7 ms·

Shame about the lack of support for older macs. I've upgraded my late 2006 MacBook with a new SSD and the thing runs great. Best upgrade I've ever done. Now mou

Shame about the lack of support for older macs. I've upgraded my late 2006 MacBook with a new SSD and the thing runs great. Best upgrade I've ever done. Now mountain lion isn't supported. Looks like apple trying to increase those profits even further. Your Mac must be one of the following models: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) Xserve (Early 2009) http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/ http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/

polysaturate 14y ago
I'd venture to say you in the minority for upgrading a 6 year old Macbook....just sayin. It's actually due to GPU capabilities of the older Macs. Thus, as well as your SSD'd 2006 Macbook runs, it still will not perform up to the standard they want on Mountain Lion. I disagree that this would purely be done for a "profit increase"
X-Istence 14y ago
Unfortunately the graphics card is simply not up to the task of running Mountain Lion. I don't necessarily think this is a play for profits, hell the OS is being sold for $19.95 and can be installed up to 5 computers that you own free of charge... Unfortunately there is no way to upgrade the video card in a laptop.
- st3fan 14y ago
  Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade. I see absolutely nothing that would require a crazy new video card. (I've been running ML for months) In other words: my terminal windows, browser, text editor and twitter client run just as well as on Lion.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    >Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade. Well of course it is, they're a hardware company. I don't think there's some conspiracy to deprecate 6 years old computers when the shelf life of a computer in the industry is 1-3 years - in other words, I don't think they're being unreasonable.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    > Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade. I see absolutely nothing that would require a crazy new video card. (I've been running ML for months) The 32-bit Kernel no longer exists/is no longer maintained/was not upgraded for Mountain Lion. The unsupported models have video cards that do not have 64-bit graphics drivers available for them. The 64-bit Mountain Lion kernel is incapable of loading the old 32-bit graphics drivers for these cards. Thus these video cards are literally incapable of supporting Mountain Lion.
  - stephen_g 14y ago
    I think they're just standardising on hardware that is capable of OpenGL 3.0 and above. Most of the older Macs that don't support ML are the ones with Intel chips that only support 2.1 if I remember correctly.
- Watabou 14y ago
  Actually you can install it on any computer that you own. Not just 5. They removed that limitation with Lion.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Oh, I've owned some Macs whose graphics cards were definitely not up to running the OS that they were running. Turning off the genie effect because it skipped frames? Yep.
Jimbotron 14y ago
I agree that that mac is six years old, but what is so different between the graphics requirements for lion and mountain lion? Seems like they didn't have the resources or inclination to upgrade the 32bit drivers to 64bit. And yes - I'm aware that the upgrade costs $20 bucks. How much is a new macbook?
ryannielsen 14y ago
Looks like apple trying to increase those profits even further. Actually, its likely more a technical reason than a financial one. IIRC, the first generation of Core 2 Duo machines shipped with 32-bit EFI, even though the processor is 64-bit. The 64-bit kernel, which is now the default and only kernel in Mountain Lion, requires 64-bit firmware which your machine doesn't have. They probably could have engineered the 64-bit kernel to work with the 32-bit EFI, or the probably could have shipped an EFI update for old Core 2 Duo machines, but those machines are 6 years old. I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere.
- melvinmt 14y ago
  limited resources, ha! in other news: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results: $35B/$8B profit
  - avolcano 14y ago
    Yes, because we all know that money is the only obstacle to creating a product. You definitely don't need a lot of uber-talented employees focused in certain areas or anything.
    - mburns 14y ago
      They are literally the richest company in the world, and the most desired to work for company. The idea they couldn't afford or have the capacity to hire the talent they want is ridiculous. They just don't want to.
      - hollerith 14y ago
        Not trying to refute what you said, but am curious what makes you think they are the most desired to work for? Do many of your programmer friends want to work there?
        mburns 14y ago
nestlequ1k 14y ago
Also worth noting that even the newest Core 2 Duo's (not that old!) are left out of Mountain Lion's best feature: AirPlay.
- shinratdr 14y ago
  I'm sure that will be easily hacked to enable, it's enabled on my entirely unsupported Mac Pro 1,1 so I imagine enabling it on models that ML actually supports will be pretty easy. $20 says you just have to alter a plist.
pmjordan 14y ago
