You can still make an external macOS bootable drive, but Apple's tighter security procedures mean you have to prepare for it ...
Apple's storage prices can be rough. Why spend that kind of money for less, when you can get more by making your own ...
Cloning a hard drive on a Mac is a different process. If you have a newer MacBook or iMac, you can't swap out the hard disk ...
So this is weird. When my daisy-chained firewire Western Digital hard drives are attached to my iMac, the iMac pretty much won't boot. Or it will freeze at the grey screen for 10 to 20 minutes.
I've been booting off an external drive until I can get the suckers to open the iMac and replace a dying hard drive. When I checked Software Update this morning it brought up the OS X 10.6.8 update ...