OS X Mountain Lion Mac massacre

Or, put another way, what a difference a year can make. When OS X Lion shipped in July 2011, PowerPC Mac owners and even those using software with legacy PowerPC were left behind. Granted, Apple hadn’t sold PPC-based computers since 2006. The upcoming release of OS X Mountain Lion will see an even more aggressive culling of the Mac herd with machines that were sold new less than three years ago unable to run the new operating system.

There are plenty of lists out there that can tell you which Macs will be able to run OS X Mountain Lion when it ships late this Summer. That’s about a year after OS X Lion shipped, which got me wondering — how many and which Macs did Apple cull this time around?

The die is cast
When Apple stopped selling Motorola 68XXX-based Macs in 1994, many refused refused to make the leap to PowerPC, creating a large refugee community — at least one group is still very much alive and kicking to this day. A very similar community has grown up around the final generation of PowerPC Macs.

Quite a few machines got the axe and the surprising bit is how “young” many of them are:

• Late 2006 17″ 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, disc. 8/7/07
• Mid 2007 Mac mini, disc. 3/3/09
• Late 2006 MacBook
• Mid 2007 MacBook
• Late 2007 MacBook
• Early 2008 MacBook
• Late 2008 MacBook White, disc. 1/20/09
• Early 2008 MacBook Air, disc. 10/14/08

The common threads that doomed these still very useful models? They are all built with Intel GMA950 or X3100 graphics on the motherboard, a cheap but never cutting edge architecture.

Is Apple being too aggressive in culling the Mac herd?

via Low End Mac

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