Mac App store won't let me re-download Mountain Lion on a Late 2012 Mac mini, says computer is incompatible.

I should have been more clear about the purchase history. The Mountain Lion copy was purchased as an upgrade to Lion for the MacBook Air which was a late-2010 model. I'm using the Mac mini to try and re-download that original purchase in order to create my recovery key.

Well said.

If I follow the advice of the fellow above and download the installer via Internet Recovery, I'm not going to be given access to the installer for the sake of making my key—or will I? At want point in that workflow will I have the opportunity to boot to back into my already working OS (on the 2012 mini) in order to do what I need to do?

I have access to a most recent release (2012) 13" MacBook Air (FWIW, the 2011 MacBook Air in question above happens to be an 11"). Am I likely to run into the same problem as with the 2012 Mac mini, where the version in the App Store still hasn't been "synced"?

Unbelievably annoying. Worse still is while I'm stuck in self-help purgatory, if something were to happen the recommendation would be to visit the Genius Bar. It's not a bad service, but why should I have to rely on it if I'm perfectly capable of taking care of everything myself provided the correct tools are at hand?

Incidentally, what happened with the 2011 MacBook Air is that the stock hard drive was formatted prior to sale. The recovery partition was left intact. I used it to begin the reinstallation of the OS. It was working fine until I realized I didn't have enough time at the moment to continue to download the required assets. The computer needed to be transported 200 miles away and time was of the essence.

I cancelled the installation with the intention of revisiting it when I got to my destination. When I did so, even after freshly formatting the drive again in Disk Utility, I got an error right as the download began. No amount of tries made a difference. Same error. The only thing that will work, obviously, is a USB key or the equivalent with the installation files pre-downloaded—unless someone here has some other insight.

Thanks so much to all.

>>>>This case is different. A Mid 2012 MacBook Air came with Lion but now they have Mountain Lion, and it uses the same version as the Mid 2011 MacBook Air, so you can use it to download Mountain Lion and install it on the Mid 2011 MacBook Air

This 2012 13" MacBook Air was purchased about 1 month ago. It shipped with Mountain Lion.

Correct, but you're saying that a mid-2012 MBAs (5,1 and 5,2) came with Lion at one point. At first i thought not, but now i think of it I suppose they did since they were part of the ML free update program. I'll give this a try. I have a feeling it will work just fine.

Still, it's ridiculous that we're subject to the backend machinations of differing builds. As a user, when I click "Download" on a past purchase of Mountain Lion, I should at least get an installer. During setup, the installer itself should ping Apple for the relevant build and take it from there instead of waving the user handcuffed. From the user's perspective, as long as I have a computer on the list of models compatible with ML, I shouldn't ever be denied a working download of something I own. Moreover, an error of incompatibility with no other included insight is just asinine when the very computer being used to download the supposedly incompatible ML is running ML itself. Users don't realize that there are different builds within a release. They look at an error like that and think Apple crazy. Well, that or themselves.

Thanks.

Apologies for the autocorrect-based typos. I'm using an iPad to type these responses.

>>>>>Ahh, there's the rub. You don't own the OS. You merely have a license to use it under the conditions set by Apple.

>>>I realized this right as I sent the reply—just as I don't own the song, the movie, the book, and so on that I willingly paid for. Maybe Bruce Willis' peculiar desire to legally bequeath his digital music to his daughters is more than just a statement. Maybe it will have far-reaching implications.

Or, much more likely, it won't make any difference at all.