Unable to purchase El Capitan from OS X 10.7 on my MacBook

[irrationalJohn]

I have a MacBook, but it is an "Early 2008" MacBook4,1 which Apple threw under the bus back when they released Mountain Lion (10.8). So when I try to "get" El Capitan I am simply told that it won't work on my hardware.

Is there another way I can download El Capitan so I can try installing it for my Skylake Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD3 hardware?

Update: 2016 May 28

Since no one has replied to this post, I went with the only route I could think of. I installed Lion ... the only version of Mac OS X which the App Store would let me download ... to a drive using my (legacy) Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R mobo. After installing Lion, I opened the App Store after completing the initial, first boot setup. I was then able to download "Install OS X El Capitan.app".

The one thing which surprised the heck out of me is that after getting El Capitan, I appear to be no longer able to download the Lion install.

Yes, I have saved a copy of the Lion installer. But, since Lion is the highest version of Mac OS X which Apple allows me to install on my Early 2008 Macbook, I thought the App Store would still allow me to download it.

Nope. Guess I had better go back up my back ups. Currently that Macbook is the only "Mac" hardware I have free access to. I think about buying something "newer" from Apple, but none of the systems currently offered make sense to me from my personal price/performance perspective. Oh, well.

 

[irrationalJohn]

The one thing which surprised the heck out of me is that after getting El Capitan, I appear to be no longer able to download the Lion install.

Ooops! It appears that I am (yet again) an idiot.

The ability to download Lion was only hidden, not deleted from my App Store account. I'm not sure how I was expected to know that this is how things work in App Store land but ... oh, well.

The Apple support article linked immediately below explains how to "unhide" a hidden item in your App Store account.
Learn how to hide and unhide your Mac App Store purchases.
If I recall correctly, the gist of it is that you open the App Store, choose Store > View My Account, and then look for the option to manage/unhide a hidden purchase.

I still do not know what, if anything, one can do to download an earlier version of OS X if you failed to purchase/get it before it was replaced. In other words, I am not sure how I could download OS X 10.8, 10.9, or 10.10. Granted, I am not really sure why I would want to download them. The question just nags at me.

I found OS X 10.9, Mountain Lion, list in the Apple store for $19.99 but did not find a listing for OS X after 10.9. I'm not really sure what would happen if I were to purchase this. I am curious, but not curious enough to spend $20 to find out.

 

[Adrian B]

I found OS X 10.9, Mountain Lion, list in the Apple store for $19.99 but did not find a listing for OS X after 10.9. I'm not really sure what would happen if I were to purchase this. I am curious, but not curious enough to spend $20 to find out.

You would need to have hardware capable of running an older version of OS X like Mountain Lion for it to be able to work. Given that there are no further security updates to Mountain Lion and Mavericks will join it in about 3-4 months. The only use for olde version of OS X is where people continue to use older apps for music production. Upgrading these can be expensive for a hobby user and some new versions of the apps require a whole new set of further plugins and additional hardware upgrades.

 

[Kingzone]

I am writing this on an early 2008 17" Macbook Pro 4,1 It has been upgraded through the years to it's latest version, El Capitan 10.11.5, when updated I have been able to download each version to the machine via my App Store account for free. You are then able to create a USB install device using any of the downloaded versions that now live in your 'Applications' folder.

 

[irrationalJohn]

I am writing this on an early 2008 17" Macbook Pro 4,1 It has been upgraded through the years to it's latest version, El Capitan 10.11.5, when updated I have been able to download each version to the machine via my App Store account for free.

I truly do believe you. But what is your point?

I have an early 2008 MacBook4,1. Any version of OS X beyond 10.7 Lion can not be installed on it. My MacBook hardware has been pretty much dead to Apple ever since Mountain Lion was released.

Consequently, I stopped paying attention to OS X releases after Lion. Those releases do NOT show up in my App Store account because I never obtained them using the App Store. And now there seems to be no way (that I know of) to work around that. The only versions of OS X available to me to access/download appear to be Lion and El Capitan.

