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

[57004]

My old plastic MacBook is also out of luck (and the generation that came after it, the Santa Rosa kind with X3100 graphics is even unsupported).

However, I wonder how true the statement is about not being able to run 32-bit kexts. Some people have had success running Mountain Lion on old systems, like here by simply installing the old kernel extensions. (Edit: This actually seems to originate from a thread on MacRumors here)

If those are 32-bit then it must, after all, support 32-bit ones. They say there that the HW acceleration is even working.

I might give it a try but not until I have a replacement for my MacBook first. I don't want to risk an update breaking a machine I use for programming (I just hope Xcode will be supported on Lion until the 13" retina macbook pro comes out ).

I totally understand Apple dropping older systems and I don't hate them for it, though I do think it's often mostly marketing rather than technical reasons. And if some clever tricks manage to get around that then great.

Edit: I've just been reading through this thread and I see in this post it being said that DP2 did require 64-bit kexts where DP1 did not. It may well be that the article I quited is about DP1 as it's way back from February (Not sure when what came out as I'm not on the Mac developer program). So in this case it may well be technical and not marketing.

But anyway, there's no compelling features in Mountain Lion that I absolutely need to have on my portable (it's my least used machine anyway). In fact there are very few new features in it that I'll use at all.

Lion will be just fine as long as it's still supported with security updates.

 

[Flood123]

I wonder if some First Gen MacPro users will file a law suit against Apple. They marketed those machines a fully 64Bit. Not once when being advertised did they tell anyone that it was really a 32Bit machine.

Is no-one at Apple capable of writing an EFI update for the first MacPro?

The obsolescence is a joke, my old G4 worked from 9.0.2 through to 10.4.8. So it ran the latest for 8 years. Are Apple really saying they are not capable of doing that anymore? Is 4 years the best this company can now do for computer hardware support?

Apple really know how to p**s off the Mac Pro community at the moment.

That is actually a really really good point. I am one of those people that owns a 1,1 mac pro. I am slightly miffed for sure. This tower is gonna be a windows machine for browser testing purposes if i can't update this puppy. I just have to get myself another machine to support my normal workflow.

 

[faroZ06]

Not sure why people are ****. It's not like your Mac will stop working when ML is released. Apple isn't forcing you to upgrade. You can keep running SL or Lion as long as you want.

I'm actually forced to stay at Snow Leopard because they got rid of Rosetta for no @#$%ing reason!

 

[apolloa]

Hmm, whilst this doesn't affect me if I want to upgrade, I don't find it comfortable that Apple has effectively stamped a time line for their computers as being 4 to 5 years!

But I guess they have always done this?

Even so, if you spend 3 grand on that nice Retina MB Pro, are Apple stating they won't offer it's support for the the latest OSX in 4 or 5 years time?

 

[Nanasaki]

Not too unreasonable.

You know why Vista failed? Because people are pissed out seeing their older machines weren't compatible with Vista and **** load of driver didn't work with it. Windows people hate seeing their ancient machines won't run latest Windows. However, Microsoft see this. So that Windows 8 would run on those machines. I have Windows 8 loaded on 6 years old laptop, and it does runs fine. I think what Apple should do is instead drop support to older machines all together, it just shoud make those functinaolity not work on those machine p. Like what they did on iOS.

People can't legitimately expect to receive the newest updates on machines that are 3+ years old.

You must be kidding. Windows 8 would work with wide ranges of machines, including 3+ machines. I hate to see my ony 4 years old Macbook can't run 10.8.

 

[milo]

As a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 owner...

It's possible to make that machine run ML with a hack. No question Apple should just support those machines.

http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47

 

[barjam]

People can't legitimately expect to receive the newest updates on machines that are 3+ years old.

Windows 7 will run well on old hardware and my understanding is that windows 8 will do even better. I slapped a cheap microcenter SSD into my 6 year old dell laptop and it does very well for most tasks. I wouldn't use it as a primary machine and it doesn't game but for most people it would be more than enough computer.

