Apple, no support for old Hardware?

Fragil1ty

Fragil1ty

Fragil1ty

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444
I'm going to keep this short and sweet, hopefully.

I think it's a little bit pedantic that Apple are only allowing you to install Mountain Lion and Mavericks if you have a more recent up-to-date computer.

I've only got a 2008 White Macbook, to which I have upgraded btw and I also have a friend who has a Mac Pro that has the 5770, 16GB ram 4TB's of HDD space and so on and he can't upgrade either.

I've been reading around on forums and what not and it just appears to me that Apple are turning into money grabbers. I mean, Windows can install on just about any system regardless of the specifications. Sure it'll lagg or whatever, but that's not the case here, I read up and I can find the sources for you if you're interested but the reason that older hardware is not supported is due to the fact that Apple no longer support 32bit chipsets.

So for me, I have the Intel 950 GMA 950, I'm unsupported as are some other people, now I'm not saying my Mac is the fastest, but it handles Lion perfectly well with 4GB and my 120GB SSD, so it would do so on Mavericks and ML, but yeah, I'm just a little annoyed.

What are your thoughts on the matter? are their actions justified or is a little greedy? because obviously for the people who want the latest operating system, they will have to go out and spend money on a newer piece of Hardware first before doing so.

(There is a work around to get ML, but apparently it comes with a lot of problems e.g. Bluetooth not working, iSight bugs, Sleep mode bugs and also some graphical glitches.) -- But this no longer works I'm assuming as you are unable to download/buy Mountain Lion now due to the fact that Mavericks is out and they have discontinued ML (lol).

But yeah, what are your thoughts?
 
Companies, greedy? You don't say !

And I find it ironic that you call them greedy, but you want Maverick, which is as you know, free.

The machine will work just fine running Snow Leopard or Lion and to tell you the truth, it hasn't changed that much day to day use and to get almost 6 years out of a machine, i say its pretty good value for money!

I am sure I will be annoyed when my 2010 MBP is no longer supported but that's just part of the life of a machine, you can't expect it to be supported forever. I certainly don't, and won't be upset if the next OS won't install on it. It's had its time but if still boots up, loads the web, do everything that I can do the day before the update, then I haven't really lost anything.
 
I don't see any issue with them dropping support for 32-bit chipsets and making some laptops incompatible with the OS. In my opinion you don't get much more with these software updates anyway, and iCloud is available via a web browser. The core OS of 10.6 is rock solid, and a company has to decide where to draw the line, whether it be sooner or later.

As Raymond said, 6 years for your system with a couple of upgrades is good, and you are still going strong. 10.6 is still one of my favourite versions of OSX as far as stability is concerned as well, so I wouldn't feel like you are missing out on anything drastic.
 
If they were dropping support for stuff that was inside 3 years old then I could see a problem, but I don't really think you've got grounds to complain that hardware from 2008 can't run the newest OS. Sorry.
 
Raymond Lin said:
Companies, greedy? You don't say !

And I find it ironic that you call them greedy, but you want Maverick, which is as you know, free.

The machine will work just fine running Snow Leopard or Lion and to tell you the truth, it hasn't changed that much day to day use and to get almost 6 years out of a machine, i say its pretty good value for money!

I am sure I will be annoyed when my 2010 MBP is no longer supported but that's just part of the life of a machine, you can't expect it to be supported forever. I certainly don't, and won't be upset if the next OS won't install on it. It's had its time but if still boots up, loads the web, do everything that I can do the day before the update, then I haven't really lost anything.
Click to expand...

Well I actually paid for Mountain Lion a while ago on my Old Mac Mini but I then sold it due to financial diffculties in Uni (as I had a Pc and a Mac) I got this Macbook the other week and wanted to upgrade you see.

My only quarrel really is that of other companies Whether it be Windows or Linux based companies, they still support hardware as old as this, I guess it's just a kick in the teeth more than anything else. I'd just like that option to be there, I'd pay for it if need be. Ah well, thanks for your responses.
 
If you paid for mountain lion on your old machine, and then sign in another machine with the same itunes/apple account, go to purchases, just download mountain lion again for free?

Unlike Windows, the licence is not tied to the machine, but the user.
 
It's a buyer beware thing really. Apple can be quite ruthless with dropping support for hardware, some of which really isn't old at all. They have been getting better in that regard however.

As long as they release security updates for your OS I would say that was reasonable.
 
Older Macs do not have a 64-bit EFI and lack OpenGL features that are present in newer OS versions. Both of those are technical boundaries that Apple felt were minor enough to discontinue support for certain models.
 
It's a trade off, Microsoft do the complete opposite in where they support so much legacy carp that it actually negatively affects the o/s. For a business this backwards compatibility is awesome but for an end user you want all the benefits of a stripped out o/s.

Fragil1ty said:
I've been reading around on forums and what not and it just appears to me that Apple are turning into money grabbers.
Click to expand...

That transformation happened long ago.

MW
 
It is a trade off.

Spend time supporting old technology or spend the time on supporting more recent hardware in a better fashion.

I prefer the situation where old hardware gets pushed out, it is progress and a 2008 MacBook wasn't the top end at the time anyway!!

The Mac Pro from the 3,1 onwards (which is also a 2008 machine) is supported.

5 years isn't unreasonable!!
 
The GMA950 was rubbish even in 2006. I'm glad they dropped support as being the lowest common denominator it would affect OS X design decisions for the better hardware in everything that wasn't the basic white MacBook for years to come.

You should have got an nVidia chipset machine, they were available at that time. My 2009 Mac mini runs Mavericks like a champ.
 
Vanhishikha said:
Well I actually paid for Mountain Lion a while ago on my Old Mac Mini but I then sold it due to financial diffculties in Uni (as I had a Pc and a Mac) I got this Macbook the other week and wanted to upgrade you see.

My only quarrel really is that of other companies Whether it be Windows or Linux based companies, they still support hardware as old as this, I guess it's just a kick in the teeth more than anything else. I'd just like that option to be there, I'd pay for it if need be. Ah well, thanks for your responses.
Click to expand...

Actually windows only "support" the hardware if it's above their system requirements. It will work on older hardware, but may require workarounds and is done strictly under "your mileage may vary" conditions. It just happens to be that for the last few variants of Windows the requirements haven't increased very much. But if you install Windows on an old machine it will be slow and a few things won't work.

Apple say the same thing - you can get Mavericks, you can install it with some workarounds, and a few things may not work very well... it seems like the exact same situation to me. I can't install Windows 8 on my 4 year old, 800MHz Netbook without some compromises.

I think Apple do a very good job of supporting older hardware. My iPhone 4 is 3 years old but has support for the latest hardware - neither of my previous Androids had updates beyond about 18 months. Similarly my Mid-2010 MB is about to get Mavericks for free after two very cheap upgrades to Lion/ML. Similar windows upgrades are a lot more money.

Besides which, Snow Leopard and Lion are perfectly usable OS's - most of the things added since then are actually ways for Apple to tie you further into their ecosystem (which you don't have to do) or sell you more things. Notifications etc are nice but really nothing special.
 
Audigex said:
Snow Leopard and Lion are perfectly usable OS's
Click to expand...

Snow Leopard, yes. Lion on older hardware, not so much. It was very badly optimised.

I would compare Mavericks to SL performance, and not all of its new features are designed to 'tie you in'.
 
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