Guest post by Ars Technica is reporting that certain 64bit Mac models won’t be able to run Mountain Lion. The problem is the graphic card drivers; these are still 32bit, and Apple is unwilling to update them to 64bit. A 64bit kernel can’t load 32bit drivers, so that’s that. Apple has a list of supported models on their Mountain Lion upgrade page, so you can easily check if your computer is capable of running Mountain Lion.
Just buy a new mac.
Posted from my iPhone.
I hope that was a sarcastic remark…
I know your comment was meant as bait, but yeah that might be an option for some. Another option would be to pass on Mountain Lion, and yet another would be to sell the Mac and buy a current generation i5/i7 Windows machine. You could even install a 64-bit GNU/Linux OS or a BSD alongside Windows and get your *nix on that way.
As for me? Well, my only Mac runs system 7.5.3 and boots in 10 seconds.
Mine runs System 6 and boots in like, 2 seconds. *
* Power of factory installed ROM based OS (Mac Classic, has system 6 in ROM)
Nice! Mine’s a Performa 460 with maxed RAM and a 200MB SCSI drive. Next upgrade is a 10MB Ethernet card.
It’s my only 68000 Mac. It now has a 500MB internal SCSI hard drive, 4MB RAM and triple boots System 6 from ROM, system 7.0 and 7.5.3 from Hard Drive. You can boot to System 6 at any point by cold restarting and holding down X and O (and possibly some of the modifiers, I forget) and it really does boot stupidly fast. I have no idea what the point of the ROM OS is, other than it being cool and requiring no working media drive to boot.
EDIT: another fun nugget of info, I installed 7.0 from Floppy, but 7.5.3 was from the CD image that Apple hosts. I downloaded it, mounted it on my 9500 and then installed on the classic over a local talk network… seriously!! Just a serial cable between two machines. Mind blowing.
I did have a 68000 Mac 2 at one point**, but I never turned it on and gave it away shortly after I got it. I do have a 6100/66 and a 9500/180MP (runs BeOS R5 and an unreleased Beta of R5.1) and a Beige Desktop G3/233 (10.3 is hacked on it with XPostFacto). I also have a Mac Mini with a Core i5 and a BlackBook (the late 2007 one, with Santa Rosa chipset, so unsupported by MountainLion.) I’d still have the 6100 running if only I could find the damn AAUI base10t adapter. That machine was sweet. My first Mac. I had it running MacOS 8.1 and System 7.5.3 at one point.
** I once got a tonne of Macs from eBay by losing an auction. The seller contacted me and told me the winning bidder only wanted the bundled software and sold me the G3, Mac 2, Mac Classic, Laserwriter 360Select and a tonne of manuals and software of £15. He was happy to see the back of it, I was happy to hord “treasure.”
Edited 2012-07-12 11:36 UTC
i have a macintosh lc III with a network card
Mine runs BASIC and powers on instantly.
My next upgrade will be a GUI.
I also have one of those. 2MB of RAM, 8MHz 68000 and 40MB HD. I have it now on mostly MacMINIX use. Only problems are that Minix 1.5 lacked sockets and TCP/IP and the processor beign 8MHz 68000 makes compiling stuff “fun”.
Another option might be to create a stink…wtf, why am I always surprised at the contempt Apple has for it’s customers. Isn’t one of the supposed ‘pluses’ of controlling both hardware and the OS that a limited…
why bother.
Well we can’t blame this particular issue on Jobs’ absence as it was already in the planning stages before he died. But there are some decidedly negative vibes coming from the company these days. One in particular is Apple’s decision to no longer seek EPEAT certification for any current and future products. I doubt he would have allowed that to happen.
I’m telling you, in a not too distant time, when Apple starts doing more stuff “Steve would never do” (and/or, when Apple inevitably will see some reverse of fortunes, some decline, & partly from following too strictly the then-old ways), we’ll hear ~”almost all his views were genius, just not those few; just some rare errors from his ailing health in the last few years, you have to understand”.
Yeah… I have a 2007 macbok. No mountain lion for it. Not buying a new one, Its nice that things like netflix work, but I never got used to the *BSD userland I miss gnu when I’m on it. Plus, I’m not happy with the direction of the OS. Maybe I’ll look into getting plasma active working on a transformer prime or something.
BSD userland is the real UNIX, although I also apreciate GNU better.
Everytime I had to admin a real UNIX box, one of my first tasks was to install some GNU tools to make my work somehow more pleasant.
This is nothing against BSD, rather against commercial UNIX systems which offer tools that were never changed since the System V days.
No needs to.
You can still perfectly install other 64bits operating system available and able to run on this old Mac computer.
It’s not like Apple keep secret information needed for alternative operating systems to boot on their machines.
Wait!
Oh well. Nevermind.
