Apple's OS X Mountain Lion: The Macs that will be left behind | Hacker News Reader

Apple's OS X Mountain Lion: The Macs that will be left behind

latimes.com

10 pointsankitsingh17 comments

Apple hasn't yet released its official list of Macs that won't get support for Mountain Lion and company officials weren't available for comment on the matter on Friday morning. But in releasing its developer preview of the new operating system Thursday, an intrepid programmer did some digging and shared with the Apple-centric blog TUAW a list of machines that, as ArsTechnica puts it, are getting "voted off the Mountain Lion island."

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> This, sadly, is an inherent side effect of progress as Apple moves ahead and continues what it started in Mac OS X Lion, in bringing OS X closer to iOS.

This is a lot of what is wrong with the press about Apple.

1. It has nothing to do with moving to iOS. Same for many changes that annoy people on Lion. My pet peeve are the monochrome sidebar icons in Finder, iTunes, etc., which offer less clues for the eyes - say what you want, but they have nothing to do with iOS. The only parallel on iOS is 'Settings' and it uses colorful icons. Blaming it on an unavoidable convergence with iOS is a lazy way to avoid any debate.

2. Unless there is anything wrong with the actual hardware, this is not 'for progress' but just planned obscolescence as usual. Apple has zero financial incentive to support old devices. I don't blame them for that, it seems like they are legitimally trying to make money off software, but right now they're a hardware company.

The companies that actually strive for software market penetration/hardware conservation like Microsoft or Google (with Android or Chromebooks) have the incentive to run on everything at the latest version, but it doesn't work out either. I wish gov'ts would enforce a longer warranty on devices and even their vendor support for security fixes. Throwing away perfectly fine machines hurts...

This is called "planned obsolescence". It is almost certainly NOT because the computers "can't handle it". It is Apple's business model. Complaining about this is about as useful as complaining about the walled-garden approach to the App store. They release a new OS every year, and simultaneously phase out support for older Macs. There are positives (people aren't running thirteen-year-old computers, so developers can make reasonable assumptions about the power of the machine) and negatives (ridiculously wasteful), but it's their BUSINESS MODEL.

With that in mind, if you're going to argue that it's bad practice, please do so from a business standpoint, not from a technical standpoint. No one disagrees that your '07 Mac can handle 10.8 just fine.

I think this has more to do with Apple's "we want everyone to have a perfect experience" philosophy than it does with trying to force people to upgrade to squeeze more money out of them. Most people who just have to be on the latest Mac OS will also be using a pretty new Mac if they can afford it.

Except they fucked up the experience for those of us who wanted a desktop OS without stupid distractions and not a phone on our desktop. This is so bad that I have not updated any of my 6 macs to Lion and refuse to buy any more Apple hardware. I'll continue with Snow Leopard for as long as it is viable and leverage my hardware investment, but come time for upgrade Apple won't even be considered.

It's really sad to see what happened to a once nice and open ecosystem. I honestly can't recommend a Mac to any of my friends or family any more. Apple is on a draconian quest to kill general purpose computing and lock everyone in. It's time to fight the evil before it's to late. Unfortunately Apple already has so much power over hardware manufacturers that Microsoft could only dream of in its heyday.

What in the world are you talking about? What stupid distractions have been added in Lion? What have they locked down?

Turning pages in iCal, the hassle of changing groups in Address Book, Exposé being killed where Mission Control adds much more visual clutter (I don't need my wallpaper to shrink or to see other spaces), apps auto-restoring old documents, the 'app opens' animation, the list of recent documents in the Dock icon menu which I don't even want to think about while I'm focusing.

And then some stuff is distracting by being less obvious. For example, when the "default calendar" system in iCal is suddenly more complicated than the system it has replaced. (unless you only have one calendar)

Not all of these personally bother me, but "what in the world" seems a bit harsh when some of them are the most common complaints about Lion.

Except they fucked up the experience for those of us who wanted a desktop OS without stupid distractions and not a phone on our desktop.

