My mom's late 2006 iMac isn't compatible with Mountain Lion after I upgraded her RAM. Why is this?
ML needs features that are not available in 2006 iMacs.
The goos news is that id your iMac was made in late 2006 (not early or mid) you can run Lion, assuming you need features in OSX that do not exist in SL.
Assuming you have a late-2006 iMac*, it likely doesn't contain enough memory to run Mountain Lion smoothly. I purchased a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with 4GB of memory and Mountain Lion, and it slowed down to a crawl when I ran a Parallels 8 virtual machine one it that I gave one gigabyte of memory of its own. Moutain Lion eats up about 2 gigabytes all by itself. I concur with steve359, Lion should run pretty well on your iMac. 🙂
* Specifications can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP28?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Yeah, I put 4G of RAM on it today, got Lion on it (and iBooks Author), so I'll be happy with that and the fact that my (almost) tech illiterate mother can now use iCloud. That's what Apple needs to understand: there are people like my mom who will never upgrade her computer and need to keep her entirely sufficient older model running smoothly. (I bought it for her in 2006 because she never used the crappy Dell that confused her and my stepdad ceaselessly with their idiotic pop-ups and confusing virus warnings).
The Mac is absolutely superior to non-Macs for older folks with little or no computer or tech experience, and my folks actually use the computer (sometimes) and recently got iPhones (yet were only using them as phones until I arrived for the holidays and set up their Apple ID's, iCloud, email, apps, even putting showing them how to put their favorites in the speed dial...whew!), HOWEVER, they are not about to pay $900 to $1500 or more for a newer iMac.
So I'll just pray that Apple keeps them in the loop for the forseeable future on good ol' Lion...
Lion will have reasonable support for a while. More so than SL, but not as many updates as ML.
Glad you are at a point that you feel happy.
Mountain Lion is only supported on about 40 models of Mac. See my
http://applehelpwriter.com/2012/08/03/will-mountain-lion-work-on-my-old-mac/
(ToU Disclaimer: this page links to other pages which promote my services as a technical writer)
I think you're spot on, TimmyTimmah. In terms of build quality and interface design, Apple is second to none, but the time where Macs could last up to 10 years (my old iMac G3 was used and kept up-to-date for a decade) has come and gone. It just occurred to me that the latest version can be installed on PCs that are older than the oldest Macs that support it.
~Faye
Why isn't Mountain Lion compatible with my mom's 2006 iMac?
