Apple's OS X Mountain Lion drops support for some older 64-bit Macs

Some older 64-bit Macs have just had their support dropped from Apple's OS X Mountain Lion.

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Apple's next-generation OS X Mountain Lion comes out later this month, with the OS hitting Golden Master status just 24 or so hours ago. This means the company has locked in which Macs will support the upcoming OS. Apple have listed which Macs will support Mountain Lion:

Apple's OS X Mountain Lion drops support for some older 64-bit Macs | TweakTown.com
  • 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)

Ars Technica talks of the decision of why Apple dropped support for some of the early 64-bit Macs, that don't have support under Mountain Lion. They said:

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).

NEWS SOURCE:macrumors.com

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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