OS X Mountain Lion compatibility: will your Mac take it?

Getting OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on your existing MacApple News By Dan Grabham Friday at 14:56 UTC | Tell us what you think [ 1 comments ]

Tweet Will OS X Mountain Lion run on your Mac?

Apple has announced OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the next step in what is a clear plan to iOS-ify the Mac.

But will your current Mac take the update? The first thing to know is that you will definitely need to have OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or later because you'll need to download it via the Mac App Store.

We're not yet sure whether it's a requirement that you have OS X 10.7 Lion, though we wouldn't be too surprised.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard phased out support for PowerPC processors, so once again things are Intel-only. Here's the full list of Macs and OS X 10.8 compatibility:

MacBook Pro - you'll need to have either a 13-inch from mid-2009 on or a 2.2/2.4GHz 15-inch or a late 2007 or newer 17-inchMacBook - 13-inch 2008 in aluminum, early 2009 or laterMacBook Air - it needs to be ate 2008 or newerMac Mini - it needs to be early 2009 or neweriMac - it needs to be mid 2007 or newer Mac Pro - it needs to be early 2008 or newerXserve - early 2009

Unfortunately those Macs that won't be able to upgrade are numerous, including all the plastic model MacBooks before 2008, pre mid 2007 MacBook Pros and Mac Mini/iMac and most notably the original MacBook Air. You know, the one that came out of that famous envelope. In terms of graphics support this means anything with the ATI Radeon X1600 or an Intel GMA 950 or x3100 integrated graphics card.

Even the 2006 and 2007 versions of the Mac Pro won't be able to install OS X 10.8

Obviously all these details are based on the OS X 10.8 Developer Preview and may change for the full release. One thing's for sure - our G4 PowerBook is looking decidedly old now.

Tags: Mac, Apple, OS X, 10.8, Mountain Lion, computingTweetreddit!Stumbleupon  Your comments (1) Click to add a new commentbradavon

Friday at 16:12 UTC

1. It'll be annoying if you have to be running Lion first. That for some will be a wasted £20 just to then go to Mountain Lion.

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