OS X Mountain Lion Drops Support For Some Older 64-bit Macs

Published on 07-11-2012 10:41 AM

Apple seeded the golden master build of OS X Mountain Lion to developers earlier this week, and with it an official list of macs that will support the new operating system is available as well.

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)

The list excludes a number of capable 64-bit MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pros, which will unfortunately be excluded from upgrading to OS X 10.8. While Lion will run on any mac with a Core2 or newer 64-bit intel processor, apparent graphical limitations kept Apple from supporting the aging Macs according to Ars Technica.

“Information included with the first Mountain Lion GM now corroborates the connection to 32-bit graphics drivers as the culprit. While Mountain Lion is compatible with any Mac capable of running a 64-bit kernel, the kernel does not support loading 32-bit kernel extensions (KEXTs). Furthermore, Macs with older EFI versions that are not 64-bit clean won't load Mountain Lion's 64-bit only kernel.” — Ars Technica

Ars Technica goes on to explain that since graphics drivers are KEXTs in OS X and Apple is dropping support for 32-bit KEXTs, the older 32-bit driver relient Macs won’t be supported in Mountain Lion.

If you’re unsure if your Mac or an older Mac of yours will be Lion compatible you can run the following script in Termincal:

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

All unsupported Macs will return “EFI32” according to Ars Technica associate writer Andrew Cunningham.

Source: Ars Technica

_{This article was originally published in forum thread:
OS X Mountain Lion Drops Support For Some Older 64-bit Macs
started by
Phillip Swanson} _{View original post}

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23 Comments

hank197857 - 07-12-2012, 10:54 AM

my last laptop is the macbook pro i'm typing on. i bought it in 2010. my next laptop will be a pc. it's good to have both. there are some functions that either computer does better than the other.
- Reply

dennder - 07-12-2012, 12:23 PM

Originally Posted by hank197857

my last laptop is the macbook pro i'm typing on. i bought it in 2010. my next laptop will be a pc. it's good to have both. there are some functions that either computer does better than the other.

Yet another facepalm... "next laptop will be a PC". You probably thought that you would get computer without OSX or maybe even straight away "next computer will be with windows"? I'm really sick of people telling Mac's and PC's apart. Apple uses same hardware as other known brands from 2005! Wake up!

As for other comments. Errr... are you so unhappy with Snow Leopard/Lion that you are so upset that you won't be able to upgrade?
I am not going near 10.8 before 10.8.2, or maybe even 10.8.3.
- Reply

s0ulp1xel - 07-14-2012, 09:37 AM

Originally Posted by dennder

Yet another facepalm... "next laptop will be a PC". You probably thought that you would get computer without OSX or maybe even straight away "next computer will be with windows"? I'm really sick of people telling Mac's and PC's apart. Apple uses same hardware as other known brands from 2005! Wake up!

As for other comments. Errr... are you so unhappy with Snow Leopard/Lion that you are so upset that you won't be able to upgrade?
I am not going near 10.8 before 10.8.2, or maybe even 10.8.3.

I have ML GM and it's not what thought it would be
- Reply

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