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We just got a call from our procurement team. They said our third party vendor (Mac reseller who we will not name here) claims Apple told them they can "roll back" Macs that ship with Lion.

Of course Apple explicitly states roll back is NOT RECOMMENDED OR SUPPORTED:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2186

We have scheduled a call with our procurement manager and the third party vendor so we can get confirmation that this was suggested to them by Apple. I highly doubt it but if so I want it in writing. Then we can formerly pose the question to Apple.

Something is fishy and I'm concerned that any of our vendors would make such a claim and not stand behind it. If this turns out to be a farce we will deal with the vendor.

In the mean time, I wanted to check with the list members to see if their vendors are making similar claims/suggestions?

Thanks,
Don

Yeah I agree with you, but when I did downgrade our iMacs 2 years ago, there were some features that did change. Maybe in the firmware, maybe in the micro hardware level, but there are some things to consider. I cannot recall what didn't work right, but it was minor for us. Also, if I compiled a 10.5.8 image on a 10.6 machine it would kernel panic at boot if I tried to use the image. This is because the installers were different and loaded different drivers for the hardware. So, if you do roll back you must keep a machine of the same OS to do compiles because I am going to assume that the same issue will happen if you try to compile a 10.6 image on a 10.7 machine.

So, you can downgrade, and I did it and it did work and the machine was about 98% functional. However, we also had the licenses for both OSes at the time too. Apple is a company I could actually see suing a school or business over licensing, they have done it before over other ridiculous things.

-Tom

We did this with the 10.5-10.6 transition. Since 90% of our Macs are laptops, there were a few 15" MacBook Pro's that did not install the keyboard backlight correctly. Luckily we only deployed about 3 during this time (all of which we've brought up to 10.6 since then). Haven't had to do downgrade a 10.7 machine yet, but I'm more than assuming we'll have to very soon.
--Noah

Did you create your image using the Combo Updater? If so all the drivers would/should have been in the image.
Swanson Noah <SwansonNoah at JohnDeere.com> wrote:

These kinds of issues are usually attributed to using a "slim" updater (downloaded or via Software Update).

Don

Yep. always run the combo update. Always...

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