The good news is, as with Lion and Mountain Lion, it’s possible to create a local USB installer for Mavericks. That said, it’s still nice to have an install disk handy for those cases when you don’t have a connection, when your connection is slow, or when you just have a whole bunch of Macs and don’t want to have to download the installer on each and every one of them. These download-only installers have actually worked pretty well-I’ve never had an issue downloading the software from the Mac App Store or restoring a Mac using the Internet Recovery feature when something went south. When Apple released OS X 10.7 two years ago, it stopped selling operating system DVDs in its stores, stopped shipping recovery disks with new Macs, and switched to downloadable installers for OS X upgrades.
