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If you're too busy to read the whole article or watch the keynote, also note that you can upgrade directly from Snow Leopard or later. They listed the hardware models which will take it as well– the 2007 Mac Minis and MacBook Pros are supposedly good to go.

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While they may be good to go, I still like waiting a week to upgrade apple products. They do occasionally break things important to my workflow. The last one for me was VirtualBox support along with the Xcode commandline tools. While workarounds and patches appear fairly quickly, it is prudent not to put myself out of action, potentially for days or weeks, if I can avoid it.

It's always a good idea to create a smaller partition and install the new OS. Make sure that everything is working, then upgrade the main partition.

Or just wait for someone else to try it. I'm not sure what anyone ever loses by waiting a week or so.

If you're concerned about application compatibility, you can check out RoaringApps. They have a new table for Mavericks compatibility.

http://roaringapps.com/apps

Apple is all about that planned obsolescence, right!

That argument usually applied to iOS an their practices about non easily user repairable hardware.

I’ve heard it made plenty times in reference to OS X (also iOS where they are really pushing the boundaries of the hardware to bring it to old devices). Every time a new version comes out, actually.

> That argument usually applied to iOS...

That's been the traditional criticism against Apple and Mac seemingly forever. (User of Apples since Apple II+ and original Macintosh.)

Planned obsolescence has been Apple's standard operating procedure since the beginning.

Whatever. Is that why I've used my desktop Macs for an average of about 8 years before replacing them, and same with the laptops, at which time, I sold them, still working, to others?

Indeed. What about the Apple II/e and original Macintoshes remaining useful for a decade after their release?

It can still be planned obsolescence even if the plan is a good one. ;)

Apple has always attempted to strike a balance between longevity and progress, especially on Macs (5-7 year lifespan, usually). iOS is faster-moving, and gets the shaft more often (2-3 years, sometimes less). The latter will hopefully get better as the mobile hardware catches up to desktops; most of the forced upgrades have been due to low RAM or other hardware deficiencies.

Since you're being credulous, I'll bite:

Just because it's "free" and you can update systems that are on Snow Leopard, doesn't mean it'll update all systems on Snow Leopard. For those paying attention, Apple killed off quite a bit of hardware with 10.8. Those certainly aren't upgradable to Mavericks.

To call that planned obsolescence is completely ridiculous.

It's not. All hardware has a planned lifecycle and it's just up to them to draw the line in the sand. They'll also do it through software updates by making less features available on the older model in order to compel you to upgrade to the newer. "AirPlay Mirroring" only available in Sandy Bridge or greater because of the usage of Intel QuickSync is an example of that.

For any cocoa/obj-c dev that's dealt with constant deprecated API's on Mac, they know exactly what I'm talking about.

> They'll also do it through software updates by making less features available on the older model in order to compel you to upgrade to the newer. "AirPlay Mirroring" only available in Sandy Bridge or greatest because of the usage of Intel QuickSync is an example of that.

By your own admission that's not "in order to compel you to upgrade to the newer." That's because the newer hardware is required to make it work satisfactorily.

No, because third party alternatives like AirParrot or Beamer work just as well and without the hardware restriction.

They may work, but they don't work just as well.

Oh yes, you're right. They don't work just as well, they work better.

AirParrot has additional features like sending only one specific application window to the ATV and control over quality.

Beamer lets you seamlessly stream any kind of movie format you want and also gives control over subtitles.

Both work all the way back on 10.6. I don't suppose you could give me any advantages of Apple-branded AirPlay Mirroring huh?

This has been discussed before.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/mountain-lion-airplay-m...

Tried Airparrot - quality was terrible in comparison.

Year old review (software improves) and you may have missed this: http://cdn.arstechnica.net//wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Scree...

Too much work for my mom, thanks.

I get the impression you've never actually used the software.

The point of Quick Sync is to offload video encoding to specialized hardware, which reduces CPU usage. A quick Google search confirms that AirParrot uses a lot of CPU, which hurts the user experience. I won't opine on whether this is worth dropping the feature (and of course an application could be designed to use Quick Sync if available and fall back to the CPU otherwise; would be nice if OS X exposed this as a public API, although I think it's not hard to get at anyway), but there certainly is an advantage.

