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

Where can I mailing Appl to ask for my money back?

To all those who have chastised us for complaining about $20 and argued that its a hardware limitation and only reasonable for Apple to not support 2 year old machines:

a) Its not just $20.

I, like many others, also bought an AppleTV expressly and solely because of the Airplay Mirroring feature advertised in Mountain Lion. I also stayed loyal to Apple and held off looking for another solution for a year or so because this feature was coming.

b) This is a case of misleading and deceptive advertising.

Yes, on the day I went to buy Mountain Lion it was in the small print that none of my 4 Macs would be supported, but I don't recall seeing it in ANY of their advertising for the last few months. As someone else pointed out, the limitations are still not in the advertising page on their website: http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/

c) The limitation small print is also unclear to anyone running Snow Leopard or earlier OS X (that's me and I'm sure many others who had not upgraded to Lion). I have searched high and low, but nowhere on Apple's website (or anywhere else) can I find a list/table that maps the identiers used in the limitation statement (eg. Mid 2011/Early 2011) to the Model Name or Model Identifier (shown in About This Mac). I couldn't remember exactly when I bought my Macbook Pro and therefore could find no way to tell if it was going to work or not without buying Mountain Lion and trying it out.

d) AirParrot does work on 2 year old Macs.

After getting over my initial frustration and outrage, I bought AirParrot for $10 and installed it on my Mid-2010 MacBook Pro. It works and does exactly what I had expected Airplay Mirroring to do. Quality is nearly flawless - a couple of minor flickers in a one hour show streamed from an EyeTV recording. So the technical argument that 2 year old Macs don't have the capabilty to do Airplay Mirroring does not hold a lot of water.

I suspect that I could get AirParrot working on my mid-2010 Mac Mini and even on my older iMac. And I'd probably get even better quality if I upgraded my five year old wireless router.

YOUR RIGHT!!!!  THEY FORGOT TO POST IT ON MOUNTAIN LION WEBPAGE!!!!   THIS FOR ICLOUD SETUP WEBPAGE NOT MOUNTAIN LION  AND YOUR FONT IS MUCH BIGGER!!!!!!! NICE TRY!!!!

me too.

This is crap not having air play mirrioring on older Macs.

Its the only reason I updated, but I never saw where it said it wouldnt work on older Macs. I even loss the use of some other programs I have installed cause they dont allow downloads from non apple approved sites.

We all should flood them with demands for refunds. Come on Apple your better than that......

Here's the deal.

I, too, am a first time poster, because I am really upset about this.

I became a mac convert in 2006. In may of 2006 I purchased my first macbook pro, and in november of 2006 I bought my mac pro, which I'm still using today.

When the list of upgradable devices came out, I was not surprised to see that my macpro was off the list. I was actually okay with this - I had been thinking it might be time to upgrade that later this year. in the meantime, however, I have a mid-2009 macbook pro that I bought new in 2009. I was happy to see that one was on the list.

Like many of you, one of my main reasons for upgrading to Mountain Lion was because of airplay. I have an appletv2 that I have not decommissioned because of the airplay feature, and was looking forward to being able to utilize this on my macbook pro now.

I, like others, had no idea it woudln't work. I, like others, found this thread after googling and thinking I was doing something wrong.

My main reason for moving over to Macs is because of the fact that I can invest in a new machine once every 4 - 5 years and still be happy.

My macbook pro, with 8 gigs of ram, seems to do just fine running high end graphics programs. Heck - my mid2006 Mac Pro with 16 gigs of ram runs my graphics programs even better than my macbook pro does.  (Adobe CS6).

It's not the $20. I feel mislead. And I am, for the first time, not a happy mac owner.

I agree this is crap! I too bought an AppleTV just for the mirroring from my Early 2008 Mac Pro desktop which has 2 x 3 GHz Quads and 4GB of RAM (can still expand to 8GB) and that's more than some new base Mac Books and way beyond the specs of an iPad. ****, I can mirror from my iPad just fine... give me my desktop functions. I was able to install 10.8 with no issues an now I find that I can't mirror it to my AppleTV. How the **** does this matter what year it came from for mirroring to work??? Year is not an appropriate spec for features. Specs to specs are appropriate. Apple needs to get off their **** marketing band wagon and fix this.

This is pretty poor on the part of Apple, their marketing materials do not mention this at all (http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/). What makes it even more misleading is that they do point out (abiet in a tiny footnote) that PowerNap only works on machines with flash memory.

Furthermore, the page that lists what Macs are compatible with ML does not mention this either. http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/

Guys just complain.

I got my money back.

i wish you luck in your partcular requests

i really dont even want my money back. i mean that would be nice, but i would seriously just like this feature to work on my mac.

so disappointed...

My first time ever posting here.  Yes, I purchased an Apple TV and ML and cannot mirror with my fairly new mac which I bought at the time be cause to many features needed the intel chip.  In this case there was no warning whatsoever that support fo mirroring would be so limited. I am offended. 

This is wack apple should have made this clear. I feel cheated. Apple just gave me false hope.

Yes, the CPU and power consumption surely would be much better using hardware conversion to H264, but considering the skill of the developers at Apple, they could just as easily added code to the OS to allow that same conversion to be done by the CPU. We are pretty much all running multicore Intel processors now.

If I can do this on my iPad and iPhone, why not on older Macs?

Big apple fan, but very disappointed in this. Hopefully we'll see this addressed in OS X 10.8.1.

Same thing! I cannot beleive this! First time apple dissapoints me. I feel cheated, and I bought the apple tv just for using mirror display. I have 5 macs in home and cannot use it with none of them!

You have got to be kidding me! I bought ATV instead of another device -- even though other devices work with HULU Plus, which I would really like to have -- SOLELY because mirroring was coming. Then I upgraded to Mountain Lion ONLY because of that feature and now I find that not one of my 3 Macs - all purchased within the last 18 months - is eligible.

Unbelievable.