With lion coming out tomorrow, July 20th 2011, a lot of people are asking if they should upgrade and if their Mac is indeed able to be upgraded to OS X Lion. Well you’ll need to:
- Be running Snow Leopard (SL)- if you’re on Leopard or Tigger or Panther then you have to upgrade to SL first.
- Be running a Core 2 Duo processor or higher
- Have a minium of 2 gigs of Ram installed
- If you meet the requirement above then you need to download it from the Mac App store (If you’re on a slow internet connection you may be able to swing by your local brick and mortar Mac Store to use their speedy wifi connection to download it)
if you purchased your machine after 2007 they you’ll probably be able to upgrade (you probably have a 64 bit processor) as long as you have 2 Gigs of Ram. You can check what process your Mac has by going clicking on the Apple icon at the very top left of the screen and selecting “About This Mac”. Look at the Processor and Memory.
As you can see on my older MacBook Pro, I have a Core 2 Duo and 8 gigs of memory so I’m fine. If you have a plain of Core Duo NOT Core 2 Duo then you’re out of luck (Core Duo chips are only 32bit not 64bit) but you’re probably doing just fine running Tiger or Leopard anyway so why bother upgrading. Also the new i3, i5 and i7 processors are Lion compatible too.
Upgrading memory is pretty easy and you always want to max out your memory as this is the cheapest way to get your Mac to perform better. I like OWC, Other World Computing and normally get all my memory from them.
You can see what new in the version on Apples website here