Let’s just buy a new Mac.
It isn’t kept secret, they simply don’t support it.
Not since Macs are intel machines, indeed.
Because they can’t anymore.
But they were up to latest MacPro G5.
Not since New World Macs too. The New World had no ROM in silicon and making them boot was just down to OpenFirmware and the right bootloader (of which there were several.)
Well, it can be considered a secret, since what Apple calls “EFI” only remotely complies with the EFI and UEFI specs and keeps doing weird undocumented stuff (such as overwriting kernels after boot) all the time.
Here are some examples :
http://mjg59.livejournal.com/132477.html
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12037.html
Neolander,
Your links were a good read. The second one about the MAC boot process was eye-opening, wow are there a lot of dependencies. I’m not sure why apple would stray from a vanilla EFI implementation.
One parenthesised comment came up though and I think it’s particularly relevant to a discussion of running 32/64bit OSes together.
“So then we have runtime services. EFI is, depending on how you want to look at it, either saner or much less sane than traditional BIOS access. The firmware gives you a bunch of function pointers and you then simply call them with native calling convention (this, incidentally, is why it’s pretty much impossible to run a 32-bit OS on 64-bit EFI, or a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit system that happens to have 32-bit EFI).”
In theory, it shouldn’t be too difficult to build a shim between 32bit and 64bit calling conventions. It might not be the most efficient solution, but I see no reason this shim couldn’t be generated automatically from EFI function call prototypes.
A 64bit EFI should be able to handle zero padded 32bit OS pointers. The main question I have is whether the EFI data structures themselves change between 32bit and 64bit interfaces, because if they do then that rules out this simple trampoline approach.
That is pretty shitty … While I disagree with it I will have to point out when you buy an Apple Computer one buys it IMO for the integration between the hardware and the OS.
They support booting Windows because it is a common use case.
And I agree that one can defend Apple’s weird EFI implementation with this argument, to some extent. But it kind of gives fuel to the OP’s point that alternative OS development on the Mac is not just unsupported, but actively discouraged.
Though as another interpretation, which is arguably equally valid, Apple might also use their nonstandard firmwares as a form of hardware DRM. After all, if Macs just used plain standard UEFI, with a well-documented and predictable behaviour, nothing would prevent the hackintosh community from just running OSX on a PC with a similar configuration. There are plenty of UEFI-compatible mobos out there nowadays…
Edited 2012-07-12 20:52 UTC
To be fair, if you follow Matthew’s posts, it’s clear that *nobody* remotely complies with the standards.
Indeed.
But only some manufacturers choose to keep private the non-standard-compliant/non disclosed features list. Many choose to publish it somehow in the hope that at least that may allow more people to find their product matching their needs.
Apple is not one of these later.
Worse, in they past they lock their hardware to only allow *their* operating system to run on it, now they lock softwares they don’t want to run on their operating system.
I can see a pattern here.
Am I alone?
So, back to topic: either buy a new mac or stop rent your computing experience from Apple. You call.
But you were warning. Since long.
My own impression from reading his blog was that most of current UEFI implementations have very serious bugs, but that no one but Apple has so far completely broken basic functionality such as OS detection (“You can can boot any EFI-compliant OS as long as it’s Mac OS X”) or the whole notion of boot-time services (“Here, do everything you want with that chunk of RAM, it’s free for use after OS boot. The network chip may randomly decide to use it as a buffer from time to time though.”). Seems like something done on purpose to me…
Edited 2012-07-13 10:20 UTC
Never, how could you think such of Apple. I’m shocked!
I suppose it is a spectrum though …if you follow them, who’s the worst / mildest offender?
Or “upgrade” it with a GNU/Linux distribution. Did that 3 years ago on my 4.1 MacBook, now I almost never boot into OSX.
If I didn’t want to run OS X, I wouldn’t have bought a Mac.
Precisely!
That’s extremely simplistic. A lot of people buy them for the hardware. Linus himself owns a MacBook and runs Linux on it. When someone asked why, he answered:
“(because) everybody else makes crappy laptops.”
And:
“point me to a better laptop.
Trust me, I tried. They don’t exist. It’s sad. They are all big and clunky.”
I know a lot of people who own (or would like to own) a MacBook because of the hardware. I’m not saying that they all want to install Linux on it, but that they don’t care about the OS. They bought it (or want to) because they think they are more powerful/endurable/pretty/thin, or, specially, because of the battery life.
TBH, I think those people are in the minority.
