Mountain Lion hardware limitations real?

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Level 8

44,391 points

Mountain Lion hardware limitations real?

Not starting here a discussion on Apple being good, bad or a money grabbing capitalist... Just trying to understand the technical aspects of being excluded from Mountain Lion.

BACKGROUND

* Have a MacPro1,1 with thousands of dollars invested in additional RAM, faster and bigger hard drives and a greatly improved graphic card;

* This model was produced until January 2008, so it's not an ancient machine;

* The architecture (2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon) is classified as 64-bit Intel;

* It is running 64-bit applications and processes problems-free;

* It is running like a charm under Lion, with no slow-downs, hesitation or any other geriatric problems.

ISSUE

* Not being able to upgrade a professional-grade four-year Mac to latest OS, while lesser consumer level machines will be upgradable, is bad enough, but...

* I also have thousands of dollars invested in up-to-date iOS devices, which without Mountain Lion on the central desktop machine will loose much of their integration and syncing abilities, instantly making them less functional than they would be with ML.

QUESTION

The firmware on these Mac Pros is upgradable, the architecture is 64-bit, the graphics card has been improved, they have plenty of horsepower to run the OS, so what is it about ML that makes it incompatible with these Macs? There must be technical issues, I assume, that lead to this limitation. I would like to understand them.

Thanks in advance for any explanations.

Posted on Apr 22, 2012 4:55 PM

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Answer 1

etresoft

Level 8

46,476 points

Apr 22, 2012 6:01 PM in response to Rysz

I believe this post violates the Apple Support Communities Terms of Use in a number of different areas. Those who might know the answer couldn't discuss it in public. That leaves only people who could speculate.

If the Lion release experience repeats itself with Mountain Lion, I'm sure there will be many people eager to snatch up used machines that still run Lion, which will be, at that point, the epitome of all MacOS X versions.

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Answer 2

Rysz Author

Level 8

44,391 points

Apr 22, 2012 6:33 PM in response to etresoft

etresoft wrote:

... That leaves only people who could speculate...

... and those that have an understanding of the tech issues involved, without relying on NDA info released with ML.

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Answer 3

etresoft

Level 8

46,476 points

Apr 22, 2012 6:37 PM in response to Rysz

Rysz wrote:

... and those that have an understanding of the tech issues involved, without relying on NDA info released with ML.

OK. All those with in-depth understanding of Mountain Lion hardware interfaces, but aren't under any Apple NDA, please respond to this post.

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Answer 4

twtwtw

Level 5

4,936 points

Apr 22, 2012 7:31 PM in response to etresoft

etresoft wrote:

OK. All those with in-depth understanding of Mountain Lion hardware interfaces, but aren't under any Apple NDA, please respond to this post.

lol.

Let me just state the obvious. ML seems to want a 64 bit Core II Duo processor, the capacity for booting into a 64 bit kernel, and a relatively up-to-date GPU. Apple is traditionally good about backward compatability, so they will include your machine if feasible (which may still be fluid - this is only the developer preview).

If they don't include your machine, stick with Lion. I don't expect anything spectacular from Mountain Lion.

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