Welcome to the club of end-of-life Apple device owners. The 15 million or so first-gen iPad owners will also be joining us in October, when Apple tries to force everyone to buy yet another iPad by releasing iOS6 and dropping support for the first one 18 months after they stopped selling it. There is no technical reason: the 4th-gen iPod Touch is supported and has almost identical specs. The 3rd gen iPod Touch is also being dropped despite being almost completely identical to the iPhone 3GS, which does get iOS6. For a company that keeps boasting about its green credentials, they do generate an awful lot of waste. (not to mention the extra work for app developers, who can either drop 15 million users's worth of adressible market, or make use of iOS6 features - the most attractive of which, such as autolayout, have no sensible fallback)
- taligent 14y ago
  1) There IS a technical reason. The iPad 1 has a larger screen and as such requires more RAM than the iPod 4G. Also as for the iPod 3G "almost" identical makes a difference. 2) Apple releases a lot less products than the Android OEMs. So not sure compared to whom Apple is wasteful. 3) Personally I fail to see how autolayout is a particular attractive feature. And I haven't found it that hard to mix match SDKs/targets on iOS.
  - pmjordan 14y ago
    Re 1: The iPad has 786432 pixels vs the iPod 4G's 614400. Not that big a difference, particularly as that mainly affects the framebuffer. If each pixel in the back, front and Z buffers uses 32 bits, that's a whopping 2MB RAM difference, or less than 1% of the total. So, no technical reason, end of story. Re 2: The android makers don't seem to brag about being environmentally friendly. Apple can be held to higher standards as they're making that a supposed selling point. Re 3: I guess it depends on the apps you're making. For autorotation and dynamically-sized content in particular it's extremely useful and saves quite a bit of manual work.
ajasmin 14y ago
Perhaps there will be some way to re-enable 32-bit drivers support in the darwin source code. All it takes is an angry hacker with old hardware.
- msbarnett 14y ago
  There's nothing to re-enable. The 64-bit Kernel has only ever been able to load 64-bit drivers. To use 32-bit drivers, you had to be running the 32-bit Kernel. So to enable these machines to run Mountain Lion, the enterprising dev would have to backport all of the changes from the 64-bit-only Mountain Lion Kernel to the unmaintained 32-bit Lion Kernel.
  - ajasmin 14y ago
    Right.. Should have though of that. It's the same with other kernels. Perhaps a simpler workaround would be to run Mountain Lion under VMWare. I believe it supports graphic acceleration and there should be no problem running a 64-bit OS on a 32-bit host with hardware visualization. It might just work.
    - jasomill 14y ago
      While VMware requires a 64-bit CPU to run 64-bit software, every Mac that supports Lion already has a 64-bit CPU, and is capable of running 64-bit software outside the kernel. VMware Fusion 4's OS X video driver is not hardware accelerated, however, so YMMV, especially on older hardware (not sure about the latest Fusion Tech Preview). You're right that it should boot, though.
    - shinratdr 14y ago
      The simpler workaround is to use the Chameleon bootloader to turn your Mac into what is essentially a Hackintosh. This allows you to boot the 64-bit kernel via the BIOS emulator, bypassing EFI32 entirely. Catch is it requires two internal drives and a supported graphics card to get it to boot, and the GMA950/X3100 has been cut. This means it's the unavoidable end of the line for MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Minis cut off by this update. It would require someone to write a 64 bit graphics driver/kext which is well beyond the scope of the hobbyist world. However for us few Mac Pro 1,1/1'2 owners, this means our machines can keep on chugging. EFI is solvable limitation. No support for your GPU isn't. Problem with your solution is any machine old enough to be cut off by this would be pretty crippled by the overhead of running two operating systems at the same time.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
grecy 14y ago
Everyone blows this so far out of proportion. My three year old laptop is still running 10.5.8, and has never had a kernel panic or a single application crash in 3 years of heavy use. It runs the latest version of every app I need without problem. Why anyone would describe it as EOL simply because I have not updated the OS in a few years is beyond me. The thing still works perfectly.
- r00fus 14y ago
  It will be EOL soon. Apple got so desperate they mailed out free 10.6 discs a while back to mobileMe users, so I got my folks a free upgrade: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/24/free-snow-leopard-discs-for-mobileme-users-now-arriving/ http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/24/free-snow-leopard-discs-... This tells me they're ready to pretty much bury 10.5 soon. That said, as long as your system works and runs the apps you want - it is by no means bricked.
shinratdr 14y ago
Actually they're just all machines that either use EFI32, or have a GMA950/X3100, or both. Writing up new firmware and drivers for swaths of hardware that hasn't been sold for 3-5 years would have been a nice gesture, but I hardly think it's fair to hold it against them if they choose not to.