You know, perhaps it’s really telling how you put upgrade in quotes… :p (also, google for unnecessary quoting for other examples)
Edited 2012-07-18 23:53 UTC
That is why Apple should have allowed more participation from the community. Older macs could be used with Gnu-Darwin, Pure Darwin or some other Unixoid combination of GNU/BSD userland and Apple’s kernel instead of render them useless. With open source drivers at least they could have used them without 3D acceleration. A VESA framebuffer or a user supported 2d accelerated driver can do a lot of stuff (developoment,simulations and even browsing and document writing). But if they have implemented a proper UEFI, at least they could have used a generic GOP driver.
But user contributed XNU unixoids are doomed without Apple’s help. Puredarwin could be a place to start.
Apple make money on the hardware not the OS. There is zero motivation for them to do this.
Edited 2012-07-12 17:35 UTC
2 words: App Store
Yes they make their money on that as well. But either comment from us makes his reasoning incorrect.
I was replying to you not the previous poster.
Apple does make a ton of money off software, specially that which they don’t make via the App Store… which gives then even higher profit margins. So your point regarding Apple not having an incentive to expand the user base for their OS could very well be incorrect, which is what I was pointing out.
Edited 2012-07-13 19:45 UTC
But not from OSX, which was kinda the point.
Edited 2012-07-15 00:44 UTC
OpenDarwin (of which Pure Darwin is an offshot) had some backing from Apple. Thing is, uptake by the community was nil, there is no interest.
Once you throw out OS X userland, there’s nothing particularly compelling about what’s left – if you’re going to use more typical *nix userlands, GUIs, you might as well just use some BSD or Linux.
… Confirmed – the Macs tat we were told were not compatible with Mountain Lion are…. NOT COMPATIBLE WITH MOUNTAIN LION!!
<sarcasm>Send in the lawyers I feel a CLASS ACTION SUIT BREWING!! </sarcasm>
I’m sure the guys in the OSx86 community will have drivers for those gfx cards in no time, or maybe already have them!
Yeah, I don’t think this is that big of a deal. My business-class HP Desktop from 2009 is technically obsolete if I want to run 64-bit Windows. HP simply didn’t support this machine in anything other than a 32-bit environment, and that is the official stance posted by an employee in their forums. I found that out when I upgraded to >4GB of RAM and couldn’t find amd64 Windows drivers for basic functionality like ethernet and the chipset. Getting everything to work involved a lot of trial and error, downloading zip files from Taiwanese chipset manufacturer web sites and testing them out one by one until I found something that worked. What a nightmare.
The real issue here isn’t whether a machine can run a new OS, but that the old OS will stop receiving security updates relatively shortly. If the next release is also 12 months, and if Apple continues with its current N-1 support policy, a Core 2 Duo won’t have any updated Mac OS 12 months from now. The hardware will still be perfectly capable at that time, and presumably will still be in widespread use.
Or, more generically:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226949/Half_of_all_Macs_wil…
It’s one thing, but in my experience, the greatest annoyance with owning a recently obsolete Mac is that practically all developers immediately jump to the latest release and produce software that doesn’t run on older versions.
Based on what evidence? Apple has said why support has been dropped – the lack of EFI64 firmware so why do you automatically assume they’ll drop support for Core 2 computers? for what reason? what purpose? I’m going to book mark your post and lets see what happens in 12 months time when the next version is released.
I don’t mean to say that they’ll drop support for all Core 2 Duos, but I have a Core 2 Duo that they just dropped support for (white macbook.) I’m writing this post from it. So based on past behavior, I’ll have no more security updates when the thing after Mountain Lion is released, whenever that is.
I think this is a bad move.
Tech does not move near as fast as it at one time did. This means the useful years of a system are extended beyond the usual time they used to be useful machines.
I have a old 3000+ with 1.5gigs of ram that is still a fast machine for basic applications and even faster then some systems built today (netbook for example). Yet I can hook up that machine and install XP and get all my drivers from Windows update and be on the road with a modern browser and security updates. And this in on a 12yo OS. I have even had Windows 7 running on that machine without issue and I think I got that machine in 2003-04 or somewhere around that time.
So, a 1400$ machine (give or take) that is still fast today but only has a six year lifespan because the proprietary Gods say so? You Apple just lost a customer!
You do realise that you can keep using Mac OS X Lion after Mountain Lion is released – your computer isn’t going to spontaneously combust into a giant fireball.
No, but it means that if you want to target Mountain Lion, or take advantage of the new goodies in Objective-C you are forced to buy new hardware.
For many companies this is a big problem.
I a aware of that.
Being a GNU/Linux use I can also see the value in a machine like that. But the sad thing is, most consumers are not Linux users.
From what I understand, these machines aren’t supported because of the firmware. To boot the 64-bit kernel, the EFI needs to be 64-bit as well. So these no longer supported machines are the same machines that couldn’t boot Snow Leopard or Lion in 64-bit mode.(I remember managing to do this on my unsupported iMac though. Had to use Boot Camp and the chameleon boot loader from OSx86).
