Apple on Tuesday made the OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive available from its online store.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]The $69 thumb drive allows users without a fast broadband connection, needed to download the operating system from the Mac App Store, to install Apple’s newest operating system. As you would expect, the thumb drive installation is just a matter of putting the disk in your computer and following the onscreen instructions.

This thumb drive is different from the Lion USB Recovery Drive that has been shipping to some customers through Apple Care. The recovery drive helps users who had problems installing Lion on their computers, had the recovery partition on their hard drive fail, and have an older Mac that doesn’t feature Internet recovery.

The Lion USB Thumb Drive is available at the online store and ships within 1-3 days. There is no indication that it will be available from retail outlets, but it makes sense that it would sometime in the near future.