Apple To Release Mountain Lion On July 25
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
(I'm sure the site will be live tomorrow to get the free update.)
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)
Actually, its likely more a technical reason than a financial one. IIRC, the first generation of Core 2 Duo machines shipped with 32-bit EFI, even though the processor is 64-bit. The 64-bit kernel, which is now the default and only kernel in Mountain Lion, requires 64-bit firmware which your machine doesn't have.
They probably could have engineered the 64-bit kernel to work with the 32-bit EFI, or the probably could have shipped an EFI update for old Core 2 Duo machines, but those machines are 6 years old. I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere.
in other news: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results: $35B/$8B profit
The idea they couldn't afford or have the capacity to hire the talent they want is ridiculous. They just don't want to.
It isn't like these support issues are a surprise to them, they just have different priorities than fixing them.
Exactly! Like I said, I'm sure they felt their limited resources could be better spent elsewhere. Supporting 6 year old hardware is a very, very low priority, so they didn't spend any resources on it. As SJ himself said, focus is about saying "no". This video discusses OpenDoc, but it could just as easily apply to supporting 6 year old hardware: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs
Apple is always pushing forward. Sometimes perhaps a bit too aggressively, but they're always pushing forward.
This is true to some degree. I'm certain that if Apple decided they were willing to pay $800K/year each + signing bonuses of $3 million dollars for a team of 4-5 share OS engineers, they could, in fact, resolve this. (I base the $800K on what top flight OS/Kernel consultants make - around $400/hour, plus the money you would need to pull them away from their stock/equity packages at whatever other company they were working at, sometimes known as a "Make Whole" package)
The problems with that, though, is that the average Apple Sofware/OS engineer makes around $200K/year (fully loaded) - so you would end up with a $600K (+signing bonus) disparity - which would be unfair to existing employees.
You can't increase the salaries of all similarly qualified engineers to $800K - that would mean increasing salaries of _all_ engineers - and Apple's R&D costs would skyrocket, and all their other salaries would be out of whack.
Sometimes, even though you can buy your way out of a situation, the peripheral costs of doing so are so great, that what seems to be only a $10million problem to solve, might up ending costing you hundreds of millions of dollars.
So - you suck it up, stay focussed, and do what you can with the people you have.
Of course, what _most_ companies do, is instead hire some average (or, often, below average) engineers to try and do the port - they muck it up, and they ship a crappy product.
Better to do fewer things better. For example - photo stream and iTunes Match have been working well for me - but I wonder what percentage of Apple Employees use iCloud.com as their principal mail client, as compared to google employees using gmail as their primary email system?
Actually, it isn't. Hiring people is hard, and hiring bad people is expensive. It isn't even really a problem you can pay your way out of either, judging who will do well within an organization is incredibly difficult.
All that aside, I would be surprised if Apple didn't have internal budgets for their various projects. The latest version of OS X probably gets a budget on par with that group's market value, so it only has the hiring capacity of its tiny slice of the richest company in the world.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Apple-RVW14...
For a company that keeps boasting about its green credentials, they do generate an awful lot of waste.
(not to mention the extra work for app developers, who can either drop 15 million users's worth of adressible market, or make use of iOS6 features - the most attractive of which, such as autolayout, have no sensible fallback)
2) Apple releases a lot less products than the Android OEMs. So not sure compared to whom Apple is wasteful.
3) Personally I fail to see how autolayout is a particular attractive feature. And I haven't found it that hard to mix match SDKs/targets on iOS.
Re 2: The android makers don't seem to brag about being environmentally friendly. Apple can be held to higher standards as they're making that a supposed selling point.
Re 3: I guess it depends on the apps you're making. For autorotation and dynamically-sized content in particular it's extremely useful and saves quite a bit of manual work.
It's actually due to GPU capabilities of the older Macs. Thus, as well as your SSD'd 2006 Macbook runs, it still will not perform up to the standard they want on Mountain Lion.
I disagree that this would purely be done for a "profit increase"
Unfortunately there is no way to upgrade the video card in a laptop.
In other words: my terminal windows, browser, text editor and twitter client run just as well as on Lion.
The 32-bit Kernel no longer exists/is no longer maintained/was not upgraded for Mountain Lion.
The unsupported models have video cards that do not have 64-bit graphics drivers available for them.
The 64-bit Mountain Lion kernel is incapable of loading the old 32-bit graphics drivers for these cards.
Thus these video cards are literally incapable of supporting Mountain Lion.
Well of course it is, they're a hardware company. I don't think there's some conspiracy to deprecate 6 years old computers when the shelf life of a computer in the industry is 1-3 years - in other words, I don't think they're being unreasonable.
My three year old laptop is still running 10.5.8, and has never had a kernel panic or a single application crash in 3 years of heavy use.
It runs the latest version of every app I need without problem.
Why anyone would describe it as EOL simply because I have not updated the OS in a few years is beyond me. The thing still works perfectly.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/24/free-snow-leopard-discs-...
This tells me they're ready to pretty much bury 10.5 soon.
That said, as long as your system works and runs the apps you want - it is by no means bricked.
And yes - I'm aware that the upgrade costs $20 bucks. How much is a new macbook?
So to enable these machines to run Mountain Lion, the enterprising dev would have to backport all of the changes from the 64-bit-only Mountain Lion Kernel to the unmaintained 32-bit Lion Kernel.
Perhaps a simpler workaround would be to run Mountain Lion under VMWare. I believe it supports graphic acceleration and there should be no problem running a 64-bit OS on a 32-bit host with hardware visualization. It might just work.
Catch is it requires two internal drives and a supported graphics card to get it to boot, and the GMA950/X3100 has been cut. This means it's the unavoidable end of the line for MacBooks, iMacs and Mac Minis cut off by this update. It would require someone to write a 64 bit graphics driver/kext which is well beyond the scope of the hobbyist world.
However for us few Mac Pro 1,1/1'2 owners, this means our machines can keep on chugging. EFI is solvable limitation. No support for your GPU isn't. Problem with your solution is any machine old enough to be cut off by this would be pretty crippled by the overhead of running two operating systems at the same time.
Messages show up and seemingly random times on all devices. Sometimes, they don't both to show up on a device (typically the Mac). Sending still works fine, until over the weekend, when I became unable to initiate iMessage conversations on my Mac. I'm told that the other person is "offline", while I'm having a conversation with them on my iPhone.
It's really bad. I hope there have been some fixes, but since I'm running "Gold Master", maybe not.
In fact wouldn't surprise me if they've already started imaging machines with Mountain Lion, as they know when those machines will reach customers and can guarantee they'll arrive after the OS goes live.