OS X Mountain Lion Drops Support for Many 2006-2008 Macs with Integrated Graphics

Cult of Mac points to a report from French site MacGeneration highlighting the system requirements for OS X Mountain Lion. Among those Macs currently compatible with OS X Lion, those with lower-end Intel GMA X3100 or GMA 950 integrated graphics will not be able to upgrade to Mountain Lion:

- Any Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook from late 2007 – late 2008 (Model Numbers: MB061*/B, MB062*/B, MB063*/B, MB402*/A MB403*/A MB404*/A, MB402*/B)

- The Mid-2007 Mac mini (Model Numbers: MB138*/A, MB139*/A)

- Late 2006 polycarbonate iMac (Model Number: MA710xx/A)

- The original early 2008 MacBook Air (Model Number: MB003LL/A)

Users of those older systems may still receive a few of Mountain Lion's enhancements such as with Apple's Safari 5.2 for Lion, but the vast majority of improvements will require a new machine with higher specs.

Update: At least one developer tells us he has been able to install Mountain Lion on a Late 2006 iMac and MacBook Pro without problems. So, the developer builds do not seem to enforce these restrictions.

Update 2: Systems using ATI's Radeon X1600 graphics will also be incompatible with OS X Mountain Lion.

Top Rated Comments

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bristleworm

89 months ago

Thats ok, Snow Leopard is still superior (faster, less bloated, more stable and has expose).

When did you last try Lion? It works flawlessly and really fast on my machines

Rating: 21 Votes

Lesser Evets

89 months ago

I'm shocked that they are already planning for another OSX within about a year of the last one. From a business perspective, it makes sense due to the price of recent OSX versions: release sooner, more and make more cash. $29/yr instead of $129 every 2.5 years or so, and drop hardcopy media and booklets and boxes and shipping and distribution etc.

Even more daunting is how quickly the old hardware is now being jettisoned from OSX. 4yo machines are already vorbei. Horrible, but the extras these OS versions are bringing aren't world-shattering necessary for productivity; OSX is loading up with trinket functions instead of spending time honing and improving their existing programs (some of which are bizarrely underdeveloped after a decade).

Rating: 17 Votes

utwarreng

89 months ago

Well that's a bummer, considering I just put an SSD into my early-2008 MacBook last night to try and squeeze another year or so out of it before updating.

Rating: 14 Votes

wikus

89 months ago

I agree, but given I was already tricked into getting Lion, I may as well go forward with Mountain Lion.

Oh, and missing from your list:
Widgets and Spaces.

Seriously, what the heck were they thinking when they decided to change how those worked? I vastly preferred the old system of having 2x2 spaces with a layer of widgets on top of them all. I could access any space or widget with just one gesture. Now if I want to get to my widget from space 4, I have to cross space 3, 2, and 1, and then go all the way back to get back to them.

Or go into that mess known as system control.

Bleh!

... maybe I can benefit from Apple's lack of including obvious features again and just write a little app that adds them in?

It gets worse. Mission control is a complete failure.

Try working on 2 documents in Illustrator, 3 in Photoshop and 1 in Indesign, and having a couple finder windows open, Xee, and some other stuff. Youre currently in one of your photoshop documents and you need to find a file, open it in illustrator and bring it into photoshop.

In Snow Leopard:

show all windows all at once in expose, go to finder (any finder window) open in illustrator, copy object, show all windows again all at once and go DIRECTLY into the desired photoshop document and paste.

In Lion:

show all windows in mission control, and then get stuck with all finder windows being grouped together. randomly choose one and then find window. then open file in illustrator, copy object and use mission control only to find all photoshop document windows AGAIN be grouped, which the only solution is to pick the front document and hope its the desired one, and if not, use mission control AGAIN to fan out all documents within the application, requiring another useless step, just like the initial step with finder.

Who the hell was in charge of mission control?

And why is there no option in system preferences for mission control to show all windows at once without grouping?!

Rating: 14 Votes

superfula

89 months ago

When did you last try Lion? It works flawlessly and really fast on my machines

Based on this post and his history here, he's never tried Lion.

Rating: 11 Votes

SilverOnemi

89 months ago

well, one of the main marketing plots is that " macs last forever ", but what about now? is 3 years the time our macbooks are supposed to last now?

Rating: 9 Votes

ArtOfWarfare

89 months ago

And why is there no option in system preferences for mission control to show all windows at once without grouping?!

Oh, and I just remembered one of my favorite features that they touted in Snow Leopard and then promptly removed in Lion.

Click and hold on any icon in the dock and it would show you all the windows for whichever app you were pointing at! Fantastically handy! So intuitive that even though it's gone in Lion, I still try doing it all the freakin' time (and it never works. :( )

Rating: 9 Votes

ScottishDuck

89 months ago

Why do people still defend Lion? It's a bad OS, it has bugs. It's OK to admit it, Apple won't ban you from their stores.

Mountain Lion for me so far has been a far more pleasant experience.

Rating: 8 Votes

wolfpackfan

89 months ago

So Mountain Lion won't run on a Mac mini I purchased new in 2007 but I have no problem at all running Windows 8 on a laptop I purchased in 2004. Strange. Thanks a lot Apple.

Rating: 8 Votes

wordoflife

89 months ago

I thought Apple used to advertise how their machines used to get updates for years. Like 7 years.

To be honest, the main features of ML are just a few new apps. If your computer can run L, then it should be able to run ML.

Rating: 7 Votes

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