It doesn't bother me that apple ends support early though.

 

[KnightWRX]

I gotta wonder about your experience actually. Having done real driver porting for Linux for years I somehow doubt you understand modern OSes and the facilities they provide to make endianness, and 32-bit/64-bit issue mostly a matter of writing good code that is 64-bit clean - take a look at this for example.

As such all well written code should not be a that big of an effort to port to 64-bit. Apple themselves have done it for some time now since the 64-bit kernel was available.

Looking through hardware specific C files for the nouveau driver, seems to me they need to use plenty of help functions and specific 32bit types to make sure the driver doesn't break on architectures that aren't 32 bit :

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kern...1;hb=bd0a521e88aa7a06ae7aabaed7ae196ed4ad867a

Of course, Linux has been working on 64 bit platforms since the 90s and the SPARC/MIPS/Alpha ports.

Ok, I'll give you that, yet with a simple hack M.L. can run on "unsupported systems". Thus, someone who doesn't have to know coding can get 10.8 to run on a system that Apple claims is not supported due to hardware limitations.

M.L. on "unsupported systems" seem to be running off a generic VESA Frame buffer driver that very much destroys any performance provided by Quartz Extreme, or at least it did last time I checked out the thread on Macrumors about it.

There are just no graphics driver to provide hardware assistance to graphics. The reason Apple doesn't want to support ML on older Macs.

As for writing kexts, it doesn't require a complete system rewrite.

Of course not, otherwise they wouldn't be Kernel Extensions.

Also, "Snow Leopard" was indeed rewritten; it was a ground up overhaul of Leopard, and began the drop of PPC systems.

Source ? Why would they need to rewrite things like say POSIX support ? The VFS layer ? HFS support ? I don't think you understand how big an operating system is if you feel "rewritting from the ground up" is even an option.

 

[lilo777]

Owners of older Macs should not worry

Windows 8 is coming and they probably will be able to install it.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Windows is supported for much longer than OS X is. Unless you buy a new Mac, you can find yourself without support and being unable to run newer applications very fast. With Windows, even if the newest OS doesn't support your hardware, your current version of Windows will probably be supported for years to come.

XP is still just about in support (but not for much longer). Your old single core computer will be in support longer than any Mac will be. And I think it is a massive shame. I wish Apple supported their OSs like Microsoft does.

Bingo.

XP SP3 brought in all a way for all the new API for windows 7 to be handled in some way. Does that mean they work as they are in 7 no but at the same token they are handled in some way so the program still will OMG work. Just the new features might be put into a dead in area that does nothing so the program still works.

On OSX side they do not do that. You are just SOL and if some program needs those API for something to look pretty nope no go. It harder on devs since if they want a wider range of targets they have to support the older stuff which means no go on newer API or have to put in your own work arounds.

Apple is creating a fragmentation mess in its OS and not handling it. MS handles its fragmentation just fine so developers do not have to deal with it. Let the OS handle it like it should.

It is crap like this why Apple is a consumer grade company only.

 

[MasterHowl]

Oh dear... I saved up ages and bought my a mid-2009 MBP exactly three years ago. Looks like mine might be one of the next to go... not good considering I bought it to last me at least 5 or 6 years.

I understand my MBP won't just suddenly stop working, but is having the latest OS too much to ask? No.

Feeling pretty anxious now!

 

[Sasparilla]

people using the listed macs will happily upgrade

people who don't will happily still run Snow Leopard or Lion.

Although its important to note that Snow Leopard looses new security updates in a few weeks - Lion has until next year's OS release. This is a big change (the short amount of time for OS security updates) and needs to be fixed, IMHO..

 

[KnightWRX]

Microsoft making vendors write 64-bit drivers was a good thing - didn't hurt me as a consumer.

Actually, what hurt consumers is that Microsoft switched to WDDM and WDF instead of their old driver model, making older NT drivers not able to function properly.

