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This is an extension of this question. As noted by that question, Apple discontinued support for many of their older computers, notably the plastic MacBooks. What is the reasoning for leaving out this hardware? Is it due to hardware restrictions or is it just a push for owners of older hardware to upgrade?

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The limitation is because Mountain Lion dropped support for 32 bit kernel and extensions. There are work arounds that work on some old computers (like the first gen Intel Mac Pro), leading me to believe it's simply an artificial limitation, much like the exclusion of Intel Core Solo support that came with Lion.

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The first part of the workaround you link to is to upgrade the graphics card to one on a supported Mac, as the stock graphics cards will cause a kernel panic. You can't upgrade the graphics card in an old Macbook, and it's doubtful that the old Intel GMA graphics driver was ever ported to 64-bit. So the limitation is probably technical, not artificial. – Ken Jul 25 '12 at 20:49
(I have an Intel GMA Macbook, and the graphics were already starting to suffer from drawing bugs in Lion. It was a great graphics chip for its day, but it was getting old, and apparently they didn't have the resources to give that driver the love it needed.) – Ken Jul 25 '12 at 20:52
It must be an arbitrary/artificial limitation, since they removed support for macbook's that have core 2 duo's, so...it's not a "64 bit cpu" limitation at least... – rogerdpack Apr 15 at 6:17
The limitation has to do with the inability for these machines' EFI to load 64-bit Kernle extensions, which was magically fixed by the MLPostFactor mod. My girlfriend's GMA Macbook is running it, and it's working great so far. – XAleXOwnZX Apr 16 at 1:36

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