Why/how do I now have access to El Capitan if I have no Apple hardware which supports it? Well, I recently upgraded my Intel hardware from Core 2 Duo to Skylake and have been feeling my way towards running OS X on it. Trying to install Lion on Skylake hardware seemed unlikely to work, so I fumbled around to obtain El Capitan.

At first the App Store refused to download 10.11 for me because I tried to do so with my MacBook. But eventually I worked around that by doing a "quick 'n dirty" install of Lion to my legacy Core 2 Duo motherboard. I then was able to access the App Store from that "means to an end" hackintosh and download El Capitan.

In hindsight, I suppose I should have taken the time to boot up a Hackintosh version of OS X and used it to download those previous releases back in their day. If I had done that then I assume they would also be available in my App Store account. Oh, well.

As was pointed out, it's hard to come up with a compelling argument for why I would go to the trouble of obtaining these older releases of OS X. I suppose I ask about it primarily because I am curious. I also just want to sanity check my assumptions about how the Apple world works. I tend to make mistakes when I make assumptions about how things work in App Store land.

 

[kiiroaka]

it's hard to come up with a compelling argument for why I would go to the trouble of obtaining these older releases of OS X.

You mean like having a browser that can show book marks and the full URL in the URL bar? First thing I did after my OSX64 was running was to install Opera and Firefox. And even in Opera I had to install the "right" bookmark manager. And even then it is a pain to import old bookmarks. But not being able to see the full URL address in the new Safari irritates me. Answer:
http://osxdaily.com/2014/10/20/show-full-website-url-address-safari-mac-os-x/

There are little things that irritate me in El Capitan, things like trying to Control-V to paste, windows going to full screen, the flat icons, not being able to get to the Dock in full window mode, a little mouse (go through System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display -> mouse size). But it still is only in black and white... I like a red mouse pointer, which Linux allows me to do. When I work on people's multi monitors I have to enable the Control-key mouse find in Windows. And don't get me started trying to find a small white mouse against a white background. Drives me nuts.n Windows does Alt-Tab to switch between windows. Mac? Control-tab does the same thing.

So, yeah, there are reasons to stay with an older OS version. In Windows it could be as simple as being able to create a Recovery Disc in W8.0 but having to use an USB for W8.1 and W10 (Windex?), instead. It could be that a device is no longer supported, for example, or some piece of software won't now work with El Cap., just like some software won't work with the newest OS. (I have three AC guys running XP, W7 and W8 in the same department just for that same reason. Like the bus mechanic who is running W98 on a laptop because he uses the parallel port to program bus speedometers.) In the case of the Mac Pro one has to either buy an ATI HD7770 to be able ti use the XEON 64 bit processors to run El Cap or buy a PC HD7770 and live with a blank screen until the OSX desktop appears. Or you install ubuntu MATE 14.04 AMD64+MAC, install Cairo Dock, Breathe Icons, GlossyP (I hate gray browser scroll bars - impossible to see, especially in Windows 8 and 10), and maybe a different Window Control scheme theme. All the PPC 32 bit'ers can only go to 10.5.8. So it's Linux or nothing after that. Same goes for older PCs... throw Linux on there and give it a new life. Here's something that OSX doesn't have and Linux does - you can't double click the window menu bar and have it roll up and down. Roll it up in Linux and there's your desktop. When you're finished, double click on the menu bar and the window comes down. Then there's the "problem" of having to use the menu bar to quit an app. after hitting the app. window's quit button. And once you get used to having four desktops under linux (for those windows that automatically take up the whole screen (*cough*Chrome*cough*) going to W8 (you can now have multiple desktops under W10) or OSX is a step backwards, imo. So make sure that you set up "Spaces" correctly...

No, there are some really solid reasons why one could want to stay with an older OS, the most important, to me, is that I hate flat icons. Darn iPhone ruined everything. Even Windows went with flat icons. I fondly remember the Gentoo 3D glossy icons... Just compare the Mac 10.5.8 icons and browser scroll bar to 10.11.5...