I think it is more that Apple didn't want to implement and maintain two different solutions for the same problem.

Also, their OS upgrades are more expensive than everyone else's because their customers are idiot sheep easily fooled by flashy marketing. That's why this is so expensive.

I'm hopeful I didn't misread the slide, and that the original Macbook Air will be supported. Not my primary laptop, but it'd be great to move up from Lion.

Nope. The original MacBook Air used a shitty Intel GMA GPU. OS X 10.8 and later require a real GPU - NVidia, AMD, or Intel Sandy Bridge or newer.

10.8 didn't support that MBA, so I'm not sure why you would hope that 10.9 would suddenly reintroduce compatibility.

Maybe because the App Store requirements, rather strangely, say "OSX 10.6.8". I suspect that might well be why it's free - can't have lots of people paying for something they can't use, much easier to do the checks during installation than at POS, and there will be a LOT of compatibility issues with various machines on the cusp.

I tried buying Mountain Lion on a machine that ran Lion but doesn't support ML, and the App Store does have hardware checks at point of sale. It won't let you buy/download it if your machine is incompatible.

I wonder what the technical reason is for not letting Leopard users upgrade. It seems like everyone I know with a 2008/2009 is still on 10.5.8

No app store in Leopard? If the MAS is the only distribution vector, there's a bootstrapping problem from 10.5 IIRC.

10.5 doesn't support the Mac App Store. And, why would they put effort into testing the upgrade process from an OS that is only still used by people who never upgrade the OS?

snow leopard was the first 64-bit only OS X. You couldn't allow all Leopard users to upgrade, so that's not what's in the press release. People may still be able to upgrade though, if they can work out how to install the App Store.

Snow Leopard still supported 32-bit processors. Lion requires a 64-bit processor, and Mountain Lion requires 64-bit firmware.

apologies - I remembered it wrong!

The most technical reason for not offering an upgrade to all 10.5 users is: PowerPC-Architecture! 10.6 was the first Intel-Only OS X, and 10.5 the last one for PowerPCs.

The question isn't why they aren't offering upgrades to all 10.5 users, it's why they're not offering upgrades to any 10.5 users.

As someone who is using Snow Leopard (10.6) on some older macs. The path to upgrading seems to be through apple support or buying a snow leopard disc. (as the app store offers me mountain lion upgrades on machines that don't support it).

In mid-2012 Leopard users were offered a free DVD upgrade to Snow Leopard to get the App Store (and access to later upgrades).

Didn't Lion not support 2008 models? I think it's cool, and unusual, that they can now upgrade to Mavericks.

I'm running Lion on 2007 MacBook, so it should support 2008 models.

The problem was with Mountain Lion, because it required 64-bit EFI (or something) which older models don't have.

My girlfriend uses a 2008 aluminum MB (non-Pro), and I never had any issues upgrading her to previous versions of OSX. Now it's running Mountain Lion and downloading Mavericks as I type.

Nice. My 2008 black macbook wouldn't upgrade. But I went MacBook Air, which was great.

Depends on which model and when you bought it. If it's an iMac, you're good all the way back to mid-2007. Mac Pro needs to be early 2008 or later. Mac Mini needs to be early 2009 or later.

If it won't run Lion/Mountain Lion, it won't run Mavericks either, unfortunately.

Also note that some features (e.g., AirDrop) aren't available on older machines running Mountain Lion, even if the basic OS runs. I don't know if that's been changed for Mavericks.

No luck for us 1st gen 2006 macbook users!

There was no luck on Lion or Mountain Lion either.

Sadly the first Core Duo's were 32 bit.

With that in mind, I can understand Apples motivation to move the whole line to 64 as soon as is possible.

Sadly first Core Duo's sucked so much that I spent way more time on G4 than on CD.

That's confusing, didn't they charge to upgrade to ML. Doesn't that then infer they should refund anyone who paid for an ML upgrade?

Why? I got what they paid for. I don't feel slighted.

I don't really understand how you can be confused.

Where can I find the list of models?

http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/

I'm always confused turning "mac late 2008" into the indetifier the mac system profiler reports: eg: Model Name: MacBook Model Identifier: MacBook7,1

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