If you’re not sure which Mac model you own, you may find EveryMac and apple-history to be useful sites.

MacBook (Late 2006 or any 2007 or 2008 model).

If your Mac isn’t new enough to run Mountain Lion, it should still be able to run Lion if you have a Mac with a Core 2 Duo processor (one of the Mac models listed below), as long as it has at least 2 GB of RAM and 7 GB of free hard drive space:

MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer).

Mountain Lion requires one of the following Macs with at least 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of available hard drive space: If your Mac is older than the ones listed, read on for suggestions on what you can do to upgrade to a supported system.

If you bought a new Mac on or after June 11, 2012, Apple’s Up-to-Date Program allows you to request a free upgrade to Mountain Lion by August 24.įollowing are lists of Macs that can run a supported version of OS X. The good news is that most new Macs sold within the past few years can be upgraded to a newer version of OS X. Back in February I inquired of Apple whether any security updates would be released for Snow Leopard after the release of Mountain Lion, and Apple never responded. In other words, don’t expect to get a corresponding Security Update for Snow Leopard the next time Apple patches vulnerabilities in Mountain Lion and Lion.Īpple dropping Snow Leopard support was inevitable. Apple’s lack of commitment to patch the 121 vulnerabilities in Snow Leopard’s version of Safari is only a harbinger of things to come. That’s not a good thing, because it means that Apple likely won’t patch security vulnerabilities for those Macs’ operating system anymore.įor the past several major versions of Mac OS X, Apple has only released patches for OS vulnerabilities in the current and one previous version of the operating system. Some older Macs cannot be upgraded to Lion, meaning they’ll be stuck with Snow Leopard (version 10.6.8) or older. This means that some Macs will be limited to Lion (version 10.7.4), which will presumably still receive security updates for the next year or so. Last week Apple released a new version of its Mac operating system, OS X Mountain Lion (version 10.8).Īs usual with major new Mac OS X updates, support for some machines has been dropped.

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