Why Your Old Mac Can’t Use Mountain Lion Mirroring

Why Your Old Mac Can’t Use Mountain Lion Mirroring


AirPlay mirroring is one of the sweet new features that arrives on your Mac with OS X Mountain Lion — as long as you have a newer computer. But if you’ve got a pre-2011 Mac, it’s not going to work. Don’t worry, though. It’s a hardware problem, not a conspiracy.

You need a newer computer to take advantage of one of Mountain Lion’s tastiest treats? Cue the outraged masses: “WTF! Forced obsolesce!” Not so fast, friends.

The problem with pre-2011 Macs is that their graphics chipsets don’t have the necessary powers for AirPlay mirroring:

It’s simple: the secret sauce that Apple requires to make AirPlay Mirroring work is on-GPU H.264 encoding, or the ability to compress video on your device’s actual graphic chips without calling upon the CPU.

The great Cult of Mac article points out that Apple requires your graphics card encode the video for your own good. If it didn’t, your processor would get so bogged down by the churn that the performance of menus and the like would die. Make sure to check out the whole feature for more video codec nerdery. [Cult of Mac]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.