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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

> To be fair, OS X updates are free and usually run well even on 5+ years old hardware

Unless your hardware has been made "incompatible" by Apple (not for any technical reason, but simply because they wish you'd buy new hardware).

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What hardware have they dropped support for without a technical reason? To my knowledge, the only Intel Macs they've dropped support for are ones with 32-bit processors, 32-bit firmware (requiring a 32-bit kernel and drivers even if the processor is 64-bit), or really old GPUs that can't support recent versions of OpenGL.

To my knowledge no Linux distro packages install media supporting 32-bit firmware and 64-bit kernel+CPU, but it's definitely possible to built a 32-bit GRUB EFI binary and have it load and execute a 64-bit kernel on a 64-bit CPU. I've done it on such a Mac. And there are a number of tablets built this way also (unfortunately).

Intel only contributed the code for that a year ago, so while we now know it can be done, there's no particular reason to believe that it's easy to get working properly. The messy mix of EFI 1.x and UEFI 2.x that Apple uses could make things even trickier.

Early 2009 X-Serve?

It has a quad-core Xeon processor.

[update]

I am wrong. It is the late 2008 X-Serve that won't upgrade ...

Specs: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP10?locale=en_US

Supported H/W:

    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)

from https://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/

I am not sure why you were downvoted. I'd think it is in Apple's vested interest to actually not treat the older hardware so you buy new one. I am no talking about really old hardware. Example: I have seen my iPhone 5S get substantially slower after update to ios 8+.

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