Apple Planning On Checking Specs Before Letting Customers Download Mountain Lion?

Don’t worry about downloading Mountain Lion when it ships later this year. It seems like Apple’s thwarting attempts to download the operating system for anyone who’s not running the minimum recommended system specifications. According to our buddy, Mr. Stephen Hackett himself, the 10.8 betas are not available for any Mac that does not meet the minimum system requirements.

What are those system requirements?

  • OS X v10.6.8 or later
  • 2GB of memory
  • 8GB of available space
  • iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
  • MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
  • MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
  • Xserve (Early 2009)
  • MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
  • Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
  • Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)

While there are probably a few Mac geeks who may be plenty annoyed at the idea of Apple thwarting operating system downloads, I’m pretty happy that the company is doing it. There’s nothing worse than downloading an application from the App Store only to have it barely work because your system doesn’t have the resources necessary to run it optimally. When you pair that with the fact that getting refunds for Mac App Store purchases is pretty much non-existent, this is easily the best solution to the problem.

Stopping customer before they waste their money on a software bundle that won’t work, especially for the least tech-savvy among us, is easily the simplest and best solution available.

Source: 512 Pixels

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.