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ALERT: Mountain Lion Airplay Feature unavailable

The one criticism I would level - Apple doesn't really help the situation by their model naming convention.

Even as a fairly longterm & devout Mac fan, I wouldn't know whether or not my MacBook Pro is an "Early 2011". That's not written on the device, System Profiler just tells me it's a "MacBookPro6,2", but I still had to search Everymac.com to find out the release date for that model. I could see a lot of people being caught out like that.

There goes the one feature that I wanted in Mountain Lion. Oh well. :)
 
dericks0n said:
Everyone please be aware that if you are planning on purchasing ML (Mountain Lion) for the Airplay feature like I did make sure your Mac supports it. To my amazement after purchasing the upgrade to ML today, the AirPlay feature I was looking forward to more than any other was unavailable. Apparently Apple is trying the same trick they did with mobile devices. AirPlay is unavailable for an Macbook purchased before 2011. What a joke!!!!

Maybe Apple should lower the price for those of us with order Mac since they want to sell us a stripped down version of ML.
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You do understand that your product eventually becomes obsolete, right? Eventually, the technology inside the computer won't be good enough for the new software features.

And, as for a lower price point, how is $19.99 too much to ask for? Especially after Leopard was $129.99, Snow Leopard was $29.99, and Lion was $29.99?
 
HipHopTrex said:
Let me say I'm sorry for being an ass.

But I've rarely had heating issues with Airparrot. From stuff as small Youtubes or college humor to show off to friends. Or stuff as long as a few episodes of HIMYM, or an Episode of Dexter. I've never had issues with it lagging or looking pixelated. The heating issue I can understand, but I've honest to god never had it look laggy or pixelated or the sound be off.

2. It's for when I haven't downloaded videos. Like I said before, I'm generally a converter time. The loss of perfect MKV from transferring it to MP4, has never bothered me in the slightest. So that's why. It's also nice to show off pictures that aren't in my photo stream as well as videos. It's also helped give a presentation before in class because my university is equipped with appleTVs in some class rooms.

As for 3. i totally thought you were the OP. Which is entirely my fault, and I'm quite sorry about that. I have no idea why I thought you were, but that's all I can say. Like I said before I just like airparrot, it does it's job, it's not perfect. but for me it works, and at a decent rate. Would I prefer AirPlay on a new mac? Well I think we both would. :) But unfortunately we're stuck here, so I was just trying to help the OP, and perhaps inform others of the app.
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Can't we just all get along?....of course we can.:):) I understand you and some other are satisfied with the AirParrot product.

But I do feel at least a little vindication for my feeling about the product from this article:

http://www.appletvhacks.net/2012/07...airplay-mirroring-in-mountain-lion/#more-2889
 
There's no scam here. If you can't read about an OS and it's features (as well as which devices get what features), that's your fault.

A moderator needs to change the title of this thread because it is completely misleading to other Mac users.
 
whooleytoo said:
The one criticism I would level - Apple doesn't really help the situation by their model naming convention.

Even as a fairly longterm & devout Mac fan, I wouldn't know whether or not my MacBook Pro is an "Early 2011". That's not written on the device, System Profiler just tells me it's a "MacBookPro6,2", but I still had to search Everymac.com to find out the release date for that model. I could see a lot of people being caught out like that.

There goes the one feature that I wanted in Mountain Lion. Oh well. :)
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Finder/about this Mac/more info

under the name of your Mac it says what is it, example it says "Mac Mini" then "mid 2010".
 
dericks0n said:
Everyone please be aware that if you are planning on purchasing ML (Mountain Lion) for the Airplay feature like I did make sure your Mac supports it.
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Has nothing to do with your Mac. It is a processor feature (Quick Sync support). The processors in Macs come from Intel, not Apple.

----------
mastamark2020 said:
come on people think about it here, its not a hardware issue at all, if a mobile phone can "airplay" I'm pretty sure a 2010 MBP running a i5 and 4gb ram with wireless N can do it.
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Wrong. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and higher have special hardware units for H.264 encoding/decoding, which makes AirPlay possible.
 
It's not a scam of course but it's been dreadfully handled by Apple. It has not been clearly labelled on the Mountain Lion info page in the AirPlay info feature. No asterisk, note, nothing to say It wont work on pre Mid-2011 iMacs. The info that is clearly seen is to do with basic requirements for upgrading to ML.

Look at the Apple Discussions page, there are 40+ pages of cheesed off people. It's only 20 bucks but it's not the point. Many have obtained refunds.

It's been very badly handled by Apple. And please don't lecture people on not Hunting down the specs which are not clearly displayed on the ML info page. They clearly state the Facebook integration won't happen until autumn so why not clearly state the facts on AirPlay?

