So I am currently running an iMac with OSX 10.4.11 and have been looking to upgrade for a while now. From what I've heard, in order to upgrade from 10.4 you must purchase the Mac Box Set with iLife and all those other goodies as opposed to just the OS disk for $30.

I was looking into the new Lion OS that's supposedly coming out sometime this month, but I heard it's not being sold in disk form (only available as a download in the Mac app store).

Will I be able to upgrade from 10.4 straight to Lion or will I have to purchase the 10.6 Box Set and then purchase the Lion OS download?

Also, do these downloads take up memory on the HD? The 10.6 box set says you should have 12 GB of disk space, so is that space I will lose when I upgrade to 10.6?

I've been with macs for well over 10 years now but this will be my first OS upgrade, so I'm kind of blind to the whole thing. I would greatly appreciate any help/advice!

P.S. My iMac's processor is a Core 2 Duo

Yo don't need the box set, but you do need to do an upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6) before you will be able to upgrade to Lion (10.7). The advantage of the box set is of course that it will give you the latest versions available of iLife (which includes iTunes, etc.)

The reason you will need Snow Leopard first is it provides access to Apple's App Store, and Lion is reportedly ONLY going to be available as a download from the App Store, no disks will be sold.

Your iMac is like mine, it's running the minimum processor needed to run Lion.