polysaturate 14y ago

I'd venture to say you in the minority for upgrading a 6 year old Macbook....just sayin. It's actually due to GPU capabilities of the older Macs. Thus, as well as your SSD'd 2006 Macbook runs, it still will not perform up to the standard they want on Mountain Lion. I disagree that this would purely be done for a "profit increase"

X-Istence 14y ago

Unfortunately the graphics card is simply not up to the task of running Mountain Lion. I don't necessarily think this is a play for profits, hell the OS is being sold for $19.95 and can be installed up to 5 computers that you own free of charge... Unfortunately there is no way to upgrade the video card in a laptop.

st3fan 14y ago
Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade. I see absolutely nothing that would require a crazy new video card. (I've been running ML for months) In other words: my terminal windows, browser, text editor and twitter client run just as well as on Lion.
- duaneb 14y ago
  >Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade. Well of course it is, they're a hardware company. I don't think there's some conspiracy to deprecate 6 years old computers when the shelf life of a computer in the industry is 1-3 years - in other words, I don't think they're being unreasonable.
- msbarnett 14y ago
  > Personally I think it is an excuse to get people to upgrade. I see absolutely nothing that would require a crazy new video card. (I've been running ML for months) The 32-bit Kernel no longer exists/is no longer maintained/was not upgraded for Mountain Lion. The unsupported models have video cards that do not have 64-bit graphics drivers available for them. The 64-bit Mountain Lion kernel is incapable of loading the old 32-bit graphics drivers for these cards. Thus these video cards are literally incapable of supporting Mountain Lion.
- stephen_g 14y ago
  I think they're just standardising on hardware that is capable of OpenGL 3.0 and above. Most of the older Macs that don't support ML are the ones with Intel chips that only support 2.1 if I remember correctly.
Watabou 14y ago
Actually you can install it on any computer that you own. Not just 5. They removed that limitation with Lion.
smackfu 14y ago
Oh, I've owned some Macs whose graphics cards were definitely not up to running the OS that they were running. Turning off the genie effect because it skipped frames? Yep.

Jimbotron 14y ago

I agree that that mac is six years old, but what is so different between the graphics requirements for lion and mountain lion? Seems like they didn't have the resources or inclination to upgrade the 32bit drivers to 64bit. And yes - I'm aware that the upgrade costs $20 bucks. How much is a new macbook?

ryannielsen 14y ago

Looks like apple trying to increase those profits even further. Actually, its likely more a technical reason than a financial one. IIRC, the first generation of Core 2 Duo machines shipped with 32-bit EFI, even though the processor is 64-bit. The 64-bit kernel, which is now the default and only kernel in Mountain Lion, requires 64-bit firmware which your machine doesn't have. They probably could have engineered the 64-bit kernel to work with the 32-bit EFI, or the probably could have shipped an EFI update for old Core 2 Duo machines, but those machines are 6 years old. I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere.

melvinmt 14y ago
limited resources, ha! in other news: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results: $35B/$8B profit
- avolcano 14y ago
  Yes, because we all know that money is the only obstacle to creating a product. You definitely don't need a lot of uber-talented employees focused in certain areas or anything.
  - mburns 14y ago
    They are literally the richest company in the world, and the most desired to work for company. The idea they couldn't afford or have the capacity to hire the talent they want is ridiculous. They just don't want to.
    - hollerith 14y ago
      Not trying to refute what you said, but am curious what makes you think they are the most desired to work for? Do many of your programmer friends want to work there?
      - mburns 14y ago

nestlequ1k 14y ago

Also worth noting that even the newest Core 2 Duo's (not that old!) are left out of Mountain Lion's best feature: AirPlay.

shinratdr 14y ago
I'm sure that will be easily hacked to enable, it's enabled on my entirely unsupported Mac Pro 1,1 so I imagine enabling it on models that ML actually supports will be pretty easy. $20 says you just have to alter a plist.

