Mountain Lion fails to deliver on its promises for older Macs

Question

For months, I have been anticipating the release of Mountain Lion primarily because of the AirPlay Mirroring feature. I have an early 2008 aluminum MacBook, and after all of the "Make sure your Mac can run Mountain Lion" advertising over the last couple of months, I was relieved that my four-year old Mac had not been rendered obsolete. In preparation for this new OS X release, I even purchased additional memory and a new hard-drive in hopes of adding life to my machine for several years to come.
The "Make sure your Mac can run Mountain Lion" info on the website was not clear about the limitations of installing this new OS X on machines older than 2011 models. I was led to believe that my machine was good to go, only to find out otherwise. Like many others have expressed elsewhere on this discussion board, AirPlay Mirroring was the primary, if not the only, feature that I really wanted from Mountain Lion. After going through the three-plus hour download and a half an hour install, the big reveal of Mountain Lion on my Mac left me struck with the realization that I had been duped by the hype and advertising, and was by all rights swindled into spending $19.99 for a lot of nothing. Instead of using AirPlay, I was forced to download AirParrot for an additional $9.99, thus making my upgrade cost closer to $30. But, the money isn't really the point. Rather, the issue is that if I can by an app for $9.99 that does the very thing AirPlay Mirroring should do on my 2008 Mac, why is the lack of AirPlay support a hardware related issue on my Mac?
As the owner of three Macs, two iPhones, an iPad, Apple TV, an AirPort Express and Extreme, I felt a tremendous sense of loyalty to my Apple products, and I am now wondering why. For months I've been trumping Apple products to co-workers who are considering possible purchases, and my free-advertising is finished. In essence, Apple products--as great as they are--are a leash. Once they get you on it, they force you to live on that leash until they put your product out to pasture. I planned to buy a new Mac, a new iPod, and possibly another iPad during the next year, and now I'm not going to bother. That's not a threat--just good sense, I think. I've got enough of Apple's gadgets, and this Mountain Lion update is a lesson in learning to be satisfied with what I have and not falling prey to the mentality that I've got to have the latest and greatest. This OS X release is revolutionary and eye-opening indeed. Mountain Lion is a lesson I hope I don't forget any time soon.

Answer 1

From Cult of Mac:
"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.
It’s not just Macs that can’t use AirPlay Mirroring if they are older than 2011: even on the iOS side of things, you need a minimum of an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 to use AirPlay Mirroring on your Apple TV. Why? Because older iOS devices don’t have on-GPU H.264 encoding either."
I am not sure how this doesn't "make scence."  To be honest, I don't necessarily disagree with the two of you - Apple should have been more transparent in their release notes when specifying which computers are capable of AirPlay mirroring with Mountain Lion.  I guess I felt like I got burned by Apple back in 2005 when I bought an iPod Nano right after they released it and then they had the "One More Thing" unveiling of the new color iPod that played video, which I would have bought instead.  I realized at that point that it wasn't really going to be feasible to have all the "latest and greatest" of Apple's products without constantly breaking the bank.