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OS X Mountain Lion Officially Drops Support for Some Older 64-Bit Macs

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With Apple having seeded the golden master build of OS X Mountain Lion to developers earlier this week, the company has locked in which Macs will support the forthcoming version of the operating system. While the machine requirements have been known for some time, the seeding of the final public release is a good time to remind users which machines will support Mountain Lion.
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)
Click to expand...
Ars Technica has more on Apple's decision, including discussion of why Apple has dropped support for some early 64-bit Macs that do support OS X Lion.
Apple declined to tell us the reasoning behind leaving some of these models out of potential Mountain Lion upgrades, but we suspected it was related to an updated graphics architecture that was designed to improve OS X's graphics subsystem going forward. Our own Andrew Cunningham suspected the issue was related to graphics drivers, since the GPUs not supported under Mountain Lion had drivers that were written before 64-bit support was common.

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 no longer supports loading 32-bit kernel extensions (KEXTs).
Click to expand...
The report notes that some of the GPUs used in early 64-bit Macs were deprecated before 64-bit KEXTs were in common usage, and thus they were never upgraded from their original 32-bit KEXTs. With the affected machines now being a number of years old, Apple apparently decided that it was not worth investing the resources to upgrade those drivers to 64-bit in order to support OS X Mountain Lion.

Article Link: OS X Mountain Lion Officially Drops Support for Some Older 64-Bit Macs
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/11/os-x-mountain-lion-officially-drops-suport-for-some-older-64-bit-macs/
Looks like Mountain Lion is the end of the road for my Mid 2007 iMac! Hopefully some nice new ones released in time for 10.9 :D
 
The ARS report seems to miss that EFI64 is required for Mountain Lion. While a Mac might have a CPU capable of 64-bit, it still might be running EFI32 and therefore won't be supported. No EFI64 means no 64-bit kernel which means no Mountain Lion.
 
Whoah, bad news for me using a 3.0 2x dual core mac pro tower maybe.

Kinda pisses me off my mac pro may not get new osx, especially when there isn't a proper new mac pro. Apple ought not release osx that won't work on semi recent models. Pretty bad for customers. Could be an reason to upgrade... To a windows workstation
 
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With the affected machines now being a number of years old, Apple apparently decided that it was not worth investing the resources to upgrade those drivers to 64-bit in order to support OS X Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...

How much effort does it take to upgrade a kext/driver? I would guess less effort than working on "Game Center".
 
They dropped all models which do not support at least OpenGL 3.2 core profile. I think this is the main story here. Personally, I welcome this decision.
 
I have 3 - 2007 mac pros at work. Not happy. Especialy as an iOS developer where apple will surely force me to run the latest OS X to run the latest version of xcode.
 
Good thing I upgraded from my early 2008 MacBook (plastic) to an early 15" MBP 2011 last summer. Don't want to miss out on Mountain Lion.
 
People can't legitimately expect to receive the newest updates on machines that are 3+ years old.
 
bobobenobi said:
The ARS report seems to miss that EFI64 is required for Mountain Lion. While a Mac might have a CPU capable of 64-bit, it still might be running EFI32 and therefore won't be supported. No EFI64 means no 64-bit kernel which means no Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...

First Unibody Macbooks released in 2008 had EFI32 only and yet can still run Mountain Lion.
 
very fair.

this is why im on the verge of jumping ship entirely to apple.

my notebook is a sony vaio and support has been weak.

have they invented two button mouses yet in the apple world? :p
 
bobobenobi said:
The ARS report seems to miss that EFI64 is required for Mountain Lion. While a Mac might have a CPU capable of 64-bit, it still might be running EFI32 and therefore won't be supported. No EFI64 means no 64-bit kernel which means no Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...


I am running my Mac Pro 2,1 on Mountain Lion DP4. I'll be upgrading it when it is paid for.

You CAN run it on a Mac Pro 2,1 and earlier.

It took me a little time but really it is quite simple once you know what you are doing. You can PM me if you need any help.

Here is how you do it on a Mac Pro

http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47
 
" macs last/supported longer than windozers lolz " whoops.

Sarcasam aside, its pretty typical of Apple to stop supporting computers pretty quickly. It helps force users to upgrade. Business model.

Hopefully 10.7 will be supported for awhile so older machine users can get more use out of their machines
 
bedifferent said:
How much effort does it take to upgrade a kext/driver? I would guess less effort than working on "Game Center".
Click to expand...

Working on the low levels required for hardware access in a driver is where 32bit to 64 bit porting requires the most effort as often you're dealing with fixed width registries and can't simply "recompile" code into a 64 bit binary, you have to adjust types.
 
Radio said:
very fair.

this is why im on the verge of jumping ship entirely to apple.

my notebook is a sony vaio and support has been weak.

have they invented two button mouses yet in the apple world? :p
Click to expand...

No. But you still don't have much of a reason to right click on a Mac ;) So it's all good.
 
hobo.hopkins said:
People can't legitimately expect to receive the newest updates on machines that are 3+ years old.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty certain a few years ago people used to say "5+ years", by 2015 are people going to be saying "People can't legitimately expect to receive the newest updates on machines that are the last generation."
 
KnightWRX said:
First Unibody Macbooks released in 2008 had EFI32 only and yet can still run Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...

In that case, I guess it's boo ****** hoo for the unsupported. It's not like unsupported hardware will stop working when ML is released.
 
Not a big deal. They are dropping support for computers 4-5 years old.
I would love to see my old single core windows xp computer handle windows 8.

Edit: Guess my old computer could run it afterall. My bad
 
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