pmjordan 14y ago

Welcome to the club of end-of-life Apple device owners. The 15 million or so first-gen iPad owners will also be joining us in October, when Apple tries to force everyone to buy yet another iPad by releasing iOS6 and dropping support for the first one 18 months after they stopped selling it. There is no technical reason: the 4th-gen iPod Touch is supported and has almost identical specs. The 3rd gen iPod Touch is also being dropped despite being almost completely identical to the iPhone 3GS, which does get iOS6. For a company that keeps boasting about its green credentials, they do generate an awful lot of waste. (not to mention the extra work for app developers, who can either drop 15 million users's worth of adressible market, or make use of iOS6 features - the most attractive of which, such as autolayout, have no sensible fallback)

taligent 14y ago
1) There IS a technical reason. The iPad 1 has a larger screen and as such requires more RAM than the iPod 4G. Also as for the iPod 3G "almost" identical makes a difference. 2) Apple releases a lot less products than the Android OEMs. So not sure compared to whom Apple is wasteful. 3) Personally I fail to see how autolayout is a particular attractive feature. And I haven't found it that hard to mix match SDKs/targets on iOS.
- pmjordan 14y ago
  Re 1: The iPad has 786432 pixels vs the iPod 4G's 614400. Not that big a difference, particularly as that mainly affects the framebuffer. If each pixel in the back, front and Z buffers uses 32 bits, that's a whopping 2MB RAM difference, or less than 1% of the total. So, no technical reason, end of story. Re 2: The android makers don't seem to brag about being environmentally friendly. Apple can be held to higher standards as they're making that a supposed selling point. Re 3: I guess it depends on the apps you're making. For autorotation and dynamically-sized content in particular it's extremely useful and saves quite a bit of manual work.

ajasmin 14y ago

Perhaps there will be some way to re-enable 32-bit drivers support in the darwin source code. All it takes is an angry hacker with old hardware.

msbarnett 14y ago
There's nothing to re-enable. The 64-bit Kernel has only ever been able to load 64-bit drivers. To use 32-bit drivers, you had to be running the 32-bit Kernel. So to enable these machines to run Mountain Lion, the enterprising dev would have to backport all of the changes from the 64-bit-only Mountain Lion Kernel to the unmaintained 32-bit Lion Kernel.
- ajasmin 14y ago
  Right.. Should have though of that. It's the same with other kernels. Perhaps a simpler workaround would be to run Mountain Lion under VMWare. I believe it supports graphic acceleration and there should be no problem running a 64-bit OS on a 32-bit host with hardware visualization. It might just work.
  - jasomill 14y ago
    While VMware requires a 64-bit CPU to run 64-bit software, every Mac that supports Lion already has a 64-bit CPU, and is capable of running 64-bit software outside the kernel. VMware Fusion 4's OS X video driver is not hardware accelerated, however, so YMMV, especially on older hardware (not sure about the latest Fusion Tech Preview). You're right that it should boot, though.
  - shinratdr 14y ago
    The simpler workaround is to use the Chameleon bootloader to turn your Mac into what is essentially a Hackintosh. This allows you to boot the 64-bit kernel via the BIOS emulator, bypassing EFI32 entirely. Catch is it requires two internal drives and a supported graphics card to get it to boot, and the GMA950/X3100 has been cut. This means it's the unavoidable end of the line for MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Minis cut off by this update. It would require someone to write a 64 bit graphics driver/kext which is well beyond the scope of the hobbyist world. However for us few Mac Pro 1,1/1'2 owners, this means our machines can keep on chugging. EFI is solvable limitation. No support for your GPU isn't. Problem with your solution is any machine old enough to be cut off by this would be pretty crippled by the overhead of running two operating systems at the same time.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

grecy 14y ago

Everyone blows this so far out of proportion. My three year old laptop is still running 10.5.8, and has never had a kernel panic or a single application crash in 3 years of heavy use. It runs the latest version of every app I need without problem. Why anyone would describe it as EOL simply because I have not updated the OS in a few years is beyond me. The thing still works perfectly.

r00fus 14y ago
It will be EOL soon. Apple got so desperate they mailed out free 10.6 discs a while back to mobileMe users, so I got my folks a free upgrade: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/24/free-snow-leopard-discs-for-mobileme-users-now-arriving/ http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/24/free-snow-leopard-discs-... This tells me they're ready to pretty much bury 10.5 soon. That said, as long as your system works and runs the apps you want - it is by no means bricked.

shinratdr 14y ago

Actually they're just all machines that either use EFI32, or have a GMA950/X3100, or both. Writing up new firmware and drivers for swaths of hardware that hasn't been sold for 3-5 years would have been a nice gesture, but I hardly think it's fair to hold it against them if they choose not to.