A Short Rant about Mac

It is fair to say that I’m a Windows man through and through. Recently I obtained a Macbook Air 2008 (the very first Air!). Now, first of all, this is a very old Macbook (12 years at the time of writing), however I’m amazed that it holds itself well running some of the modern applications such as Chrome (with 4 tabs open), Safari, Microsoft Office, without crashing. I guess this is where Apple shines. A Windows equivalent spec would simply crash at startup logo. In fact, I doubt a 5-years old Windows laptop would still be usable.

However, this is where my rant began. While Macbook is a very simple user-friendly laptop, it is very difficult to configure otherwise. For example, as the laptop I got is second-hand, I need to factory reset it. The way to do this is simple restart it and press Command+R while it is booting. Then I am presented with the Recovery mode, and then simply choose Disk Utility and Erase the hard drive. So far so good.

Now comes the problem. Back to the main Recovery menu, I choose Reinstall Mac OS X Lion. I connect the laptop to the WiFi, press Agree, and the press Agree again. Finally I need to sign in to Apple. Then it says that this item is temporary unavailable. I tried again and again and it gives the same error.

I quickly searched online, and basically it is a security feature that the Macbook need to be signed in with the same user ID as it was first signed in with. This is very crappy feature that is not helpful at all. Especially when there are so many workaround for this, such as starting Internet Recovery, or reinstall from USB. Even if it works, it should just say that in the message in the first place.

Edit: I found out that the “this item is temporary unavailable” is not a security feature, but a poor implementation. The reason for this is because you need to purchase Lion OS X from the App Store with your Apple ID (using another Mac), then you will be able to reinstall Lion on that Mac using the same Apple ID. This is only needed for Mac that do not have Internet Recovery, so you will unlikely to have this problem.