New Mac Pro run Mountain Lion??

[Justinhub2003]

Has anyone been able to successfully load Mountain Lion on the new Mac Pro?

I know it sounds crazy but I am Technical Director for my companies Cincinnati office in a Graphic design/Color Seps business that uses Mac's exclusively and my company has budgeted 13 Mac Pro's to be purchased in 2014.

However we "Pitstop" our machines meaning we have one system image with all of our custom software, scripts and other items so that globally our team works the same and the same work can be done across any region.

But the negative side of that is that we just moved to ML in early December and now are just in the early stages of Mavericks development.

The only way we can upgrade to the new Mac Pro's anytime soon is to load our ML Pitstop image on to the system.


Actually this is my biggest beef with Apple's yearly update cycle. As a home consumer nerd user, I love it. As a business OS, it makes it harder for us to update to latest version even if it is free. We've had some success hacking the new rMBP with ML Pitstops but we were hoping that could be done with the Mac Pro but because its a whole new SKU and redesigned product, I would imagine not.

 

[echoout]

For better or worse, we have a similar setup in the labs of the college I teach at. Lining up OS changes and managing subscription-based software like Adobe CC is keeping things very exciting.

 

[ZnU]

Not only is this a whole new product, but it's the first time Apple has used this socket/chipset, so it seems like pretty long odds that ML will work.

 

[Derpage]

Nope

 

[chrfr]

It won't be possible to run Mountain Lion on the new Mac Pro. It's not even compatible with the general release of 10.9/10.9.1.
It's also very ill-advised to try and shoehorn an unsupported OS configuration onto hardware that's used for production work, especially something like print production.
"Golden Master" imaging (which is what we in the Mac admin business call your system of "pitstops") is now generally too inflexible to work within Apple's OS/hardware release structures– exactly because of examples like this one, and also because it makes distributing software patches very unwieldy.
There are a number of tools you can use to deploy your applications and the rest of your software package to an out-of-the-box Mac, and these can even be used to distribute updates automatically.
I use a free, open source package called Munki to do this but there are several commercial products which work.

 

[elvisizer]

10.8 will definitely not work. the nMP doesn't even run the 13B42 build of 10.9.1 from the appstore. The OS is forked 3 ways right now- there's the standard 13B42 build, the late 2013 retina's 13B3116 build, and the nMP build.

Have you considered modular imaging systems? you could have configurations that are identical except for the OS installer . . . the machines would be running different OS's, but everything else would be the same.
Deploystudio, filewave lightning, and JAMF's casper suite are examples of common modular options. they can be used to thin image, too.

But yeah, if you need them to be running the identical operating systems, you're going to have to switch everyone to mavericks 'cause the nMP won't boot ML.

<edit> ninja'd by chrfr, can't believe I forgot munki!!

 

[Justinhub2003]

Im gonna look into some of the options posted above.

We actually stopped buying the Mac Pro in all of 2013.

And opted for an Spec'ed out iMac which has actually been amazing.


I'm gonna look into the solutions above but ultimately, I only control the Cincinnati/ and Mexico offices, and our main office is in the UK where we will probably be waiting for Mavericks.

The biggest issue we face: We use Esko and currently Esko doesn't support Mavericks yet though has an upcoming patch that should