen and 250 new features added.

[alert_box] Some questions answered: [/alert_box] What if I want to reinstall the OS?
The only way right now is to burn a bootable Lion DVD with the instructions here and do a clean install. Or install Snow Leopard first and then upgrade again to Lion.

What will happen to my InstallESD.dmg after I upgrade?
The DMG file will still be there in your Mac.

My Internet is slow. What alternatives do I have?
Just take your Mac to the Apple Store and download it. 🙂

Hope this was helpful. A lot of tutorial on using Mac OS X Lion is coming next. Stay tuned via RSS or Follow me on twitter (@ImKarthikK)