Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Running Mountain Lion on your Mac (Update)


With OS 10.8 Mountain Lion coming out soon, I thought it would be good to talk about upgrading to Mountain Lion. Apple has issued a very specific list of models that Mountain Lion can be installed on. After doing some research as to Apple's list of Macs, I discovered it wasn't necessarily the Mac itself but it's video card that is the issue. Mountain Lion is relying more heavily on the Graphics Processing Unit or GPU than in past versions of the Mac Operating System. One interesting question I've come across a few times is, "If you have an older Mac Pro tower and you were to upgrade the video card, would that older Mac Pro become compatible with Mountain Lion?" The answer is unfortunately no. The first Mac Pros have 32-bit Firmware and in order to run Mountain Lion, the software would have to include a 32-bit OS X Kernel to be compatible with the early Mac Pro's 32-bit Firmware. Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion is a fully 64-bit operating system and is only compatible with Mac Pros with 64-bit EFI Firmware.

Below is Apple's exclusive list of compatible Macintosh models that can be upgraded to Mountain Lion: 

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)
Also, you can contact John here at MacMobile and he can find out if any of your Applications are not compatible with Mountain Lion before upgrading. If you have further questions or you would like MacMobile to do the upgrade for you, please Contact John. Thank You.

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