Funny that I got two responses along these lines. It is, in fact, a Core 2 Duo white Macbook model A1181. 10.8 doesn't support it because Apple decided to delete the X3100 video driver, not because of any defensible technical justification.

Note that people have gotten 10.8 running on machines of this vintage by copying the 10.7 X3100 driver bundle unmodified into their 10.8 installation. Why doesn't Apple just do that? Because they want to sell me a new Mac. I refuse to go along.

That's my point. It happens if you are a Mac user. Windows and Linux users do not have their operating systems vendors arbitrarily decide that five-year-old hardware is obsolete. I don't think it's a coincidence that in this case the OS vendor is also the one trying to sell me new hardware.

Yes, it was a security update that disables old versions of Flash. Aside from that, there hasn't been a single security update for Leopard since Lion was released.

I can guarantee you that not one of those is a five year old Core 2 Duo laptop sold by a major PC manufacturer.

I'm glad that works for you. But again, if you look at the history of Apple's security updates, you can't trust them to keep old versions updated. This is not a problem with Windows or Linux. Besides, quite frankly I don't like the idea of being stuck with old software. Personally I've always been a very early adopter -- I ran alphas of Mac OS 8 when it was called OS 7.7, and OS X when it was called Rhapsody. (No, never tried to run Copland -- not *that* crazy :)

Sounds like driver issues. If that happened to me, I would definitely avoid the manufacturer of the product that was preventing the upgrade. Which is exactly what I've been saying -- you just don't like it because the manufacturer I'm talking about is Apple.

Not sure what that has to do with anything. I know what the differences between 10.7 and 10.8 are, and I know that none of them justify what Apple is doing.

No, I am aware that (particularly in the Windows XP -> Vista transition) there were quite a hardware manufacturers that were slow to make the transition. But XP continues to get security updates, and 10.5 (soon to be 10.6) does not.

It used to be the case that longevity was a big selling point for Macs. Now it's actually the opposite, thanks to Apple's increasingly aggressive forced obsolescence policies. My 2007 Macbook, for instance, will not run Mountain Lion. Only five years of OS updates is pretty insane, IMHO. Remember when you could run System 7.5.5 (released late 1996) on a Mac Plus (released early 1986)?

Even if I were willing to run Lion forever, Apple typically only releases security updates for OSX one major version back. I refuse to run an internet-connected computer on an OS that doesn't get any security updates, so it's the end of the line whenever 10.9 is released, likely in 2013 or 2014.

This Macbook is my sixth Mac -- I've been using them since pretty much the day Commodore went under. But at this point I honestly wouldn't even consider replacing it with another Mac.

Well, that's a silly attitude to have. Google added a "feature" that I find to be incredibly distasteful and distracting, with no ability to turn it off. You seem to think that I shouldn't take that into account when deciding whether to use their service. Of course if either Google or Bing change the behavior of their respective products I will re-evaluate at that time. Why shouldn't I? But the fact is that Bing, at this point in time, offers a service I prefer as my default search engine (even if I do occasionally find it necessary to use Google as a backup).

Also: It's not just an issue of averting my eyes because the auto-scrolling feature makes that very difficult. It's as bad, to me, as if they started having animated ads: useless space that reduces the information-I-care-about-to-noise ratio while moving around a lot to draw my eyes away from said information I care about. It's a usability disaster when it appears, and I'm not the only one that thinks so. I don't need them to get rid of it; a setting would be fine.

The day I searched (a few months ago) for information on the Toyota recall and got an automatically scrolling box of Twitter posts was the day I switched to Bing.

(That said, Bing really isn't as good as Google... but most of the time it's almost as good, and I really don't want anything to automatically scroll, and I really really don't want any results from Twitter.)