Does anyone know if Apple plans to support AirPlay Mirroring in Macs older than last year? It seems in the fine print that it only works with 2011 models.
asked Jul 27, 2012 at 23:39
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1I don't think so. Knowing from past history, Apple likes to force upgrades.– user3463Jul 28, 2012 at 1:35
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1I edited your question to specify AirPlay Mirroring, since that's really what you seemed to be asking. Note that "AirPlay" is now a pretty big umbrella term that includes things as old as what used to be called "AirTunes" audio streaming from 2004. So plenty of parts of "AirPlay" are supported on older machines. AirPlay Mirroring is the new thing that's only for 2011+ models.– SpiffJul 28, 2012 at 6:41
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2 Answers
It seems unlikely that AirPlay Mirroring will be coming to older Macs. It has been reported that AirPlay Mirroring requires hardware H.264 compression support from the GPU, to compress your screen image small enough, fast enough, to pipe it across the network.
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Sounds like it. Some of the commenters are not convinced that it's the complete case. Jul 28, 2012 at 7:32
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@1.21gigawatts The other thing to remember is that Apple allocates resources to the future, not the past. They don't spend a lot of development/QA/support effort on bringing features to older systems.– SpiffJul 28, 2012 at 7:44
It does seem unlikely.
According to 9to5Mac,
"It’s not working on our 2.4 GHz 2010 Mac mini or 2010 MacBook Pro."
After reading the link in the previous answer I doubt AirPlay Mirroring will come to before-2011 Macs. It's the same issue with iOS devices:
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.
(source: CultOfMac)
