“With Airplay Mirroring now part of OS X Mountain Lion, you’re going to hear a lot of people claim that OS X is now a cord-cutting tour de force,” Matt Peckham reports for TIME Magazine. “The iPad and iPhone 4S already had it, and now your Mac does, too.”
“In reality, what Apple’s done is make it slightly more convenient to stream whatever’s on your Mac’s screen to your television, wirelessly, by way of an intermediary device,” Peckham reports. “Those of you who already own an iPad or iPhone 4S, and who’ve been doing this for months now, may be less impressed.”
Peckham reports, “Having the ability to simply click an icon in OS X’s menu bar, select “Apple TV” and watch as, presto, my Mac’s display hijacks my television is impressive… It’s also as intuitive to initiate as anything else I’ve employed my Apple wireless devices for, clicking the same box-triangle icon in iTunes to bounce audio from my music library between the Apple TV or speakers connected to an Airport Express, for instance.”
Read more in the full article here.
Still pissed that my mid-2010 iMac is not included in the AirPlay fun!
Look at Air Parrot. There are technical reasons the earlier MBP’s won’t support it.
I plan to go the Air Parrot route or use my iPad until i upgrade to retina MBP next year.
AirParrot’s drivers conflict with the NVIDIA card. It’s even described on AirParrot’s FAQ page (though they don’t list the mid-2010 MBP’s NVIDIA card specifically).
After I installed it, my MBP would go to a screensaver all the time, for no apparent reason. Got rid of AirParrot and it’s back to normal.
I was able to load the audio driver in Air Parrot with no issue but had problems when I loaded the video driver that is designed to extend the desktop to 1080p instead of just mirroring. It worked great right up until my MacBook Pro went to sleep. The other issue is when you go full screen on the extended desktop you get the linen background on the notebook screen.
I elected to just keep the mirroring via Air Parrot and use regular AirPlay for music, video, and movies via iTunes. It will have to do until 2014 or so.
This guy is a giant A-hole
I haven’t tried it yet but from what I understand you can’t pipe system audio and I assume there must be some noticeable latency which would surely make it fiddly to move the mouse cursor?
You certainly can pipe system audio.
“With Airplay Mirroring now part of OS X Mountain Lion, you’re going to hear a lot of people claim that OS X is now a cord-cutting tour de force,”
Not until the devices can talk directly to each other without a 3rd party network. It’s stupid that they can’t.
What do you mean, “without a third-party network”? My Mac is on wifi. My AppleTV is on wifi. If they were not, I wouldn’t have an internet connection. Now, if I am willing to work without internet, I can certainly connect the AppleTV and the Mac directly over wifi without a router by having the Mac create a network.
I used this over the weekend while working on powerpoint slides for a presentation this week. It worked flawlessly and the cursor lag was barely noticeable. It’s very intuitive and kinda fun!
Powerpoint, WTF, over!
Air Parrot rocks.
It would be nice if I could ACTUALLY use airplay mirroring on my barely used MacBook Pro. If there is a real technical limitation in an 18 month laptop to be able to mirror, I’d like to hear it. More like artificially limited by some controlling authority.
No on-CPU h.264 transcoding on your Mac. It is a legitimate technical limitation.
Air Parrot can sure do it, you would think Apple could be a wee bit more inclusive of their machines for Airplay mirroring. I’m all for progress moving forward, but man there’s gonna be quite a few disappointed Mac users when they find out their relatively new machine can’t perform the best new feature of Mountain Lion.
Of course you’re going to hear about different quirks about Airplay mirroring on the Mac because people have different set ups but his complaints are very minor compared to the plus’ it has brought. How about the ability to stream ESPN 3 and HBO Go which IOS will not let you do, I say this alone makes it worth the $20 Mountain Lion upgrade, no doubt!
It’s amazing. Love it and use it all the time. It does sometimes stammer though, not sure why, especially during the first moments of the connection.
I was kind of hoping that AirPlayMirroring would work with more than just Mac to Apple TV, like Reflections did. But I have not yet really tried it because I don’t own an Apple TV. I don’t plan on getting one any time soon either. I was hoping that I could stream games like Infinity Blade and Final Fantasy or a few movies from my iPad to my MBPS 2011. But unfortunately, that is not yet an option.
