OSX Lion & iLife licensing

[SC92]

Hi all,

First of all apologies - I have created another thread in the licensing section but need a bit of an urgent response - mods please close the thread in the licensing section if you could!

We are currently looking at upgrading from snow leopard to osx lion, but have been told that we will need to purchase new ilife licenses?! - I'm not sure whether this is the case or not and just need a bit of advice really. We are running 17 snow leopard clients, and due to unforseen circumstances, having 8 macs stolen, we were shipped the replacement 8 with Lion installed - hence why we are upgrading. Does anybody here know how Apple 'do' licensing for different OS's? Surely if we already have the 17 snow leopard clients licensed then why do we need to RE-LICENSE them on upgrading to Lion? Or is this how Apple work? I just can't get my head around it at the moment! Any advice/thoughts greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Currently running 8.0.6 on our Snow Leopard clients and 9.0.4 on our Lion ones.

Thanks!

[Carter]

Technically can only install the version of iLife that came with the computer. That said you could install Snow Leopard on your new iMacs. I don't believe that the latest version iMacs are OS X Lion only "yet".

If you are looking to upgrade you Snow Leopard Macs to have iLife 09 I would talk to your Apple Education rep. Most likely they may wave it and say that as long as you buy one copy of iLife that you can install it on your older 9 desktops.

[Arthur]

We are currently looking at upgrading from snow leopard to OS X Lion, but have been told that we will need to purchase new iLife licenses?

As long as the Mac's you upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion keep the version of iLife they came with (iLife '09 in your case), then you don't necessarily have to buy new licenses for them. The only reason would be consistency with the new Lion iMac's which have iLife '11 pre-installed (both from an administration and end-user point of view). Some students might find it confusing if they switch to an old iMac which has iMovie '09 installed, after using iMovie '11 on one of the new iMac's. It will also be easier for you if you only have one version of iLife to deal with.

Surely if we already have the 17 snow leopard clients licensed then why do we need to RE-LICENSE them on upgrading to Lion?

You only need to buy nine Lion and iLife '11 licenses (17-8 = 9). As with Microsoft Windows and Office, Apple's licenses do not cover you for all future upgrades as well. It would be nice if they did, but it doesn't work that way.

I don't think Apple do site licenses any more, but we bought one for iLife '09 a few years ago to cover all of our Mac's. This worked out substantially cheaper for us than buying individual copies. I think it cost somewhere in the region of £130-£150.

Also worth mentioning is that you can sometimes find iLife '11 on offer for £8.33+VAT per license, so you could save a bit of money if you wait for the next deal to come along.

[SC92]

Thanks for the replies guys. We're only running version 9.0.4 of iLife (iMovie, iWeb, iPhoto, Garageband etc) on our new 8 Lion clients, but on our other 17 Snow Leopard clients we're running 8.0.6, so to my mind, we would only need 17 licenses for iLife 9, which is installed on the new Lion clients, or is my logic completely flawed here?!

[Arthur]

iLife v8.0 = iLife '09
iLife v9.0 = iLife '11

You would only need nine licenses for iLife '11 (v9.0) because the new Lion iMac's already come with iLife '11.