According to Apple, these are the minimum hardware requirements:
- iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
- MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminium, or Early 2009 or newer)
- MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
- MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
- Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
- Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
No Mac Minis older than 2009, no MacBooks older than late 2008 - almost 2009 - and only the iMac is supported beyond this and then only to mid 2007.
Are old Macs not supported because they aren't powerful enough? Is Mountain Lion so demanding that it would run too slowly? I'm not sure that processing power is the problem. Perhaps, but I think a bigger problem is the memory.
All computers are designed with a limit to the amount of memory they can accept and with old Macs this could be as little as 2Gb. I'm typing this on a 2006 MacBook that has 2Gb of memory and that's the limit. According to Apple it won't accept any more. It is running Lion just fine and I have Chrome running with five tabs open, Text Wranger open, and Activity Monitor. According to Activity Monitor 1.32Gb of memory is in use and 692Mb is free.
Mountain Lion uses lots of memory and although Apple says the minimum spec for running it is 2Gb of RAM, it takes about 1.5Gb just to boot up to the desktop. Open a couple of apps and the memory usage is over 2Gb on my new MacBook with 4Gb of RAM. During normal use I often seen memory usage creeping up to 3Gb and I'm wondering if 4Gb is enough and whether I need to upgrade.
My advice to anyone wanting to upgrade to Mountain Lion is to make sure you have at least 4Gb of RAM and if you can, upgrade it to 6 or even 8Gb. When you've got all the cool new stuff running in Mountain Lion, it's going to need it.
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