This approach brought many benefits, such as not having to keep and safeguard a physical disc, immediate access to the OS when purchased instead of having to wait in line, and server-side updates to the downloadable installer so that the most current version of OS X is always installed when updating new machines.īut what if you’ve just installed a new hard drive in your Mac and have no version of OS X with the Mac App Store? Or what if you don’t have a reliable Internet connection? In these cases, it’s always best to have a physical local copy of the OS X installer. Instead of a traditional disc, customers could now purchase and download OS X directly from the Mac App Store.
With the release of OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, Apple officially abandoned physical media for its operating system installations. For OS X Mavericks, see this updated process.
UPDATE: Apple has changed the process for creating a USB installer with OS X Mavericks and the method below no longer works.
