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

 

**GIVE US THE ABILITY TO DECIDED FOR OURSELVES IF OUR MACHINES CAN PERFORM THIS FUNCTION OR NOT. IT'S JUST THE RIGHT THING TO DO!**

 

I'm sorry, I mean no offense, but this made me laugh. It's not like we can just "decide" that our processors have more capability than they actually do.

I don't think you should laugh as there is a legitimate point made there. The CPU does have the capability to "perform" this function and airparrot is the evidence of that. Airplay could mirror at a certain optimum rate for newer models and a lower rate for others if necessary to get around any performance issues.

I bought a USD 3,000 iMac in early 2011 with virtually all the bells and whistles that were available back then and according to this article http://www.cultofmac.com/178460/the-real-reason-why-macs-before-2011-cant-use-ai rplay-mirroring-in-mountain-lion-feature/ the machine I bought hasn't got the hardware to do AirPlay. Yet the tiny sub-USD 1,000 iPad can do it? Hard to believe what a lousy machine I got for that amount of money.

I migrated to Apple from Wintel via iPhone and iPad but I am wishing back the days where I could do anything I wished with my PC. Perhaps I had to battle with performance issues (and then would decide to upgrade the hardware) but at least I was not dependent on the whims of Apple.

Some people clearly didn't take the time to research as to WHY our older Macs don't support AirPlay - we do not have "Intel Sync" encoding built into our CPU's. Apple is using this technology because it provides a much better user experience for AirPlay mirroring. The only workaround that could work on our older Macs is a software solution and at this point in time that solution = AirParrot, which honestly, *****. It's slow and laggy. Have you had the oppurtunity to try AirPlay mirroring on a newer Mac as it was intended by Apple? MUCH MUCH better and that is what Apple is about - creating a superb experience, not a subpar one. Subpar is exactly what would happen if they enabled AirPlay mirroring on Macs without Intel Sync technology built in. That is why they enabled that feature for the newer Macs only, to avoid the headaches created by people who are calling them and don't understand why AirPlay is running so slow. It's a very simple concept, and it IS funny to watch people get all angry about things they don't take the five minutes to try to research and understand.

sgaske, sorry, but I think that you have misunderstood the anger that has manifested itself here.

I do agree that technically there is a good reason for what Apple have done and that the experience on older macs would be the same as Airparrot which is, as you say, laggy and below the standard we expect from Apple.

But, and this is the most important part of it, Apple did not make that clear to anyone deciding on an upgrade.  A small superscript "1" to the side of Airplay on one screen on one part of the website leading to the list of supported Macs does not count as "making aware".  If Apple had been clear that only certain Macs were supported they would have prevented this entire shitstorm. If I knew before I bought it that it was not going to work I would have accepted it but they didnt make me away and I wasted a day of my life over this.

Expectation management is a key part of experience and Apple have failed here.

I haven't misunderstood a thing. What has manifested itself here is ignorance and a lack of understanding on top of blind anger.

Unfortunately for us, that little "1" that you say doesn't count, does indeed count legally. Also - when I'm reading about features for something and I see an annotation number, I check it out. If other people don't - that's their problem. I knew APM wasn't going to work when I purchased ML. I was frustrated, but I accepted it. I didn't post silly statements out of ignorant anger on the Apple support forum. Why? Because deep down, even though I wished otherwise, I knew it wasn't going to help, and it wasn't going to give my CPU Intel Sync capabilities. 

Hi sgaske,

what has manifested here is indeed ignorance and a lack of understanding but unfortunately it is Apple who has shown these things. 

The first rule is that the customer is always right and if you think that pointing out the little "1" and saying we legally covered ourselves and it was up to you to do your research is going to reduce the anger in question then your understanding of the psycology of the average Apple buyer is sadly a little off.  We all expect more from Apple and we expect it all to work and we expect to be informed when it does not.  This is the bar that Apple has set for itself and it has failed to manage our expectations appropriately.

If this happened with a Microsoft product I would not be upset, my bar for Microsoft products is pretty low but with Apple I expect more, I pay more and I expect more.

Apple understands this and I think that they accept that this could have been done better, why otherwise would I have been given a complete refund (and itunes store credits) if they didnt think that they were wrong.

