When will I be able to upgrade my Mac Pro to Mountain Lion:
2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, Memory 13gb 667 MHz DR2 FB-DIMM, 64GB free disk (system), 1TB free other disks, computer age mid 2007, Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5.
As of 11/28/12: Mountain Lion is not compatible with this computer.
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5), Mountian Lion Upgrade rejected
shelleyfromtucson wrote:
Mountain Lion is not compatible with this computer.
And it never will be, nor will any future OS X version. Sorry, but your hardware is now effectively deprecated as far as Apple and OS X are concerned. Lion is the end of the line for that machine.
You would need a mid-2008 or newer Mac Pro to run ML.
And you need 10.8.+ for....?
Your system does well with 10.6.8, and maybe 10.7.5. It was sold over 6 yrs ago, was in labs of Intel a year before that - the firmware is mid-2005 era 32-bit EFI (1.x) and not the UEFI 2.x 64-bit needed.
Thanks for the reply. I found the answer about 2 seconds after my post. I was just hoping that since I have 64-bit Xeon processors that there might be hope. I need the upgrade so I can upgrade to Parallels 8 so that I can install Windows 8 Pro to play with. So now I guess my decision is whether to buy a PC or a Mac Pro.
If you are a developer, or someone who can deal with that sort of complexity, there is a 64-bit EFI work-alike that loads into RAM called Chameleon and its descendant Chimera. It is too complex for regular folks. That would allow you to run 10.8.
It also takes up some RAM, which is rapidly becoming the scarcest resource on these older Mac Pros, because it is not available in dense enough modules or at cheap enough prices.
The memory economics of a 2009 and later Mac Pro are startlingly different -- 4*8GB for under US$275; 3*16GB for under US$600.
Perfect! Thank you so much. I will investigate Chameleon as an option.
You can run Parallels 8 and Windows 8 on Lion, you don't need to upgrade to Mountain Lion at all. My machine is very similar to yours and I'm doing this without any issues on 10.7.5.
Here are the OS requirements for Parallels 8:
So you only need to upgrade if you're on 10.5 or earlier.
Right you are. I see that now. The article I read just listed OS X Mountain Lion and I didn't go to the system requirements to investigate further.
However, after evaluating CPU Benchmarks on the various Xeon processors, I've decided that it's worth investing $1700 into a new Dell with a touch screen and Windows 8 Pro. The CPU Benchmark between my current Mac Pro at 3916 (X5365) vs. the new Dell at 9451 (i7-3770) is enough of a difference to bypass horsing around with Parallels and just invest in a new toy.
Thanks to all for your generous help!!!!
I installed Windows 8 Pro on a PC, quickly shutdown and walked it over to my Mac Pro 1,1.
5365s are 8-core and Geekbench in the 8000 pts range.
An apple 2010 refurbished is $1800 also, old 4-core 2.8 but can upgrade easily to W3680 6-core 3.33
I agree running native beats running VM
The issue with getting Windows 64-bit onto 32-bit firmware is just the install phase but a real pain. 64-bit Windows requires, if the system is EFI based. I do have one PC that does use UEFI and Windows 8, another that does not. Both are 2008-9 motherboards (Intel which supports UEFI, and Gigabyte which did not with X58). Apple of course last updated our EFI 1,1 and 2,1 back in 2007. Before UEFI was done standardized etc.
Mountain Lion is not compatible with this computer
