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Can my Mac run OS X Mountain Lion?

17 February 2012 5,497 views 16 Comments

Time marches on and Apple’s never been shy about dropping legacy technology compatibility and the company’s latest, greatest operating system, a.k.a. OS X Mountain Lion, cuts off a huge number recent Macs, many less than three years old — ouch. Get the details here.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard dropped support for PowerPC Macs and OS X 10.7 Lion dropped the Rosetta PPC emulation environment, as well as the earliest Core Solo and Core Duo Intel Macs.

With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which is currently available as a developer beta, the cut is Intel’s 950GM and X3100 graphics — Macs running those graphic subsystems aren’t supported. Further, you will need a Mac with a 64-Bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better.

Rather than trying to make sense of that, here are separate lists of which Macs will and won’t run OS X Mountain Lion.

Macs that live on: (DP4)
• 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)

And, the dead Macs walking:
• Late 2006 iMacs: iMac5,1, iMac5,2, iMac6,1
• All pre-unibody MacBooks (MacBook2,1, MacBook3,1, MacBook4,1)
• MacBook Pros released prior to June 2007 (MacBookPro2,1, MacBookPro2,2)
• Original MacBook Air (MacBookAir1,1)
• Mid-2007 Mac mini (Macmini2,1)
• Original Mac Pro and its 8-core 2007 refresh (MacPro1,1, MacPro2,1)
• Late 2006, early 2008 Xserves (Xserve1,1, Xserve2,1)

I haven’t read anywhere how much RAM you will need, but 2GB seems a reasonable assumption.

On the OS side, you will need Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) or later — additional details from Apple.

via TUAW, Cult of Mac and Mac OS X Daily

Related posts:
—  New in Mountain Lion: Power Nap
—  New in Mountain Lion: GateKeeper
—  New in Mountain Lion: Software Update
—  Three ways to minimize, three ways to hide in OS X
—  What is Mountain Lion’s sign? Leo, of course

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