Looks like I’ll have to purchase that $15.00 app instead. I held back on it when I heard ML would have it. But it was not the type of thing I was expecting it to be.
I want to join the airplay mirroring party. But I’m not going to buy a new iMac to do so. It’s only three years old.
Fine if you have a 2011 or newer Mac. I think it will take at least 5 years before everyone can say that as of right now.
Lots of pissed off people wondering why AirPlay, one of the most touted features in 10.8, is not supported except for the near-recent Macs. Some models barely a year old don’t support it either.
Beginning to wonder what happened to Apple’s “it just works*”. The asterisk would of course refer to a giant blob of exceptions. AirDrop, another touted feature in Lion 10.7, was also not supported on a large majority of Macs (although it could be hacked to work).
If Microsoft pulled this kind of stunt, they’d be getting hell for it. Apple’s planned obsolescence and inability to provide all the features they tout for Macs which actually run 10.8 is just inconsiderate to consumers.
And you don’t understand that only the newer intel CPU have the built in DRM required for this to work, “Yes” it is a requirement that was put on Apple due to the concern of piracy, and that’s not an Apple call.
Don’t blame Apple, it’s a hardware limitation, and it has been listed on Apples site on what devices would and wouldn’t be able to use AirPlay.
Problem is, Folks don’t take the time to read anymore and just assume.
Perryfjellman above says it is a technical limitation due to only the newest Macs have on-CPU H.264 transcoding. You say it is because the MPAA or some other restrictive agency is forcing DRM on us. Which is it?
I don’t understand how airplay mirroring is a piracy concern. You are just taking what you already have and throwing it on a bigger screen.
Regardless of whether or not you’re right about the DRM issue, which I believe is not the case here, since it is just “mirroring” over the air instead of plugging in a DVI-to-HDMI video cable. Anyways, you’re making my case for me and you’re right, “people don’t read anymore” as Steve Jobs famously said. But for simple consumers (of whom Apple is now targeting over professionals these days) why should they? Hey, it’s an Apple, not a PC running Windows where I’m used to doing research before installing driver packages.
Nowhere on http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/ does it indicate “only works on some Macs”, not even in the fine print at bottom. I have to go to the “Tech Specs” to find that information. Most consumers don’t care, they’ll watch the video that Apple has posted at http://www.apple.com/osx site (as I did), they’ll see the AirPlay Mirroring feature section and are led to believe any Mac able to use OS X 10.8 will do that thing. AND IT SHOULD.
All I’m saying is, if mainly touted features aren’t going to be made to work on all supported Macs that OS X 10.8 itself is designed for, then you’re misleading your customers. Apple is trying to push it’s iPad/iPhone mentality on it’s Mac install base and it just seems like a dangerous precipice.
As I mentioned OS X 10.7 had touted features which many later noticed only worked on “some Macs” and if you ask me, most of the other touted “features” in OS X 10.8 such as Messages, Notes, Reminders, and Game Center could’ve been easily added into 10.7 via a system update, but whatever…. /troll rant
Exactly! Well said.
K.C. is incorrect. Airplay mirroring limitations has NOTHING to do with DRM. I found this article. Actually Apple could do airplay mirroring on older Macs (as Air Parrot does), but they chose not to do it because internal temperatures and CPU loads wouldn’t be within their tolerances.
http://www.cultofmac.com/178460/the-real-reason-why-macs-before-2011-cant-use-airplay-mirroring-in-mountain-lion-feature/
This is a horrible sentence. You well may know what you’re talking about. But could you learn how to write a sentence? Thanks.
“Having the ability to simply click an icon in OS X’s menu bar, select “Apple TV” and watch as, presto, my Mac’s display hijacks my television is impressive… It’s also as intuitive to initiate as anything else I’ve employed my Apple wireless devices for, clicking the same box-triangle icon in iTunes to bounce audio from my music library between the Apple TV or speakers connected to an Airport Express, for instance.”
Good God.
Looks very nice with ATV 3 and my newer Mac mini, the only drawback is cursor lag. So this will be good for streaming, but not good to actually work sitting iin front of the big screen with my wireless keyboard and trackpad.