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Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring (iMac to AppleTV) Not Working

Mountain Lion successfully installed on my iMac.


AppleTV sucessfully networked with my iMac (at least where iTunes and iPhoto are concerned.)


But AirPlay icon is NOT appearing in my menu bar. Any clues as to why this is?


In System Preferences, I've checked "Show mirroring options in the menu bar when available" but still nothing.


Below is a screenshot of my menu bar. Thanks in advance!




User uploaded file

Posted on Jul 25, 2012 9:13 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 25, 2012 9:16 AM

Never mind. Just realized my iMac is too old. Late 2009.


AirPlay will only work for mid 2011. 😟

1,096 replies

Jul 25, 2012 5:40 PM in response to pudsack

I agree pudsack. I waited for months too for the upgrade. I was told in an Apple store it would work on my 2008 Mac. I am going to get a new Iphone 4S so I can use that but I have an Iphone 4 & and Iphone 3 and wish I didn't have to keep spending money to get what I want. I paid $2000 for my computer and I have loved it. It has lasted for years but now they are just trying to make their old products obsolete just because they are greedy. Sickening...

Jul 25, 2012 5:42 PM in response to jcetheredge

Same as the rest. I am very dissapointed in the false advertising and being mislead. As well as the return policy. It's almost suicidal for a company to not refund a product when they have provided such an outrageous false advertising. The main function for me of the operating system is Airplay!

I request a refund. Especially since it was not made clear that my CPU can utilize the airplay functioning. I had just purchased Lion a few months before too!

Jul 25, 2012 5:48 PM in response to Nrspace

Join the club man. Just got off the phone with support. My MAC bought Mid 2011 is not compatible with the mirroing feature. The processor is not up to spec. Like you, I only bought this **** software to use this. Apple marketing have misled its public. They wrong assume that everyone out here is tech minded. I bought apple TV too. It is just another trick to get people to buy a new mac. Apple are just out to con people for sure! Very disappointed.

Jul 25, 2012 5:48 PM in response to jcetheredge

I'm going to assume that many of you have not read the technical reason as to why they disabled it on older Macs and why it's not going to be something easy for the community to change. There is in fact a hardware difference between the machines/devices that can do this and those that can't.


In short there is a hardware H.264 encoder chip built into newer machines. Rather than write the code to render the video on the CPU side they simply use the calls to the hardware chip which is faster, easier and more battery/power efficent. So this is why old machines won't support it - the code to do this does not exist.


Ah, but wait - there's AirParrot that can do this. That's because those guys wrote the code to render the stream before sending it to AirPlay - they essentially built what the hardware is doing for Apple.


Where Apple has totally screwed up here is in 2 ways - first the obvious that they promised a feature that they knew they could deliever to only the smallest percentage fo owners. They know their customers (I am not one) - they know many of you guys will ***** but at the end of the day you'll upgrade and give them the cash. The second is that they could have written this into the software in such a way that older machines would be able to support it but it would be more intensive on them. AirParrot has clearly proven this a viable option but as we all know Apple is the most controlling technology company on the planet. As they can't guarentee a great experience they won't do anything. Some call this good - most walets call it bad.


This is the same reason(s) that Siri isn't on the iPhone 4 (and only the 4S). At the end of the day it won't matter - yes, we're all right. Yes this is shameful. You guys are forgetting that Apple is an evil corporation. They make great products but they care about the bottom line first and consumers second (as they really sorta should).


I hope this gets some mainstream tech press but I doubt it will. The weathly market that Apple has will just buy new machines - those that can't will ***** and then buy AirParrot. Neither will remember this 2 years from now, other than "man, you shoulda read this tread I saw one time...."


Time to unsubscribe - I've rarely seen a thread grow so quickly.

Jul 25, 2012 5:49 PM in response to kewljedi

Ok I did find that the following page points out the limitation.

http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/ the app store page also has this information on it.

While this makes me feel more that this is my fault. I still feel that it is bs that it wont work on any of our macs if an iPhone 3GS can stream youtube to my Apple TV my Mac Book Pro should be able to handle AirPlay Mirroring!!!

Jul 25, 2012 5:54 PM in response to kewljedi

It makes no sense whatsover that Apple would introduce a new software knowing fulwell that it will only work with newer MACS. Did not someone in the marketing or software engineering department have the comon sense to realize that allowing this software to go to market knowing it's limitations to only work for athe smaller percentage of users with newer MACS. What about all the millions of loyal Apple customers out here who paid money to make them rich. Don't we deserve respect? They need to back engineer this and kick out a software update to make it work for the rest of us!

Jul 25, 2012 5:59 PM in response to jcetheredge

If you go to the Apple promotional page for new "features" of ML (http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/), you will notice that there are 7 footnotes that are referenced in their applicable features write-ups. One of the footnotes points out that the Power Nap feature requires a Mac with flash storage. However, there are no footnotes regarding special requirements to run AirPlay. Usually, Apple makes a big deal out of these hardware limitations at product announcements. I hear about these things on sites like MacRumors and AppleInsider. I have heard NOTHING about AirPlay being limited to sub-1-year-old Macs until AFTER I paid for the ML upgrade.


Apple repeatedly gets sued in European countries for deceptive marketing tactics, yet they still continue to pull stunts like this. Sure, they are the biggest company in the world and they are making money hand over fist...for now. But hubris eventually leads to downfall. See the current state of Microsoft, Blackberry (RIM), Dell, etc. Nobody is too big to fail if they continually anger their customer base. Apple should be keenly aware of this given their failure in the early days of personal computer wars. But I suppose they are going to have to learn their lessons the hard way.

Jul 25, 2012 6:10 PM in response to jcetheredge

I totally agree with many of the posts. One of the main reasons I upgraded to ML was for the mirroring capability. Apple should have made the compatability requirements much more clear (I have a mid 2007 iMac with multiple 2nd and 4rd generation Apple TVs in the home). I feel completely mislead by apple here. Please do the right thing here Apple and correct this compatibility issue.

Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring (iMac to AppleTV) Not Working

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