On July 9th, Apple released the “Golden Master” version of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) on the Mac App store to eager developers everywhere. Scheduled to release this month, Mountain Lion brings a slew of new features to the desktop including iMessage, enhanced iCloud integration, and enhanced Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Vimeo sharing.
More confusingly, Apple’s Mountain Lion will be leaving lots of old hardware in the dust when it launches. Basic System Requirements are fairly straight forward, including OS X 10.6.8 or later, 2GB of memory, and 8GB of available space. However, the list of supported models has grown smaller, compared to Snow Leopard.
Why the change? Mountain Lion drops support for Apple systems with a 32-bit kernel. Apple lists Supported Models on the Technical Specifications page but how can you tell if your organization is ready for Mountain Lion?
Apple’s hardware traditionally lacks easily identifiable and understandable model identifiers on their exteriors. Interactively checking hardware specifications in System Profiler can be both time consuming and inefficient. Crawling under desks and flipping over laptops to obtain Model Numbers will lead you on a scavenger hunt through Apple or Third Party websites to figure out if that aluminum MacBook you are looking at is Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer.
MaaS360 Visibility for Mac can help you identify the existing hardware inventory information and technical specifications for the Apple computers in your organization—alongside PCs, iPhones, iPads, Androids, BlackBerrys and Windows Phone devices.
