Confirmed: Mountain Lion sends some 64-bit Macs gently into that good night

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/confirmed-mountain-lion-sends-some-64-bit-macs-gently-into-that-good-night/

by shawndumas • 14 years ago

61 68 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

_mayo• 14 years ago

Slightly OT, but did anyone else have any issue grokking the headline?

stavros• 14 years ago

It's a Dylan Thomas reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_go_gentle_into_that_good...

rickmb• 14 years ago

I think most people get that reference (and I don't know shit about poetry).

It just makes it all the more confusing and misplaced, so I'm guessing the one person that doesn't get it was the author...

DanBC• 14 years ago

Yes. I thought they'd confirmed that ML killed some machines, not that some machines wouldn't be able to upgrade to ML.

mbauman• 14 years ago

Let me recommend a poem to you. Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas.

  Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
  Because their words had forked no lightning they
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  And you, my father, there on the sad height,
  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175907

Edit: woops, late to the party. That's what I get for leaving a page up for 20 minutes before commenting...

sp332• 14 years ago

It's confusing because the computers aren't actually dying, they're just being left behind.

rangibaby• 14 years ago

It's a shame (although not surprising) that Apple has never released a firmware update for the 2006/7 MPs to allow them to boot into the actual 64 bit kernel, as opposed to the 32 bit kernel's extended (4GB> RAM) mode.

It is still possible to boot the 64 bit kernel and install ML by using a non-Apple bootloader (eg Chameleon), basically turning your Mac Pro into a 100% Apple hackintosh.

ageektrapped• 14 years ago

Is there somewhere I can go to check if my Macbook is one of those? I have to start buttering up my boss if I need a new one. (Xcode updates sure force upgrades. I was just fine with Snow Leopard, except iOS 5.1 wouldn't build without the latest Xcode, which is Lion only. Grrr.) Now this.

Aqua_Geek2• 14 years ago

If you have Lion, go to the Apple menu -> About this Mac. Then click on the "More Info…" button. The model year should be listed under the model, on the right.

If you don't have Lion, I think you can still get that info from the window that comes up when you click "More Info…", but I forget where (and don't have a machine running Snow Leopard handy ATM).

EDIT: The required models are listed by Apple (linked in the article): http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/

Flow3• 14 years ago

   iMac:~ Flow$ ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi
       | |   "firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">
   iMac:~ Flow$

EFI64 means ok for ML.

mturmon• 14 years ago

And the reverse, not OK for ML, looks like this:

    % ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi
        | |   "firmware-abi" = <"EFI32">

on an old (white polycarbonate) iMac.

Aqua_Geek2• 14 years ago

I was quite surprised that my now 5-year-old MacBook Pro will still be supported. Maybe it's time to fork out for that SSD upgrade and scrape one more year out of it after all.

mariusmg• 14 years ago

I got a 7 years old desktop which will get updated to Win 8. I would be surprised if i would NOT be able to update....

IanDrake• 14 years ago

I think that's what has left a lot of Windows Phone users completely surprised. Buy a top end Windows Phone right now and it won't work with WP8 in 5 months.

That said, I have an HTC Titan and don't really care.

[edit for typos]

kalleboo3• 14 years ago

I had an HP that didn't even work properly with a clean install of Windows 7 Pro (it came with 7 Home...). Audio over HDMI would bug out after a while with any drivers that didn't come on that HP "restore" partition.

lysol• 14 years ago

I'd say six years of OS upgrades before being EOLed is a pretty good deal. That said, my primary machine at home is an 07 Macbook so I have a little bit of envy going on.

microtonal3• 14 years ago

If you bought a 2008 Mac Mini, you are not so lucky. But how bad the effect of the new requirements is, remains to be seen. If Apple provides security updates for Snow Leopard and Lion for some years and if software remains compatible with those versions, it's not so bad.

Flow3• 14 years ago

Early 2008 MBP is ok for ML. I guess I was a bit lucky there since I got 64-bit EFI in it.

grecy• 14 years ago

Of course, EOL is a huge exaggeration.

I've been running a machine with 10.5.4 on it for 3 years, and just 2 days ago got a brand new Air with 10.7.x

I notice some differences, sure, but nothing that makes my old laptop "obsolete" or "EOL" compared to the new one. The real difference is the new machine has twelve times more storage, 4 times more RAM and another CPU core.

X-Istence• 14 years ago

I've got an 2007 15" 2.4 Ghz MacBook Pro and it is still supported by Mountain Lion...

It is still my primary machine (well, I've got two of them actually).

crag• 14 years ago

I have a brand new MBP (Retina) and I won't be upgrading to ML anytime soon (even though I get a free copy). I'm still bitter at the Lion upgrade process. It was a nightmare for me. And at that time I considered Lion to be Apple's trash OS. It's gotten better, After like 8 major updates. :)

Hell I tried to downgrade to SL, but that's not possible due to drivers.

Lesson learned. Also,I'm STILL being forced to download the OS from the App Store. I wouldn't mind that so much if the Store didn't have performance issues.

bluthru• 14 years ago

I thought the general consensus was that ML is more stable than Lion?

