Is a mac the machine to buy? You might want to think twice!
I've been using Apple products since I was 7, so I'm very familiar with the way Apple does things but now I'm calling them out on the lack of a physical recovery disk when you purchase a mac instead opting to go with a recovery partition. Ok so why should you care? Here's why.
If your a geek like me you like to push your hardware to the limits, finding compatible cards, and accessories is fun and getting them to work is even more fun, and you do a lot of reinstalling, and if your not a geek you should also be concerned, because this takes getting your computer fixed out of your control. Now your better off to go with a Windows computer because at least you can make recovery disks.
Here is a copy of a letter I've sent Apple.
Dear Apple Support,
You probably won't care about this email but I'm writing it anyway. I must express my profound disappointment with your decision to go with a recovery partition over a recovery disk. As a tech person I am often helping people with their systems, and as such have the occasional time where a machine is past warranty and they don't have the money to purchase a new one, or they want to do some sort of hardware upgrade where a reinstall of the operating system is required.
Now that you are no longer offering bootable disks with your systems I must now categorize you in the company of HP or Dell, (That is a bad thing). I often recommended Apple Computers for their pick of hardware, but the fact you actually got some sort of other bootable media other then the hard drive if anything were to happen to your computer. Now that is not the case and the fact that you need an internet connection to do a restore will make things take longer and to frank about it is a joke. I know your trying to make the move to cloud computing but there are some things that the cloud can't do well and operating system installs is one of them. Now your going to tell me that I can take my Mac to any apple store and they will do it for me and at no doubt with some sort of charge. When you made this decision did you think everyone was made of money and time?
If you are going to sell computers without a recovery disk you should at least give users an option to guy a bootable flash drive of the OS or some sort of removable media. I've purchased every Apple OS from system 9 to 10.7 and have been a large supporter of apple computers in my social circles but now unless you change your current policy I can no longer do that. I always felt you were trying to do what is right on for the user but in this I can't support and won't support, you are taking away a user's right use their computer as they see fit and if that's your policy that's your policy there is nothing I can do about it but tell you about it and how I don't like it. (Hell at least Microsoft will let you make recovery disks you guys won't even do that; and the thought of that use to suck).
I hope you will reconsider shipping your systems with removable bootable media.
Trevor Tye
------------------UPDATE-----------------------
Apple does offer a USB Flash Drive of Lion for $70.00, which is a little outrageous but it is better then nothing.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD256Z/A?
There is also the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant that will let you make a recovery disk to DVD's or a Flash Drive