So, this is not because of graphics drivers, but rather that Mountain Lion no longer contains a 32-bit kernel.
I don’t know why the EFI needs to be 64-bit though, seeing as these macs boot both 64-bit Windows and Linux just fine using Boot Camp.
Edited 2012-07-12 08:25 UTC
Because neither operating system (Windows/Linux on Mac) are using EFI but are booting using the BIOS compatibility layer. The EFI implementation isn’t 100% compatible with the UEFI specification that both Linux and Windows require if one were to boot those said operating systems using UEFI mode.
I’m aware of the difference. But it seems like an artificial limitation – the hardware is clearly capable of running 64-bit operating systems.
It may be because of the interaction between OS X and EFI after boot, for choosing start disk etc.
Except that MacOS Lion 10.7 boots in 64 bit mode by default unless you press and hold <3> and <2> on the keyboard when powering on the machine.
Adrian
http://ahatfullofsky.comuv.com/English/Programs/SMS/SMS.html
This ist the link to a small tool, telling you in which mode your kernel booted.
I never quite understood how it works that I have a 64bit-EFI with a 64bit-kernel, that starts up in 32bit-mode and runs 32bit and 64bit applications alongside – as this app indicatates my 2011-MBP does with Snow Leopard.
You can use this tool also to force your kernel into 64bit mode on next boot – which I never tried.
I thought this strange mixture of 64bit/32bit-kernel mode was what allowed Snow Leopard to run 32bit drivers also.
First of all – how can a piece of kernel be 64bit and 32bit at the same time, if it’s not just a 2-architecture binary file and bootmode decides which of the two ressources in this fork is loaded.
And if ’32bit-mode’ means that kernel operates in 32bit – how can it execude 64bit applications and kernelextensions?
I really don’t get it.
And what happend in Mountain Lion, if Apple really has such an elaborate way of mixing 32bit and 64bit?
Ok, I found the answer to my own question 😉
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/28/road_to_mac_os_x_snow…
Still it sounds like magic – I thought in machine code you have to be very specific about 32 or 64bit.
MacOS has actually a very unique design to run 32-bit and 64-bit applications. It’s quite complicated.
If you have some time, watch this talk from CCC, it might shed some light onto it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8
Adrian
Apple only support a machine for about three years… Though, my late 2008 MacBook Pro is still supported
That said my mission critical MacBook Pro is the old 2007 model still running Tiger! It works an absolute treat, and I don’t want to change anything.
Mac OS X Lion is still receiving updates – 10.7.5 update is testing right now and to be released soon too. If you take into account the youngest Mac to lose support being 3 years at this point I would be pretty certain that it’ll be 5 years before all support by way of security updates etc. occurs.
Btw, where on earth did you get the whole ‘three years’ crap from?
I think he means OS support is generally for three years. Apple’s major OS releases from Tiger on up have been right around 18 months apart (until ML), with full support for the current and last releases only. So, 18 months * 2 = 3 years.
Of course he could also be referring to three-year AppleCare warranties, which would actually make for four years of support (first year plus the three from AC).
Unless the applications you use stop working, or it does not meet your needs, I would not worry. My G5 Mac is still kicking ass. Best data processing computer ever.
Apple would make alot more profit if they aimed for EXCELLENCE. It seems APPLE has reached a lazy comfort zone.
That’s the breaks. Anything goes in today’s economy, and Apple could be next ..
Apple could fix the problem by opening up the hardware specs on OLDER MACINES. In this case, all the machines that can’t run Mountain Lion ..
Apple should supply propietary drivers for LINUX, or even opening the hardware specs so LINUX programmers could write the drivers. Stupid Apple !!! The Apple II was successful because it’s hardware was open. Why not do the same for the Mac ?
Not being able to run Mountain Lion – that sure is a good customer experience ! Hey Apple, what’s the problem ?? To lazy to offer customer support in this area ? Apple’s Mountain Lion programming team must suck and/or the damn bean counters are screwing the customers ….
Just set the damn compiler switches so the 32-bit drivers will work. That’s a good start… What’s wrong Apple, can’t afford paying your in house programmers ? Is Apple strapped for cash ? Dumbasses !
I wanted to run Lion 64bit on my MacPRO 2,1 w/32GB of RAM. I’ve got a Radeon 5770 video card in it. It’s stable, fast, and never gave me any problems. I’ve got my Linux virtual machines on it too, that’s why I have gobs of memory. My vms have 8gb. Anyway I wanted to run Lion with a 64bit kernel. I ended up saying screw you apple and configured my macpro as a hackintosh. It’s stable! It runs fine!
I am disappointed with the way Apple and Micrisoft are dumbing down the PC. I think most of us who code will be importing our computers in and running Linux in a few years. The Trusted OS is just bullshit.