My anger is from failed expectations and that is why others are angry too.  They have been let down by their gods and are rightly questioning the faith.

You, as a more technically minded Apple user, see the futility of this anger (you cannot, as you rightly point out, give a chip capabilities that are not already hardwired in) and feel that others should have researched more before buying but you are not seeing that the majority of buyers out there are not technical and just expect it work because Apple have been very good at doing and selling this in the past.

Anyway, at the end of the day this is all just my opinion on expectation management.  I see a fail and you see ignorant people.  These are two valid sides of the picture

If you are telling me that you expected AirPlay not to work on iMacs (before reading it) that were more than 12 months old, I'd say you are lying.

You are correct that the average consumer is ignorant. As you learned in the University, the most powerful security tool is ignorance. The average consumer expected AirPlay to work on their apple products, plain and simple, otherwise you wouldn't get thousands of them complaining about it. Apple doesn't have to prey on that ignorance.

Yes, I read the subnote prior to downloading. Yes, I knew that my iMac wasn't supported. Yes, I bought it anyway. But the reason I did is because I read it in so much detail was because I was duped the last time an upgrade came out. I guaratee that Apple sold way more copies of Mountain Lion that they should have, as they did on the previous OSX release. It was poor planning, and dishonest marketing.

sgaske - this IS all about customer expectation management. This is not just 45 pages of idiots ranting.

I know some on this forum are technically savvy / 'geeks', but these days Apple is very much a company catering to the mass market of consumers. And for these Apple customers (the vast majority), one of the key things that encourages them to buy Apple's, arguably technically superior, but unarguably more expensive products is that they believe that Apple products simply work and that Apple is not one of those companies that hides behind the small print.

I am not a geek but I do understand the technical limitation, and I still feel let down. Why? Because Apple misled me on this one. I'm not sure I subscribe to the conspiracy theories re forcing us into hardware upgrades - its more likely that Apple simply dropped the ball on this one and didn't think through the customer expectations properly.

The cynics will argue that we should expect nothing less from a huge public company. But one of the things that has defined Apple to date has been the loyalty they engender within their customer base. Incidents like this cannot help but undermine that loyalty and trust. For Apple's sake, I hope somebody is listening.

sgaske,

If IntelSync is needed for AirPlay support, then why do both my iPhone and my iPad both work perfectly with AirPlay? I understand that AirPlay and AirPlay mirroring are different, but Apple was able to make AirPlay work with technology that has less hardware horsepower that some of the Macs that they excluded from Mirroring functionality. And I am pretty sure that the iDevice support is enabled without intel chip support, so the only excuse is that Apple decided not to spend some of their 107 billion in cash to implement the feature. We are talking about  Mac's that are just over 1 year old. Apple is excluding a majority of their Mac user base. You might argue for the limited deployment of AppleTV being a factor, but then why make Mirroring such a major feature of the Tim Cook keynote, featuring both videos and game playing.  I think that calling people ignorant was unnecessary on your part, given that  the situation is not as simple as you understand it to be.

WTH APPLE!  I bought this lame "upgrade" for airplay and it doesn't work on my air?  lame.lame.lame.  Let me weak old mac stuggle through airplay mirroring if I want it to.

lame.

So why didn't Apple just say up front that it's not going to work on the majority of the computers?  At least when I purchased the iphone, I knew going in that I wasn't going to be able to view flash websites.  This was the one feature I was actally looking forward too!

For the meantime untile Apple fixes the issue and ****** off the rest of us pre 2011 users, you way want to try airparrot for $10.  They figured out how to stream our 2011 pre users to Apple TV.....

too bad apple, too bad... I'm not going to buy anything of Apple ever!!

Bugger! Mine is an early 2009 model. :/

AlaninSEA wrote:

...you way want to try airparrot for $10.  They figured out how to stream our 2011 pre users to Apple TV.....

Thanks, I'll go have a look now.

Forgot to say that airparrot trial version is activated for only 20 min.  Don't forget to "Enable Audio" when the symbol appears on the upper right hand of your screen (will also need to reboot the computer).

Have a mid-2010 27" iMac i7 with 8 GB of RAM.  Most powerful computer I've own and they cound not figure this one out.

Apple -don't advertise what you can't offer!!!!