Apple is not building your idea of a perfect experience. They're building what Jonathan Ive, Tim Cook and (formerly) Steve Jobs think is a perfect experience. They do not care what you think, and they don't want you mucking with it even after you've bought the hardware and the software.

I don't like this philosophy myself and haven't bought an Apple product in years because of it. I really wish I'd bought some Apple stock though.

Totally disagree. They are building what MOST people really DO want. Apple got it right a long time ago when they realized that people just want to get their email, browse the web, and view/manage their photos, videos, and music. Period.

That's all most people want to do. The Hacker News population does not represent "most people".

Still, under the hood there is plenty that you can customize and change if you are a programmer / power-user / etc.

From a business standpoint, they will start losing users. For myself, I upgraded to Lion exclusively for some of the under the hood changes. However, every time I open iCal or AddressBook, I regret the upgrade. I updated my fathers computer to Lion as well, and he also despises some aspects of it. Neither of us will be upgrading to Mountain Lion as it is, and obsoleting working hardware makes these sorts of decisions even easier. Of the people I know with macs (about 5), nobody has upgraded to Lion, and one person explicitly upgraded to Snow Leopard to avoid Lion.

With this new approach, Apple will quickly achieve a very fragmented user base making both support and development more difficult. It's hard to argue that their tactic has "worked so far". To date, updates to OSX have been very infrequent, obsolescence of non-iOS hardware has been infrequent, and OS updates have had significant new features, not just a new package of Apple made apps.

I was wondering about this the other day. It seemed like there would be no real grounds to drop anything that can run fully 64bit, has a decent amount of RAM and a remotely decent GPU.

I have a Mid-2009 17" MBP myself, allegedly clear this time. If/when that eventually stops getting updates, there's no way I'm buying a new system if it is otherwise still working fine. Not being on the very latest OS isn't the end of the world.

I have a MacBook Pro that was one of the last models to not have a i5 or i7 CPU. My MBP runs the Mountain Lion developer preview fine with one exception: screen and audio sharing to an Apple iTV doesn't work. I understand this: the i5 and i7 have some sweet new instructions that make video compression faster - so no complaints from me.

I really do not understand why any of the Mac Pros would lack the horsepower to run Mountain Lion. The GPU in mine is pretty weak, but it would be cheap to upgrade the GPU.

Here's hoping the installer either a) checks actual machine specs rather than machine "version number") (not likely), or b) can be cajoled (annoying).

It's not a lack of horsepower. It's an infuriating artificial restriction against running 64-bit Darwin kernels on 32-bit EFI. There's no technical reason why a 64-bit kernel can't be launched by a 32-bit EFI, but for some reason Apple has decided that 64-bit kernels will only boot from 64-bit EFI, and Mountain Lion will ship with a 64-bit kernel.

See http://netkas.org/?p=830 for more.

edit: Oh, and as to your whitelist/blacklist point - yes, Mac OS X checks what systems it can be installed on by Board IDs stored in "InstallableMachines.plist," not by enumerating the hardware.

I can't remember where I heard this, so don't quote me, but I've heard it partially has to do with graphics kexts in some or all of those machines being 32-bit and a reluctance from Apple and the manufacturers (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) to update them. That said, I'm not sure how that would rule out the Mac Pro, then, because the chips I heard cited were the old Intel chips (950, x3100) and AMD chips (X1600).

Again, don't quote me!

edit: this assumes Apple is moving to 100% 64-bit.

This makes sense for non-Mac Pro machines, although so far it doesn't seem to be the case as Mountain Lion will actually run on those machines if they're added to SupportedHardware.plist [0].

However, in the case of the Mac Pro it's hard to see the restriction as anything other than arbitrary and frustrating.

0: http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-de...

This is mildly depressing but highly informative. Thanks for the link.

People need to remember that this is a preview release targeted primarily at developers. It may well drop support for all the machines in question when it ships in the summer, but it wouldn't be at all surprising if some future preview release supports more older hardware.

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