Q: Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring (iMac to AppleTV) Not Working

Sad but true:

I'm a user/fan of Apple since 1992 and sadly this is the first time I feel really disappointed.

Over the years the company had it's ups and downs, but honestly it appears Apple didn’t care about the most loyal users. I’m happy with the new approach to a new devices era (iPod, iPhone and iPad), but what about us, the pro users?

Now, we are not important anymore? You can easily see the sales figures and quickly found out that desktop sales are not growing:

“Apple reports Q3 2012 results: $35B in revenue, $8.8B profit, 26M iPhones, 17M iPads, 4M Macs” (just 1M desktop Macs including iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro)

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/07/24Apple-Reports-Third-Quarter-Results.ht ml

What about a new revolutionary iMac? We have the same model with minor improvements over 4 years!! And a quad core i5 iMac can’t do Airplay mirroring?

Change the OS and left out many users, this is certainly not Apple like.

I hope this kind of marketing mistakes stops, certainly Steve Jobs would not allow such things.

I find it hard to believe this is truly a hardware limitation as much as it is a feature restriction.  I have a 2008 8x3.0Ghz MacPro with the ATI 5870 card in it.  I benchmark faster than all of the current laptops apple produces on most everything but hard drive based tests.  To say that a MacPro cannot even AirPlay to a 720p AppleTV is shameful.  It will simply be a matter of time before a hack is enabled.  *NIX wizes might make a bit of street cred for enabling this.

great, so now i will have to download a third party app - AirParrot and pay $10 a year to use Air Play mirroring, on my Macbook core2duo, which CAN CLEARLY AIR PLAY MIRROR.

i wouldnt be seeing this if Steve Jobs was still with us.

pathetic Apple

I tried Air Parrott out today

I am running an early 2008 iMac.

Air Parrot was ok, but only streamed the desktop, no audio.

You can try a demo for free.

I am also disappointed, but looking into it a little more there was lots of information out there about airplay.  We are all just dumb.

actually audio does work with AirParrot, im playing an .mkv file from my macbook core 2 duo with airparrot and the audio is coming from my tv. just select start audio from the air parrot app.

works like a treat

this is the best option for those with older Mac's.  It costs $10 but does an awesome job.

http://airparrot.com/

AirPlay mirroring is a very CPU intensive process, as the data stream is encrypted, and encoded with an algorythm that can reproduce the video at a very high quality, and audio in it's original stereo.

I would expect this feature to require a computer with adequate CPU but for performance, I would expect that apple is probably taking advantage the Open-CL that was added to Snow Leopard for a lot of the encoding math.  I don't know this to be the case, but looking at the list of supported macs, it would seem that the issue has to do with the video processor's capabilities for OpenCL.

It will be interesting to see apple's resonse. 

• Q Can I AirPlay the audio alongside the video?
• A Yes AirParrot has full AirPlay audio support. Choose "Send Audio" from the AirParrot menu to stream that Rihanna music video. Currently, AirParrot only transmits stereo audio. Digital audio may be added in the future.

That's not fair.  to Steve or Apple.

Apple has a long history of only providing advanced features on the more advanced machines.  This is not a con/sans steve jobs issue.  Look at all the iphones.. Does the 4 support Siri?  Does the 3Gs support facetime?  Apple produces great software, because they are not affraid to drop support for older systems, or to limit the newer features to only the most recent generations of hardware, while still providing major operating system updates for the older systems.

With that said, I have a 2010 mac book unibody (poly carbonate).  I was under the impression this model would be support air play mirror, and it doesnt.  I'm dissapointed, but I realize that my laptop would be very hot trying to stream it's video and audio in realtime.  All that heat would shorten my macbooks life span, so I will only use air play mirroring on my 2012 mac mini instead.

.  just back from the Apple store with my new Apple Tv, I actualy asked the guy about airplay mirroring, and he told me it would work. Never asked about my imac i3 bought in Feb 2011. I found out the hard way why it didnt work.

Misleading advertising and sales ?? I think so

Add me to the long list of, not just disappointed, but pi$$ed off users.  The most highly anticipated feature of ML, and your Mac has to be barely a year old to be able to use it.  Unbelievable.

The way notification of the limitation is buried on a feature page, in miniscule font at the bottom of a seemingly endless page is ridiculous.  I checked my computer for compatibility with ML before I downloaded, little did I think I had to go through feature by feature to see which were compatible and which weren't.

Apple likes to dis Android for its fragmentation.  This is pretty much the same thing, Apple style.  You can upgrade to the latest OS so that the adoption levels look great, you just can't use some of its best features.  Not impressed!

I bought an ATV3 in preparation for Air Play support in Moutain Lion.  Upgraded today and was looking for the AirPlay icon and I couldn't find it.  Did a search and found this topic. 

I'm so disappointed that my year old MBA can't do AirPlay.

I'm all for upgrading but wow, not supporting a year old computer is pretty sad.

i'm glad i read this before i upgraded to ML and purchased an AppleTV. The ONLY reason I wanted ML was for AirPlay mirroring. My MBP was bought only in 2010 and you can't tell me the model is too old to support this.

Yea.. this is very dissapointed cause i too purchased OSX Mountain Lion and an AppleTV simply for Airplay. i'm such a sucker.. good one apple. dont get mad when samsung takes over your market!

Like so many posting on this forum, I anticpated ML and Airplay for ages, checking every day to see when ML would be available. I was delighted that it was finally available today, but my hopes for streaming video to my ATV turned to dust when I couldn't find the Airplay icon and instead found this page, troubleshooting on the internet.

Even if the limitation was buried in the fine print, it's just not good enough. It is such a crucial limitation to the functionality of the OS that purchasers should have been specifically alerted to this before downloading. I am hoping for a fix or a refund. But if neither is forthcoming, it's such a weasly marketing con, that Windows 8 suddenly appears a contender for the next upgrade.

To say I feel disappointed and sorely let down barely covers it. My expectation of Apple service is elelvated based on many years of contented use. Apple has lost its halo for me today and is now just a company (mis)selling computers and software.