[pornel]

Looking at system requirements I don't see many models dropped between 10.8 and 10.9 (and 10.11 supports same models as 10.9).

Dropping of 10.7 cuts off machines from 2006. That'll be about 10 years of support, which isn't too bad IMHO.

[yuhong]

In fact, the supported list for 10.7 and 10.8 are the same too. There are no 13-inch MacBook Pro models before 2009.

[yuhong]

*10.8 and 10.9

[JohnTHaller]

It also kills off the 2008 Macbook. Apple ditched 2008 Macbooks within 4 years support-wise and left them stuck on 10.7. This was due to the 2012 release of 10.8 as 64-bit only and the cheap GPU in the 2008 Macbook only having 32-bit drivers. This is one of the reasons my girlfriend is now on a Windows machine. Paying a premium for a laptop and having it not able to run the operating system released just 4 years later was kind of absurd. The flaky motherboard played a role, too.

[ivraatiems]

It affects machines from later than '06: I have a mid-2007 silver Macbrook Pro which allegedly should support 10.11, but which I can't actually upgrade past 10.7. Even getting it to 10.7 was a huge hassle because Apple doesn't make it available anywhere.

[jonknee]

Well then it's Apple abandoning you, not Google. Your machine is lacking a ton of security fixes anyway, it's well past time to upgrade.

[twoodfin]

I have one of the original (SSD even!) Macbook Airs from early 2008 that isn't supported past 10.7.

I know it's a notoriously underpowered machine, but it still would have been nice to get more than 4.5 years of supported OS updates. Still perfectly functional as a portable secondary machine for mail, notes, terminal and light Chrome browsing.

Apparently they didn't want to continue to support 32-bit EFI.

[bsimpson]

Incidentally, Google is promising Chrome releases for 5 years from shipping for each Chromebook.

[sambe]

The first hit is this page:

http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/how-to-upgrade/

which says you can upgrade directly. What goes wrong? I upgraded 10.5 to latest 10.5 then bought 10.6 in store and got to 10.6.8 a year or so ago. I recently upgraded another machine to 10.6.8 too.

I find free, smooth upgrades (not just updates) for a decade to be pretty good but guess you are having problems with "smooth".

[JohnTHaller]

It depends on your Mac. The 2008 Macbook was abandoned within 4 years by Apple OS-wise and couldn't run Mac OS X released in 2012.

[tedunangst]

The white plastic MacBooks from early 2008 can't run 10.8, only four years after release.