It makes some sense for a hardware company. With cost removed as an excuse for upgrading then it becomes easier to maintain the OS overall, as they do not have to support old OSes.

It's a good selling point compared to Windows - I'm sure those marketing bods are busy writing ads and web pages to shout about it.

Yes but they are very different companies. What you lose on the software with Windows you more than make up for with the lower cost of hardware with PC's. Swings and roundabouts really.


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An interesting move, but one which may be used to encourage more frequent hardware purchases using artificial obsolescence. Hopefully this will not be the case.

Just hacked off a little as my MBP is just one iteration too old to qualify.

Given (IIRC) Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks all have the same 'cut off point' in terms of which Macs will run them, there doesn't really appear to be a precedent for artificial obsolescence. Macs tend to drop off the support list when Apple adopt a CPU feature (i.e. 64 bit mode for example) which requires a given Intel CPU generation or later. Unless there's some significant variation in Mac CPU design round the corner, I think it's less than likely.

Given the decreasing relevance of Mac computers to apple's bottom, line and the how its gone with iOS, I'd expect certain features not to work with earlier versions even if they have the ability to ala siri. Whether they put deliberate obsolescence into future iteration's to "encourage" hardware purchase would be interesting to say the least. I wouldn't put it past them, but as they say were in a post PC world and this could be a sign that as a company they see that the Mac line is becoming a "hobby" line next to the juggernaughts of iPad and iPhone

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From memory the driver for removing support from older machines in more recent times has been the graphics capabilities rather than the cpu.

Apple also seem to have been (admitedly on somewhat slim evidence) a bit less aggressive in bumping machines and OS's off the support list since one Mr S Jobs departed this mortal coil. Under jobs there was a definite 2 version limit on OS support but as far as I can tell there are still security updates being rolled out for Snow Leopard.

Which is artificial. My iMac has a 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor and runs 64 bit Linux and Windows (even Windows 8) but can't use anything later than Lion from Apple.