Announced and on sale this past Tuesday, Apple's new OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive has shipped, and is beginning to be delivered. It is OS X Lion 10.7 Build 11A511s, and almost identical to the InstallESD.dmg inside the Lion App. Simple DVD/USB creation instructions for this were published back in June by TUAW. Unfortunately this means that we still have some work to do to boot it directly.

Until now, the only way for a clean 10.7 install was to install the $29 Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD then purchase the $29 OS X Lion Upgrade App, for a total of $60. The USB drive is $69, and allows users to skip 10.6 altogether. It also allows a complete network-free install of 10.7 without the need for a Mac App Store account.





The OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive will soon be the recommended installation media for custom builds, but we need a bit of time to test it first, and develop a direct method to boot it. Until then, the xMove + MultiBeast method will work with it. Stay tuned for further development.

-tonymacx86 & MacMan