Vendor suggesting we buy Lion Macs and "roll back" to Snow Leopard [WTF?!]

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...