I needed Mountain Lion because some of the newer software of Apple, such as Xcode, requires Mountain Lion, but besides the iMac 27 I have, sometimes I need to go on trips and need to bring a white Macbook that I bought near end of 2007.
It is indeed a very decent Core 2 Duo notebook (besides the screen dimming a little after so many years because it is not LED type), with an Intel graphics card that is capable of playing all videos and Flash games I tried, but wonder, this Macbook can't install Mountain Lion and so I need to buy either a new Macbook Air for about $1200 or a Macbook Pro for $1800 to $2200 (depending on whether it is Retina). Is there a reason why Mountain Lion can't be installed on this notebook? Since it is to run Xcode mainly, graphics card performance is not needed if that may be a reason — or for other reasons?
Best Answer
Apparently it has to do with 32-bit graphics cards drivers, as they do not support 64-bit EFI.
While Mountain Lion is compatible with any Mac capable of running a 64-bit kernel, the kernel does not support loading 32-bit kernel extensions. So, since the early 64-bit Macs use 32-bit drivers, Mountain Lion won't load them.
You can find out if your computer has a 32-bit or 64-bit EFI by running the command:
ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abiIt will return either <"EFI64"> or <"EFI32">.