os x mountain lion not compatible with this computer? what !!

Compatible computers are listed below.

iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)

MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)

MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)

MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)

Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)

Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)

Xserve (Early 2009)

Macs that can be upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion

1. iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
2. MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
3. MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
4. MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
5. Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
6. Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
7. Xserve (Early 2009)

Mountain Lion is compatible with Mid 2007 and later iMacs. If it's early, you can't install

Here are the specs for ML:

http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/

So, what model/year iMac is yours?

Seemingly the 3rd digit on the left of the serial number is the year of manufacture and the 4th & 5th is the month. My Mac Pro was built on 2006. Which means its not compatible with the latest version of OS X. Which is absolutely stupendous that I can not upgrade to the latest verion of the OS X with a machine that is only 6 years old, when one of Apples selling points is that there machines last. Come on Apple do something about this, please.

What do you want them to do about it? The machine hasn't stopped working, and we all missed the gun being held to your head requiing you to run ML on it in order to use it.

Has it magically become less useful?

I am in the same boat as you. I have a Mac Pro 1,1 (2006). It runs flawlessly and is my home server. Has 10g RAM, 4 1tb HDs, and upgraded video card to ATI Radeon 5770 1g video card. Which is funny it cannot install OSX Mountain Lion cause it is quite a bit faster then my MacBook Pro 15" (Mid-2010) which can have Mountain Lion.

Luckily Mountain Lion to me isn't really worth it. Yes some of the features are nice, but not really needed. My main fear is that apps will force using it. For instance the iBooks Author requires Lion, so people using OSX 10.6 cannot use it, forced to upgrade to Lion. That is my fear, apps will force one of my machines to become more and more useless.

The gun to head is that evetually the software will only run on +10.8, which has happened in the past. There should be a level of substraction between drivers and the OS.

sipeki wrote:

The gun to head is that evetually the software will only run on +10.8, which has happened in the past. There should be a level of substraction between drivers and the OS.

Eventually there will be no gasoline, no reason to get rid of your car now.

Ok, according to the serial number on my iMac it was built in July, 2007 so it is a mid-2007 and later iMac. Why does the install say my iMac is incompatible? It doesn't make any sense to me. I have Snow Leoparad and was going to upgrade to Lion this week (I just upgraded RAM to 3gb today) and Lion is no longer available, which I also don't understand.

Help anyone?

Here's one way to do it:

http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47

If we wanted to follow those instructions we would make a hackintosh and not give apple any money. Plus they even say that might not works.

Put a request for a Tech Support from Apple to call me.

On Monday one did, Reese Gordie ( someone form Newcastle, Englnd).

He said the upgrade failed due to the processor. Confirmed it was nothing to do with my video card. What I would need to do was upgrade the processor from 2.66 Ghz Dual-core Intel to a Two Dual core Intel. He then advised me to contact my local Apple store to confirm the upgrade of a processor will allow me to upgrade to the latest OS X. They would also give me a price for the upgrade. He gave me the number and told me the choose option 5.

Phoned today and spoke to a shop assistant at the local store. They said that they could not confirm that I would be able to upgrade to the latest OS if I upgraded the processor. As they were not technical and there was no one technical person avaiable to answer such questions. Also Apple do not do processor upgrades and advised me to go to my local PC store.

Sounds like I was given the run around.

Problem with upgrading processors is that Intel often changes the socket with newer processors. Also the cost of upgrading two processors. Its not really worth the money to upgrade the hardware on the off chance that I can upgrade the hardware.

Looks like this will be my last Mac.

Message was edited by: sipeki

The general information available is that unless your specific model was originally offered with an option to customize with a better processor, then it is not upgradeable because the other hardware would not be able to support a different processor. So, your best bet is to try to find the original specs for your model and see if it was offered with a custom built option - it should then be possible to try to get that particular (better) processor.

Having said that, I have read here of people having swapped their Core Duo for a Core 2 Duo and still were not able to download Lion: MAS recognized/read the machine ID as being a Core Duo (not sure where that is stored, maybe the logic board) and it would not allow them to download Lion even though they now had the requisite Core 2 Duo processor.

So, your best bet is to stay with what you have (Snow Leopard is an awesome system) or buy a newer Mac...