

Apple's OS X Mountain Lion: The Macs that will be left behind - ankitsingh
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-apple-macs-that-wont-get-os-x-mountain-lion-20120216,0,356802.story
Apple hasn't yet released its official list of Macs that won't get support for Mountain Lion and company officials weren't available for comment on the matter on Friday morning. But in releasing its developer preview of the new operating system Thursday, an intrepid programmer did some digging and shared with the Apple-centric blog TUAW a list of machines that, as ArsTechnica puts it, are getting "voted off the Mountain Lion island."
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gurkendoktor
> This, sadly, is an inherent side effect of progress as Apple moves ahead and
> continues what it started in Mac OS X Lion, in bringing OS X closer to iOS.

This is a lot of what is wrong with the press about Apple.

1\. It has nothing to do with moving to iOS. Same for many changes that annoy
people on Lion. My pet peeve are the monochrome sidebar icons in Finder,
iTunes, etc., which offer less clues for the eyes - say what you want, but
they have nothing to do with iOS. The only parallel on iOS is 'Settings' and
it uses colorful icons. Blaming it on an unavoidable convergence with iOS is a
lazy way to avoid any debate.

2\. Unless there is anything wrong with the actual hardware, this is not 'for
progress' but just planned obscolescence as usual. Apple has zero financial
incentive to support old devices. I don't blame them for that, it seems like
they are legitimally trying to make money off software, but right now they're
a hardware company.

The companies that actually strive for software market penetration/hardware
conservation like Microsoft or Google (with Android or Chromebooks) have the
incentive to run on everything at the latest version, but it doesn't work out
either. I wish gov'ts would enforce a longer warranty on devices and even
their vendor support for security fixes. Throwing away perfectly fine machines
hurts...

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eykanal
This is called "planned obsolescence". It is almost certainly NOT because the
computers "can't handle it". It is Apple's _business model_. Complaining about
this is about as useful as complaining about the walled-garden approach to the
App store. They release a new OS every year, and simultaneously phase out
support for older Macs. There are positives (people aren't running thirteen-
year-old computers, so developers can make reasonable assumptions about the
power of the machine) and negatives (ridiculously wasteful), but it's their
BUSINESS MODEL.

With that in mind, if you're going to argue that it's bad practice, please do
so from a business standpoint, not from a technical standpoint. No one
disagrees that your '07 Mac can handle 10.8 just fine.

~~~
Zak
I think this has more to do with Apple's "we want everyone to have a perfect
experience" philosophy than it does with trying to force people to upgrade to
squeeze more money out of them. Most people who just _have_ to be on the
latest Mac OS will also be using a pretty new Mac if they can afford it.

~~~
super_mario
Except they fucked up the experience for those of us who wanted a desktop OS
without stupid distractions and not a phone on our desktop. This is so bad
that I have not updated any of my 6 macs to Lion and refuse to buy any more
Apple hardware. I'll continue with Snow Leopard for as long as it is viable
and leverage my hardware investment, but come time for upgrade Apple won't
even be considered.

It's really sad to see what happened to a once nice and open ecosystem. I
honestly can't recommend a Mac to any of my friends or family any more. Apple
is on a draconian quest to kill general purpose computing and lock everyone
in. It's time to fight the evil before it's to late. Unfortunately Apple
already has so much power over hardware manufacturers that Microsoft could
only dream of in its heyday.

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rayiner
What in the world are you talking about? What stupid distractions have been
added in Lion? What have they locked down?

~~~
gurkendoktor
Turning pages in iCal, the hassle of changing groups in Address Book, Exposé
being killed where Mission Control adds much more visual clutter (I don't need
my wallpaper to shrink or to see other spaces), apps auto-restoring old
documents, the 'app opens' animation, the list of recent documents in the Dock
icon menu which I don't even want to think about while I'm focusing.

And then some stuff is distracting by being less obvious. For example, when
the "default calendar" system in iCal is suddenly more complicated than the
system it has replaced. (unless you only have one calendar)

Not all of these personally bother me, but "what in the world" seems a bit
harsh when some of them are the most common complaints about Lion.

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frou_dh
I was wondering about this the other day. It seemed like there would be no
real grounds to drop anything that can run fully 64bit, has a decent amount of
RAM and a remotely decent GPU.

I have a Mid-2009 17" MBP myself, allegedly clear this time. If/when that
eventually stops getting updates, there's no way I'm buying a new system if it
is otherwise still working fine. Not being on the very latest OS isn't the end
of the world.

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mark_l_watson
I have a MacBook Pro that was one of the last models to not have a i5 or i7
CPU. My MBP runs the Mountain Lion developer preview fine with one exception:
screen and audio sharing to an Apple iTV doesn't work. I understand this: the
i5 and i7 have some sweet new instructions that make video compression faster
- so no complaints from me.

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feralchimp
I really do not understand why any of the Mac Pros would lack the horsepower
to run Mountain Lion. The GPU in mine is pretty weak, but it would be cheap to
upgrade the GPU.

Here's hoping the installer either a) checks actual machine specs rather than
machine "version number") (not likely), or b) can be cajoled (annoying).

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bri3d
It's not a lack of horsepower. It's an infuriating artificial restriction
against running 64-bit Darwin kernels on 32-bit EFI. There's no technical
reason why a 64-bit kernel can't be launched by a 32-bit EFI, but for some
reason Apple has decided that 64-bit kernels will only boot from 64-bit EFI,
and Mountain Lion will ship with a 64-bit kernel.

See <http://netkas.org/?p=830> for more.

edit: Oh, and as to your whitelist/blacklist point - yes, Mac OS X checks what
systems it can be installed on by Board IDs stored in
"InstallableMachines.plist," not by enumerating the hardware.

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daed
I can't remember where I heard this, so don't quote me, but I've heard it
partially has to do with graphics kexts in some or all of those machines being
32-bit and a reluctance from Apple and the manufacturers (Intel, AMD, Nvidia)
to update them. That said, I'm not sure how that would rule out the Mac Pro,
then, because the chips I heard cited were the old Intel chips (950, x3100)
and AMD chips (X1600).

Again, don't quote me!

edit: this assumes Apple is moving to 100% 64-bit.

~~~
bri3d
This makes sense for non-Mac Pro machines, although so far it doesn't seem to
be the case as Mountain Lion will actually run on those machines if they're
added to SupportedHardware.plist [0].

However, in the case of the Mac Pro it's hard to see the restriction as
anything other than arbitrary and frustrating.

0: [http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-
de...](http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-developer-
preview-on-old-unsupported-macs/)

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easp
People need to remember that this is a preview release targeted primarily at
developers. It may well drop support for all the machines in question when it
ships in the summer, but it wouldn't be at all surprising if some future
preview release supports more older hardware.