KevinBongart• 14 years ago

You can bring your MacBook to an Apple Store to download Mountain Lion faster.

microtonal3• 14 years ago

FWIW: I didn't encounter any crases in any recent ML builds. Since Apple is on a one year release schedule now, the differences between versions will (probably) not be as big as before.

Also, I never had any problems downloading Lion or Mountain Lion from the App Store. The downloads were always fast (I am on a 120 MBit downstream connection).

One would expect that they also release it on a USB stick as before (or DIY).

Synaesthesia• 14 years ago

Mountain Lion brings a lot of enhancements specifically for that Mac, I would strongly suggest getting it. Eg the Smart Sleep feature and using Core Animation in Safari, making it a lot faster.

tammer• 14 years ago

Welcome to every Mac OS upgrade I've ever encountered.

Although, I can't place the blame entirely on Apple. I find that for any consolidated release OS, a reformat is ALWAYS the way to go (after waiting a good long time for all the bugs to be ironed out). Hopefully one day Apple will drive the cost of their software down so much that they'll just go to rolling release.

batista3• 14 years ago

Ok, setiously guys, what are you doing wrong?

I have updated 3 personal Macs to Lion. Some upgraded, some a clean install. Didnt have a problem with any of them.

What broke for you? Drivers for exotic hardware? (on that front, I use Wacom tablets, Midi controllers and external FW audio cards and had no probems with either in Lion).

On the other hand I refuse to install ANY haxie.

Seriously want to know what broke for you -- and I dont mean stuff like "I prefered old Expose better"....

mkaltenecker• 14 years ago

Mountain Lion is a much improved version of Lion, no more. That’s great.

I don’t see any roadblocks to installing it. It already works much better than Lion.

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

With this type behavior I'm really happy to only spend money in OEM hardware and be able to select what OS to install and when to upgrade.

kalleboo3• 14 years ago

This has nothing to do with hardware, this is an OS issue. You can still install Windows 8 or Linux on these machines.

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

You are right, but I would be not happy with these constraints after paying so much for Apple hardware.

batista3• 14 years ago

OTOH i'm happy someone is advancing the state of peripherals and laptop construction (retina, thunderbolt, shedding dvd drive, etc). If we left it to OEM hw we would still have unmovable beasts of machines with RS232 ports...

kalleboo3• 14 years ago

We'd probably still have floppy drives too…

Hovertruck• 14 years ago

While I'm typically excited for upgrades to anything (OS, Individual apps, etc) I really have no desire to upgrade to Mountain Lion.

shawndumas• 14 years ago

It's always such a double-edged sword -- slough off legacy support to enhance present hardware's experience; schlep a dated portion (in this case a 32bit portion) of a code base and be inclusive.

Apple has always pushed for letting go of the past in order to reach for the future. I mean, come-on, the original Apple Macs had no arrow keys...

tatsuke953• 14 years ago

OS fragmentation? Call MG!

I kid, but it's interesting to see a few warts in the Apple ecosystem. Nobody can argue that they don't make awesome products, but as they slip into the "mainstream" we're going to see that it's more and more difficult to maintain a flawless complexion.

First, they remove the "can't get a virus!" ad, now this, within weeks. Being unable to upgrade your OS is no minor quibble. "It just works" indeed.

sirn2• 14 years ago

They've been doing this since Mac OS X 10.3 or so. It's nothing new.

tatsuke953• 14 years ago

I didn't realize that. Then why is this news? And why is it news when a phone company decides it's not worth the trouble to build out ICS for a 2 year old phone?

Honest questions. As people in this thread with more knowledge than myself have stated, there's a tradeoff in introducing new technology and maintaining legacy hardware support. OS fragmentation seems natural. And the better our tech gets (longer life of devices), the worse the problem will get. Considering how fast phone technology works, why is/was Android fragmentation such an issue?

saturdaysaint3• 14 years ago

Consistently, strategically EOL-ing/deprecating technologies, even through some painful transitions, is no small part of why Apple are in a good position today. There's no way they could've pushed the iPhone out the door in 2007 if they were obsessively keeping all of their Mac software compatible across Intel/PPC or providing support to OS9 users (not that those are completely meritless). The de-emphasis of backward compatibility has been a tactical advantage against Microsoft.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

I read this all the time but I don't buy it.

Hiring some maintenance programmers to take care of 10.6 or 10.7 security for X more years (and announcing that EOL date!) sounds pretty harmless. How would that hold Apple back at all? They have mountains of cash in the bank and those programmers wouldn't get into the way of 10.8 or 10.9 at all.

harshpotatoes• 14 years ago

On the other end of the spectrum, I work with lab equipment that are more than 15 years old but still work great. The software which interfaces with it is old, but still works with Windows. Would such a thing be possible with Apple, or would Apple's insistence on upgrading every few years force the lab equipment to be replaced at significantly greater cost?

frou_dh• 14 years ago

I see no reason to spend the money to replace my currently 3 year old MBP in the foreseeable future. Barring breakages, I will probably be using this thing in to 2015, even if it isn't getting OS updates by then. I wonder how long Apple keep stock of replacement batteries for older models.

jpxxx4• 14 years ago

Seven years, all models everywhere. Special considerations possible in the state of California.

Confirmed: Mountain Lion sends some 64-bit Macs gently into that good night

Related Stories