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From Mavericks to Mountain Lion Haswell MBP

Hello,

I recently ordered my first Mac, a 15inch rMBP, however I was disappointed to find out several CAD applications I use regularly are not supported at this time.


My MBP will ship with Mavericks already installed, is there a straightforward way for me to downgrade to Mountain Lion right from the start?


I will upgrade in a few months once third party devs catch up, so I wouldnt mind rebooting to a Mavericks default by that point.. I don't want to lose the free iWork/iLife etc.



If someone could shed a little light onto the matter I would appreciate it.


Jim

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Oct 28, 2013 2:25 PM

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4 replies

Oct 31, 2013 5:43 AM in response to Jim M91

You should probably boot into Mavericks and fire up your Appstore account with your apple ID. It should then associate your ID with the free iWork and iLife applications. Whether you can immediately view purchases and see your Mountain Lion purchase is unknown but if you can then create a new partition and install Mountain Lion to it.


How you stop using your new partition and get Mountain Lion to be the first partition on the disk is up to you. Carbon Copy Cloner, a second drive, boot to Mavericks, clone Mountain Lion partition to second drive, remove Mavericks, copy second drive back to Mavericks partition.. that kind of thing. I don't believe there will be an easy "downgrade" option and you will need to have purchased Mountain Lion to download it on your Appstore account.

Oct 31, 2013 5:48 AM in response to Jim M91

Jim M91 wrote:


Hello,

I recently ordered my first Mac, a 15inch rMBP, however I was disappointed to find out several CAD applications I use regularly are not supported at this time.


My MBP will ship with Mavericks already installed, is there a straightforward way for me to downgrade to Mountain Lion right from the start?


I will upgrade in a few months once third party devs catch up, so I wouldnt mind rebooting to a Mavericks default by that point.. I don't want to lose the free iWork/iLife etc.



If someone could shed a little light onto the matter I would appreciate it.


Jim



With some historical exceptions, it usually is not possible to boot a mac with any version of OS X older then the version it shipped with.


You may find that you simply cannot boot anything older than OS X 10.9 on a brand new machine, or if it does boot with an older version, the system will be unstable - see http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2186


<edit> you might be better to think of running a virtual machine in Mavericks to run an older version of OS X.

From Mavericks to Mountain Lion Haswell MBP

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