As far as i recall, Snow Leopard was unlimited installs, that or i did toss in the extra 10-20$ for unlimited installs, i don't recall exactly (i do definitely recall buying a family pack for Leopard).

Regardless, where is that option now?

Edit: what the hell? -1 for saying that i prefer the family pack?

> As far as i recall, Snow Leopard was unlimited installs

The license was for a single machine. If you wanted to install it on multiple machine, you were supposed to get a family pack (5 machines).

Lion is single-user (since it's tied to an iTunes Store account), and up to 5 machines at the same time (all machines on which the account is active).

That can’t be it. The App Store license allows you to install apps on all Macs you own or control (that would include his wife’s Mac), i.e. an unlimited number of Macs. That’s for personal use.

> The App Store license allows you to install apps on all Macs you own or control

yeah I saw that in the Ars review. But I think your iTunes account can only be active on 5 machines, so you'd have to burn the dmg to a disk and install it on the supplementary machines (or remove auth)

> that would include his wife’s Mac

iTunes can switch accounts trivially, so that's not a problem: open his account on his wife's mac, update the OS, done.

iTunes does activations. The Mac App Store does not. You log into the Mac App Store with your Apple ID, that has nothing to do with iTunes. It wouldn’t make any sense to allow you to only activate five Macs for the App Store, given the license.

edit: Hey dude who downvoted, I made a factual claim. I have no problem with downvoting wrong factual claims but if you do you should at least clarify what is wrong.

I did not downvote you, but you're wrong all the same: MAS is a frontend to a sub-section of the iTunes Store. Similar to the iOS AppStore (which is a part of iTunes on computers, but a separate store on iPhones or iPads). In fact, if you have a tracing firewall you can see it send requests to itunes's servers.

And as far as I know MAS does the exact same thing as iTunes: you can authorize an account on 5 machines at a time.

I most certainly wasn't trying to make any claims about the technical infrastructure. Sure, MAS and iTunes use the same, no question, I wasn't trying to deny that. But are there activations? That's the question. iTunes has all this UI for managing activations, the MAS has not. You can't activate computers, you can't deactivate computers. Then there's the different license. It wouldn't make any sense if you had a limited number of activations given the license.

I see no reason to believe why there should be activations in the MAS. Using the same infrastructure doesn't mean anything.