The golden master build of Mountain Lion beta was recently seeded to developers. Now that we’re nearing close to a public release, it’s a good time to remind everyone exactly which Macs are supported by the newest version of OS X. Mountain Lion drops support for some older model 64-bit Macs…
The public release of Mountain Lion is happening in about a week. Here’s a list of supported Macs from Apple’s website.
Your Mac must be one of the following models:
– 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)
Now you may be wondering, why are some 64-bit Macs not supported by Mountain Lion? Ars Technica sheds some light on a possible reason for this.
Apple declined to tell us the reasoning behind leaving some of these models out of potential Mountain Lion upgrades, but we suspected it was related to an updated graphics architecture that was designed to improve OS X’s graphics subsystem going forward. Our own Andrew Cunningham suspected the issue was related to graphics drivers, since the GPUs not supported under Mountain Lion had drivers that were written before 64-bit support was common.
Information included with the first Mountain Lion GM now corroborates the connection to 32-bit graphics drivers as the culprit. While Mountain Lion is compatible with any Mac capable of running a 64-bit kernel, the kernel no longer supports loading 32-bit kernel extensions (KEXTs).
Either way these requirements for Mountain Lion will cover the majority of Mac users. Mountain Lion will be available in “late July” for $19.99 on the Mac App Store.
Is your Mac supported?
Source: MacRumors