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

Not sure why people are pissed. It's not like your Mac will stop working when ML is released. Apple isn't forcing you to upgrade. You can keep running SL or Lion as long as you want.

<snip>

...but you better take the machine of the network - otherwise you will become the target in the next OSX exploit - running an OS that does not get serviced anymore.

That's what really annoys me.

 

[AidenShaw]

When everything was moving to 64-bit I wouldn't of bought a Mac that had hardware that only supported 32-bit drivers.

The fact that x64 versions of Windows and Linux will run on those Apples proves that the hardware does support 64-bit drivers.

It's Apple's decision not to support 64-bit, not a hardware limitation - proven by the folks using Hackintosh tricks to run ML on systems that Apple won't support.

Windows 64-bit versions dropped support for 16-bit programs and all 32-bit drivers.

Windows 7 x64 also supports "XP mode", which can run 16-bit programs in a 32-bit virtual machine.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Not sure why people are pissed. It's not like your Mac will stop working when ML is released. Apple isn't forcing you to upgrade. You can keep running SL or Lion as long as you want.

As for Apple not re-writing the drivers to support the older Macs, I'm all for them. I'm a developer myself and it requires a lot of time to maintain 32bit and 64bit builds. I'm surprised Windows still supports 32bit. Hopefully with Windows 9 they drop it. Supporting multiple platforms and old hardware makes the OS bloated and more prone to bugs.

No but Apple stops providing a lot of software support and devs to only work on the newest OS. Apple does BS software obsolete and creates a fragmenation cluster ****.

 

[KnightWRX]

I'm actually forced to stay at Snow Leopard because they got rid of Rosetta for no @#$%ing reason!

They got rid of Rosetta because it was forcing them to build, maintain and ship PPC versions of every framework library file. That's your reason.

 

[driceman]

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?

Good call! I had a Toshiba Satellite and have had a much better user experience with OS X (although to be fair, the Satellite was running Vista).

As for your two-button mouse problem: as someone else said, you don't really need to right click on a Mac. And if you really feel the need to, if you click down with two fingers at once that equates to a right click on a Windows PC.

 

[dacreativeguy]

How much effort does it take to upgrade a kext/driver? I would guess less effort than working on "Game Center".

But where do you draw the line? This is exactly why Apple has succeeded with their 'closed' ecosystem. There is massive amounts of effort to test an OS on every configuration out there. By limiting the hardware, Apple can release new versions as quickly as they do. Look at how long it takes Microsoft to release a new OS. There are infinite numbers of hardware configs out there.

 

[driceman]

Also, I understand people's complaints. It sucks that 5-year-old computers aren't supported by Mountain Lion, although it's not all that unreasonable for the most part.

I'm not so sure that means the current MacBooks won't support the latest OS in five years, though-we don't know how much the technology will change and what will support what. I'm sure in five years our current computers will look like dinosaurs, but the fact iOS 6 supports the 3GS (a pretty dated phone, as smartphones go) shows me that there's no definitive cutoff.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

The only 'technical' reason why ML isn't supported by machines more than 5 years old is simply to encourage people to upgrade their hardware.

They've been doing the same with iOS for years, yet every time a new version comes out, jail breakers have proved that they work fine on older devices.

 

[SpiderDude]

Nope.

and your argument continues to stand -- not being able to run the latest & greatest OS X doesnt in anyway de-value the usefulness of your version. it's every bit as functional as the day you bought it, probably more.

just stop comparing it to whats new *today*.

Nope. Someone here complained they can't use the latest version of Xcode if they're not running the latest version of the OS.

Also, suppose you have a 2007 5 grand mac pro.
And you use it to write software to osX.
How are you going to test it?
Buy another mac just for that. Why? The $ 5000 were not enough already?


Mac'on

 

[thelaw986]

Looks like I'll be sticking with 10.6 on my mid-2007 Macbook...

 

[Laird Knox]

have they invented two button mouses yet in the apple world?

The have done so much more!

 

[dazzer21]

So it won't work on my 300MHz G3 tower then? Bummer!