Update: This article was written in early 2012. Since then, there are great apps like MLPostFactor that make good on this prediction. See this article for an example and details.

Apple’s requirement of a 64-bit kernel for Mac OS X Mountain Lion is going to draw ire from many in the Mac community. Stretching back to 2006, many Mac owners were concerned that their EFI Firmware only supported a 32-bit kernel.

This was known as EFI32, with the 64-bit EFI known as, you guessed it, EFI64. They were told at the time, by Apple no less, that it was not a significant concern… OS X would not be impacted by it. A 64-bit kernel does not impact app performance nor does it provide anything more than a small speed benefit to low-level tasks. So, we all trusted Apple… and didn’t pester them for an EFI64 firmware upgrade at the time.

Fast forward to 2012. Many older Mac models, like the original Mac Pro still outperform newer entry-level Mac models. However, Apple has left them behind with OS X Mountain Lion. Version 10.8 simply will not boot, because Apple is implementing the requirement of a 64-bit kernel.

There’s no clear reason why Apple has made this requirement, and Apple has not clarified it, despite many requests to do so. For many, it insinuates planned obsolescence; you can make a 2006 Mac Pro worth a lot less on the resale market if you can force it to not run the latest version of OS X.

Full Disclosure: I own a 2006 Mac Pro. It’s faster than the MacBook Air I bought a few weeks ago. It has many more storage options than a Mac mini sold today. It has more expansion than any consumer Mac out there. Oh, and I paid under $1,000 for it… plus $75 to take the RAM to 5 GB. Biased against the OS X Mountain Lion blackout? Maybe… but with good reason. I’d love for Apple to offer a single, solitary reason why they can’t offer a simple EFI firmware update to deploy EFI64.

Personally, I believe Apple was simply trying to draw an elegant line in the sand. Older, 2 GHz Core 2 Duo machines with Intel GMA 950s probably wouldn’t run OS X Mountain Lion well at all. However, I wish in a perfect world, that Apple would go back and offer 64-bit EFI firmware updates for machines that could run OS X Mountain Lion properly. There are quite a few of those, and it is a disappointment.

That all said, there may be a workaround or two to get OS X Mountain Lion to boot. And, it lies in of all places the Hackintosh.

Booting a 64-bit kernel on an EFI32 machine is not, in my opinion, impossible. It may require using the Intel CSM (aka Boot Camp, for those of you in Cupertino). Many will note that 64-bit versions of Windows can run, with minor modification, on these EFI32 machines. And, OS X can boot without EFI, it’s a common misconception that EFI is required to boot the world’s most powerful operating system.

As such, I think the future isn’t exactly bleak for OS X Mountain Lion on EFI32 machines. However, we may have to wait until Apple offers up the Darwin kernel code after release, so there may be a lag time before this can be fully evaluated.

Apple isn’t an evil company, I don’t expect them to throw roadblocks in this direction… or I wouldn’t have posted this.

For those of you that are new to the Apple community, and there are at least a few of you… XPostFacto was a powerful tool from the early days of Mac OS X. It bypassed the system requirements for older Mac models, and even enabled a few upgraded systems to run Mac OS X for the first time. This was accomplished through a series of OpenFirmware tweaks, driver modifications, and settings changes. XPostFacto fell out of awareness during the Intel transition, as there were not any systems that such a method of hacking would have assisted in the Leopard -> Snow Leopard -> Lion era.

Update: I’ve posted a follow-up to this article with some new information about the requirements… it appears that graphics, and not the kernel, are behind the changes.

Update: This article was written in early 2012. Since then, there are great apps like MLPostFactor that make good on this prediction. See this article for an example and details.