[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.