Install Lion 10.7.5 on a new Mac

[Auskalo]

I know this all mainly about OSx86. But I wonder if you could point me in the right direction... I have a Mac that came with Mavericks preinstalled. However, I want to use Lion instead. Is there a custom build I could use on it?

[Allan]

Hi!

 

Post your hardware specs.

[Auskalo]

Hi Allan, it's a MGXC2B/A, i7

Processor Speed 2.5 GHz Processor Count 4 RAM Size 16 GB Computer Memory Type DDR3 SDRAM Hard Drive Size 512 GB Graphics Card Description NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M Graphics RAM Type DDR3 SDRAM Graphics Card Ram Size 2048 MB

[MacUser2525]

There will be no support in lion for that machine it is to new, best you can probably do is using vmware or some other  program like it to run a virtual machine containing lion.

[Allan]

 

Hi Allan, it's a MGXC2B/A, i7

Processor Speed 2.5 GHz Processor Count 4 RAM Size 16 GB Computer Memory Type DDR3 SDRAM Hard Drive Size 512 GB Graphics Card Description NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M Graphics RAM Type DDR3 SDRAM Graphics Card Ram Size 2048 MB

 

 

See this: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pro-retina-display-faq/macbook-pro-retina-display-os-x-ios-windows-support.html

[Auskalo]

Thanks, Guys. I knew about everymac.com. Browsing around the web I also found reports of tricky attempts to install either Lion or ML on machines originally with Mavericks. They all stated problems and in the best scenarios they could not use the trackpad and the resolution was bad. One of the comments hinted at the lack of 'drivers' in Lion in order to support the new architectures - I suppose they meant kext files? It was in that line of speculation that I thought the missing files could be fished out of Mavericks and inserted in Lion the same way it is done for Intel or AMD PC machines on OSx86. Am I too wrong?

 

It strikes me that Apple allows you to run MS OS on bootcamp on every Mac but not their own older cats. After reading this: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/poor-retina-macbook-benchmark-results-due-mavericks-tweaks-3541650/, it seems to me that product obsolescence is planted on every new Mac even with each iteration (I guess I cannot downgrade to 10.9.2 on my new machine either). 

 

On my old Mac (Late 2011, or MD318b/a) I had reverted from Mavericks to Lion for speed and legacy reasons. I moved on to MGXC2 because it is faster with Parallels and Win 8.1 on board. But I running Lion on Parallels would be a redundancy, and again, how come I could run Lion sandboxed with Parallels Tools and not in bootcamp or native?

[Gringo Vermelho]

Because Parallels is a virtual machine. The "hardware" that you install Lion on in Parallels is virtual.

 

If you want to use Lion on real hardware, then use it on your old machine where it can run natively. It makes little sense to buy a brand new, faster Mac in order to run an old version of OS X "for legacy reasons". If you still have your older Mac, it makes even less sense.

 

I'm curious to know what it is that you need to run on Lion that doesn't run on Mavericks.

 

I've been around since 2009, built a handful of hacks for myself and others, and I've never had to use a driver from a different version of OS X that I was installing.

I don't know how you got into your head that we mix and match drivers from older or newer versions of OS X they way you say. I think that's probably very rare.

Kernel extensions don't always work "independently". Sometimes they expect certain other parts of the system software (such as frameworks) from a particular version to be present.

If a driver from Mavericks, written by Apple, should work on Lion, on a system that Apple doesn't want you to install Lion on, you're very lucky.

 

Some people use Hackintosh tools on real Macs so that they can run newer versions of OS X that Apple don't want them to run. One of the tricks here is to use one of our bootloaders to trick OS X into thinking that it's actually running on a newer Mac.

I've never heard of anyone using Hackintosh tools in order to run an older version of OS X on a newer Mac. Consider that some of the hardware in your new Mac did not exist when Lion was the current Mac OS. That makes it a lot less likely to work.

[Auskalo]

Thanks, G. Well, I might belong to a minority who think / found out Mavericks or ML are not a step forward in terms of speed and stability. I'm a heavy user and this is my experience. But I don't think it defeats logic if you want your OS to take advantage of faster components. You also may find many articles detailing all features abandoned in Mavericks.

 

However, I admit my ignorance with regards to how you manage to run Mac0sX on PC machines. From what you explain it seems hardware restrictions are hard coded in MacOSX. Does this all mean you can never get a certain version to run on a hardware configuration faster than the one it was coded for? Not even on non-Apple computers?

[Gringo Vermelho]

If the latest model Mac has some new component in it, then it'll need a new driver. That driver won't be present in older versions of OS X.

 

I don't know where exactly the cutoff point is but older versions of Snow Leopard would, for example, not know what a Core i5 CPU is, and because of this, even if you got it running, it would run without proper CPU power management and without accelerated graphics because Snow Leopard would have no drivers for the on-die Intel GPU...because it didn't exist when Snow Leopard was the current OS X.

 

If I knew more about current Apple Hardware and OS support I could give you a better example using Lion...but you get the idea.