The Truth About iLife, iPhoto, and Mac’s Leopard

I had to figure this out this morning, and didn’t find a comprehensive explanation anywhere else, so I’m offering one for posterity.

If you bought your mac with a version of OSX earlier than Leopard (10.5), and then you upgraded to Leopard with a clean install (erasing your hard drive), then you erased iLife (iPhoto, Garageband, etc.) and did not get it back.

Apple likes to say that iLife “comes with every mac,” but they don’t clarify that it does not come with every mac OS upgrade. The fact that it comes with your mac does not mean that it stays with your mac, at least not without some additional work.

iLife does come on the install discs that come with your mac. That is, the install discs that you shouldn’t generally need, since all macs come with the OS already installed. But these discs are in case you need to re-install, or to install some specific component.

If you don’t have the install discs, because you lost them, or you got your mac second hand, then you may be able to use someone else’s install discs. I have read posts indicating that for this to work smoothly, the discs you borrow have to come from the same model as the mac you’re installing to. If the models are different, you can apparently still transfer the files some other way, but I don’t have the details.

If you do have the install discs, Ben Robison has a posted a nice walk-through for installing iLife from your Tiger install discs without overwriting Leopard.

However, keep in mind that, when you do this, you will be installing the Tiger version of iLife, which is to say, iLife ‘06. The fact that you paid for Leopard apparently does not entitle you to have the latest version of iLife. To get that, you will either need to buy a new mac, or upgrade for $79.

This is why Apple says that iLife comes with every mac, but you don’t hear them saying that it comes with every installation of OSX. In the mac universe, software and hardware are tightly integrated. OSX comes installed on every computer, iLife comes installed on every computer, and all three elements are made by the same company, so it’s easy to assume that iLife comes with OSX.

This idea may be reinforced by the fact that iLife is itself not any one thing, but a grouping of several pieces of software. It is advertised as its own entity, and yet the usual way to obtain it is to buy a computer that comes with it. In other words, it’s distributed just like an operating system is. And it’s always distributed with the same family of operating system. So it’s not surprising that people consider it part of that operating system. Even though (sigh) it’s not.

photo by ocoolto