Legacy Macs not supported: Are you worried? What's your plan?

[Starfighter]

I'm only running macs with PPC so this has no effect on me what so ever.

 

[blow45]

Welcome to the post Steve jobs money grab. Full soulless corporatism in effect. Just take a walk inside the apple store, they're taking full advantage of there effect on customers who lust over "the new" and next status symbol from Apple and I'm not just talking trash because I asked Siri and she agrees.

That is crap. Users with 2006/2007 machines do have the right to complain, especially with Apple's extortionate prices. As for old tech getting in the way of innovation, bull, plain bull. It's no skin off Apple's nose to add a few extra drivers for older hardware when feasible. They have made an arbitrary cull at the software level, this forces the choice out of the hands of users and forces them to either fall behind in OS terms or buy even more expensive hardware.

I will be mostly unaffected by this (our oldest white Macbook has developed severe case fractures anyway) but I can sure understand any fellow Mac user who is furious about this.

If Mac Mini's are so cheap, are you going to volunteer to help others out who cannot afford to upgrade? I don't think so.

Amen brothers.

What's even more insulting is that ml is really a service pack, and that's the only honest truth about what it is - the alternative is to think notepad, reminders, notifications and twitter deserve an os release. They are not just disallowing older mac users from running a new os, they are actually disallowing them to run a service pack to a by most accounts rather poor os release and fix the problems it's created for them to begin with.

And all that just after disallowing the previous os users, snow leopard's users, from having basic sync functionality for their ios devices via icloud, when a lot of them already did have that functionality via a paid service mm (and a poor one for that matter) on snow leopard. We are not offering you syncing anymore, and instead of thanking you for sticking with us for the pain in the ass that was mobile me (SJ's admission) by enabling icloud on your sl system we are asking you to pay more to get the next os to get back the functionality you used to have, whether you like it or not, cause we are pimping it and forcing adoption of it this way.

If that isn't shameful behaviour from a computer (well...) company to its user base of premium priced products I don't know what is.

 

[MacAndrew07]

Can't upgrade

I have a Core Duo Mac Mini from 2007. It has Snow Leopard on it (10.6.8), ;( ;( I feel like I'm the only one with SL. But I'm probably buying a 11 inch Air soon.

 

[haravikk]

You don't have the Not Affect but worried option that covers me

My Mac Pro only just made the grade for Mountain Lion, while all my other family machines should be okay for the future. However, it has me worried that 10.8 may be my last update for the Mac Pro.

That said, I can't think of anything off hand that distinguishes the machine as being worth dropping, i.e - it has solid 64-bit support and the NVidia GeForce 8800 is still a perfectly good GPU, though I'm concerned that it might lose out if Apple forges ahead with newer OpenGL support or such, though I haven't had a good look at compatibility to see if that's the case.

It means I'm extra anxious about the future of the Mac Pro line, as while I don't really need much more than what I have now, it might soon be time to think about upgrading, if I can afford it.

 

[throAU]

My mini is affected, but it is over 3 years old now, only has 2-3gb ram MAX anyway, so it is time to move it on due to other reasons anyway.

It currently runs Lion server (test/toy box), I might run Linux or FreeBSD on it instead, or just stick with Lion.

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I'm starting to wonder if Apple deprecated the older machines simply because they wanted to stop having to port older video drivers.

Pretty sure this is on the money. Its quite possible they subcontract out video driver development to the hardware OEM, and the OEM no longer maintains the code (or the cost to re-write for 64 bit OS X kernel was excessive). Do the affected video cards get new windows drivers on a regular basis? I suspect not...

Apple are not a 3d hardware driver company. They integrate and write operating systems.

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You don't have the Not Affect but worried option that covers me

My Mac Pro only just made the grade for Mountain Lion, while all my other family machines should be okay for the future. However, it has me worried that 10.8 may be my last update for the Mac Pro.

I reckon you'll be OK (gut feeling), despite the whining there were valid reasons apple dropped the machines they did with ML. 64 bit only kernel ruled out a lot of kernel extension/drivers that were required for old machine hardware that the OEM probably doesn't support any more.

Apple won't be dumping 64 bit kernels any time soon.