Poor show Apple
 
Maybe it's been posted or mentioned, but why won't it work on older machines. I have an iMac from 2008 and don't get why it can't handle this feature.

Can someone enlighten me?

I'm not upset and will still get ML, but I really wanted to use this feature. I was a little hocked to learn this.
 
marcre said:
Maybe it's been posted or mentioned, but why won't it work on older machines. I have an iMac from 2008 and don't get why it can't handle this feature.

Can someone enlighten me?

I'm not upset and will still get ML, but I really wanted to use this feature. I was a little hocked to learn this.
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Read the thread you just posted in (this one), the technical reasons are spelled out. In short, it requires a feature set not available until the SandyBridge CPUs were released.
 
mic j said:
Just for fun...So if I go into buy a car and I'm looking for a 6 cylinder and I don't read the sticker on the window (which clearly states it's a 4 cylinder), when I get home, I lift the lid and get upset because it is missing 2 cylinders, should I go on the autodialer forum and accuse them of pulling a scam?;)
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This is horse hockey. Cars are not like computers and consumer awareness is not as great with computers/software. The average consumer sees Apple's promotion of ML AirPlay as a great feature and doesn't necessarily read spec requirements. It would be reasonable to assume that a Mac purchased in Jan 2011 would fully run ML released within 18 months. I was disappointed as well but ML is still a great upgrade for $20.
 
animatedude said:
Finder/about this Mac/more info

under the name of your Mac it says what is it, example it says "Mac Mini" then "mid 2010".
Click to expand...

It's not showing anything like that for me. My personal Mac's name is written at top left (e.g. "whooleytoo's MacBook Pro") and the Model Name and Model Identifier are on the right-hand side (MacBook Pro, and MacBookPro6,2).

It might be different with different System Profilers/OS X versions.
 
whooleytoo said:
It's not showing anything like that for me. My personal Mac's name is written at top left (e.g. "whooleytoo's MacBook Pro") and the Model Name and Model Identifier are on the right-hand side (MacBook Pro, and MacBookPro6,2).

It might be different with different System Profilers/OS X versions.
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I'm pretty sure they only added the newer style info panel in Lion, so in versions prior to that, you're correct it would be difficult to tell exactly which model you had.
 
whooleytoo said:
It's not showing anything like that for me. My personal Mac's name is written at top left (e.g. "whooleytoo's MacBook Pro") and the Model Name and Model Identifier are on the right-hand side (MacBook Pro, and MacBookPro6,2).

It might be different with different System Profilers/OS X versions.
Click to expand...

share a pic please
 
mastamark2020 said:
come on people think about it here, its not a hardware issue at all, if a mobile phone can "airplay" I'm pretty sure a 2010 MBP running a i5 and 4gb ram with wireless N can do it.

My HTC one X can mirror its screen over DLNA and play FULL HD files on the phone and to a tv at the same time, so really guys i doubt its a hardware issue.
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The mobile devices have hardware support for h.264 transcoding. as do the core I series.

the core 2 cpu does not, thus, it needs to use software to do it. Airplay mirroring on my i7 uses maybe 3-4 percent CPU.

Trying to do full HD on-the-fly transcoding without hardware support would use 30-40x that amount of CPU power on a core 2 (guestimation, based on the speed up of ~30x going from software AES enycrption to hardware AES on the core I series). Having read about other's experience with airparrot (fans, lag, heat, etc), i'd suggest that is in the ballpark.


Apple decided that trying to do this on a core 2 was not worth it, and not practical, especially if say, you were trying to do it whilst on battery (like, oh i don't know - you take your mac into the boardroom/living room/etc, place it on the desk and want to stream from it to an apple TV without being tethered to AC). Your battery would drain within 40 minutes or so.

If you want to try it, use airparrot.
 
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I can't get the MirrorPlay feature to work. The icon dosen't appear in the menubar in my mac.
I have the new Macbook Pro Retina, with Mountain Lion installed.
I also have a Apple TV (2nd gen), running version 4.3.

Maybe it's the version of the Apple TV that is old, but I don't really want to update (for diffrent reasons. :) ). Can anyone confirm this?
Do I need a newer firmware to get this feature to work or not?
 
Engan said:
I can't get the MirrorPlay feature to work. The icon dosen't appear in the menubar in my mac.
I have the new Macbook Pro Retina, with Mountain Lion installed.
I also have a Apple TV (2nd gen), running version 4.3.

Maybe it's the version of the Apple TV that is old, but I don't really want to update (for diffrent reasons. :) ). Can anyone confirm this?
Do I need a newer firmware to get this feature to work or not?
Click to expand...

you will need to update the ATV software but dont worry you can still jailbreak it ;)
 
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