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. 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. 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. The good news is, as with Lion and Mountain Lion, it’s possible to create a local USB installer for Mavericks.