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Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring: Older Macs not welcome

3 July 2012 17,468 views 32 Comments

And, by older I mean more than a year old. Although OS X Mountain Lion AirPlay mirroring works with a second generation (i.e. 2010) Apple TV or newer, you will need a mid-2011 or newer iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. Sadly, Apple doesn’t list a single Mac Pro model that is compatible with Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring.

Looking forward to broadcasting movies, music and more from your less-than-fresh, though still OS X Mountain Lion compatible, Mac using AirPlay Mirroring? If you don’t have a mid-2011 or newer mofrl, just put that thought out of your mind right now.

Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion specifications and requirements page offers the following guidance for AirPlay Mirroring aspirants:

Feature-Specific Requirements: AirPlay Mirroring:

Requires a second-generation Apple TV or later. Supports the following Mac models:

• iMac (Mid 2011 or newer)
• Mac mini (Mid 2011 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Mid 2011 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer)

What’s up with that? My best guess is that these Macs ship with Intel chips (Sandy Bridge) containing the latest and greatest version of Intel Insider, which allows streamed DRM encrypted Hollywood content to play — just guessing…

What’s your take?

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32 Comments »

  • Al said:

    so get airparrot. It works pretty well on my 1st gen Air

  • Steelbuck said:

    Or just get a mini-display port adapter to whatever input your TV takes.
    Just because it’s Apple, doesn’t mean it’s best.

  • Peter said:

    Y’know, the iTunes Store is probably the worst thing Apple has ever done.

    Yeah, yeah, I know. It revolutionized the industry. Blah, blah, blah. The problem is, it put Apple squarely in the sights of the music/movie producers and their ridiculous restrictions.

    Anybody remember the Rip, Mix, Burn ad? Consider the tag at the end, “It’s your music. Burn it on a Mac. Y’dig?” People had been burning mix CDs for years on PCs. But nobody big company had actually said, “Hey! It’s okay to do this!”

    Then Apple partnered with the music companies and released the iTunes Music Store. Buy your music from Apple! Reasonable prices, great interface, good Karma, etc. It was a big success!

    Then the problems started.

    Apple released AirTunes-a great way to stream audio to your stereo. But there was only one channel and it was encrypted so that eeeeevil people couldn’t somehow intercept the stream and steal music wirelessly. Was there an encrypted channel? Nope. Could you use it with anything other than iTunes? Nope.

    Later on, Apple released ring-tones. You could take your music and use it as a ring-tone for your phone! You just had to pay 99 cents for the privilege. Oh yeah, and it had to be a song that your purchased from the iTunes Music Store for another 99 cents. So you had to pay $1.98 for the song and the privilege of using a snippet as a ringtone. But this was cheaper than the other guys! That must be worth something, right?

    At the time, of course, the music industry was insisting that ring-tones were not fair use and they deserved to be compensated. While at the same time telling artists that they didn’t deserve any of that money because ring-tones were fair use.

    Then iCloud comes along. Store your music “in the cloud” and stream it to whatever device you have handy! And you only have to pay $25 a year for the privilege!

    At the time, of course, the music industry was suing companies that offered the same service for free. And they lost. Big time. So Apple users are the only ones paying this ridiculous license to the music companies.

    And now we have things like this. Why does Apple do this? Because the companies insist on it-if you use “their” content. Apple has the choice of fighting for it’s users and potentially angering the companies that provide this content, meaning that they may stop doing so, or doing what the music/movie companies say. Of course, it doesn’t hurt the fact that Apple may get some people to upgrade their machines.

    Hey Apple! It’s my content. Let me do what I want with it.

    Y’dig?

  • Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring: Not So Fast There, Older Macs! | MacTrast said:

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  • aBaboon said:

    Back to the topic at hand…

    You’ll find that the machines listed as required all have the Sandy Bridge intel line. Sandy Bridge was the first Intel chip to include something they call QuickSync, which is basically a dedicated video encode execution unit. Airplay is basically an encoded (H.264) video stream sent over a network to an Apple TV receiver that then displays the video stream on your TV/projector what have you.

    QuickSync is required because it allows Apple to completely offload the encoding and not have any of the CPU or GPU power tied up with that function. If they do it right, you should not see any difference in performance with Airplay on. There could be DRM on it as well, but the hardware requirements for such a thing would be minimal.

    Does Apple pander to Hollywood a lot? Yes they do and it isn’t cool, but the truth is, Airplay mirroring is a disruptive technology that Hollywood doesn’t like at all… It enables the average consumer to easily put content onto the big screen that they don’t want shown there. Any app or web page on your iPad or iPhone or Mac can now be pushed to your big screen with one button… Apple has done what Google never could with Google TV, and that is bring the full web, (and anything else) to your living room. Which is exactly where Hollywood doesn’t want it.

  • TrekMacMan said:

    Hey now, look chaps, SOMEBODY has to get tech pushed into the future. I happen to think that somebody will be the people at Apple. How do think that will happen? By remaining with older technologies or abandoning them and moving forward?

  • bbock said:

    I don’t buy it. It’s planned obsolescence which will be proved by the people who will provide a hack that makes it work on unsupported hardware. I don’t believe it because the AppleTV doesn’t use Intel. None of the iOS devices do. If they can do it without Intel’s help, so older Macs. Apple uses its own DRM. I think they just want people to want new computers. It’s the same thing why they won’t let several of the non-computationally complex features of iOS6 run on the iPhone 3S. Like the VIP feature in email.

  • Steve Chavez said:

    I’m not going to buy or not buy Mountain Lion based on where Airplay Mirroring works or doesn’t work. However, like FaceTime, Airplay Mirroring has been given obstacles that, as a result, make it less relevant, and give competition an opportunity to get mass acceptance. I use Air Video Server on my Mac Pro and use AirPlay with my Air Video app on my iPhone so that I can pick the movie I want to watch from my living room with the comfort of my iPhone or iPad’s touch screen. I enjoy the setup. However, this isn’t how things should work. Integration should work better. If you are going to run around town talking about a feature, it damned well better work on more than 4 models… This is crap…

  • ex2bot said:

    You can make your own ringtones from whatever for free. Not difficult. I know how on OS X, and I’m sure there are multiple solutions on Windows.

    As far as clouding your music, you aren’t prevented from using Google or Amazon’s solution. I use Amazon’s with my Apple products.

  • ex2bot said:

    BBock, I agree with you to some extent that some of it may be planned ob. Like Siri, for example, not available on iPhone 4. But the most important reason why the older phones don’t get some features is lack of RAM. The 3GS only has 256 MB of RAM. The first iPad was squeezed even worse by its 256 MB of RAM. Keep in mind, iOS doesn’t have virtual memory.

    Also, some features left out in the past have been due to performance. They didn’t allow wallpaper on the home screen of the 2nd gen iPod because of performance issues. It didn’t work right. May have been memory, too. I think it had only 128 MB. (Source: email from Jobs to someone or other)

  • Mike said:

    Maybe I’ll not upgrade yet as I currently use AirPlay on my 2009 iMac with Lion os over our network to tow separate conference rooms where we stream video. Hmm.

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  • Alan Shutko said:

    The iOS devices don’t have Intel quick sync, but they do have hardware h.264 encoding.

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  • Sam said:

    It’s unusual how Airplay won’t work from my MacBooK Pro, except via iTunes and only some formats. I refer to home movies recorded on Canon 7D and Sony HandyCam.

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