OS X Mountain Lion Officially Drops Support for Some Older 64-Bit Macs
With Apple having seeded the golden master build of OS X Mountain Lion to developers earlier this week, the company has locked in which Macs will support the forthcoming version of the operating system. While the machine requirements have been known for some time, the seeding of the final public release is a good time to remind users which machines will support Mountain Lion.
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)
Ars Technica has more on Apple's decision, including discussion of why Apple has dropped support for some early 64-bit Macs that do support OS X Lion.
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).
The report notes that some of the GPUs used in early 64-bit Macs were deprecated before 64-bit KEXTs were in common usage, and thus they were never upgraded from their original 32-bit KEXTs. With the affected machines now being a number of years old, Apple apparently decided that it was not worth investing the resources to upgrade those drivers to 64-bit in order to support OS X Mountain Lion.
Popular Stories
Apple plans to announce the iPhone 17e on Thursday, February 19, according to Macwelt, the German equivalent of Macworld.
The report, citing industry sources, is available in English on Macworld.
Apple announced the iPhone 16e on Wednesday, February 19 last year, so the iPhone 17e would be unveiled exactly one year later if this rumor is accurate. It is quite uncommon for Apple to unveil...
Apple today shared an ad that shows how the upgraded Center Stage front camera on the latest iPhones improves the process of taking a group selfie.
"Watch how the new front facing camera on iPhone 17 Pro takes group selfies that automatically expand and rotate as more people come into frame," says Apple. While the ad is focused on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the regular iPhone...
Apple turns 50 this year, and its CEO Tim Cook has promised to celebrate the milestone. The big day falls on April 1, 2026.
"I've been unusually reflective lately about Apple because we have been working on what do we do to mark this moment," Cook told employees today, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. "When you really stop and pause and think about the last 50 years, it makes your heart ...
In the iOS 26.4 update that's coming this spring, Apple will introduce a new version of Siri that's going to overhaul how we interact with the personal assistant and what it's able to do.
The iOS 26.4 version of Siri won't work like ChatGPT or Claude, but it will rely on large language models (LLMs) and has been updated from the ground up.
Upgraded Architecture
The next-generation...
While the iOS 26.3 Release Candidate is now available ahead of a public release, the first iOS 26.4 beta is likely still at least a week away. Following beta testing, iOS 26.4 will likely be released to the general public in March or April.
Below, we have recapped known or rumored iOS 26.3 and iOS 26.4 features so far.
iOS 26.3
iPhone to Android Transfer Tool
iOS 26.3 makes it easier...
