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Perhaps this is an obvious question, but will the Mountain Lion installer from the App Store work on any Mac? E.g. if I download it and put it on an SD card on my MacBook Pro can I use that SD card to install Mountain Lion on a family member's white MacBook? I know that the OS discs that the laptops came with were hardware-specific. I'm just trying to avoid downloading and burning the installer again.

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Mountain Lion will not install on a white MacBook. – Dave Sag Aug 7 '12 at 0:12
@DaveSag The apple site (apple.com/osx/specs) says: MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer), so I construe that as meaning that a mid-2010 white Macbook would be compatible with ML. – penguinrob Aug 7 '12 at 3:31
I didn't realise they still made white MacBooks after the aluminium ones. I tried installing ML on my wife's black MacBook and it said no way. – Dave Sag Aug 7 '12 at 7:20
I've never seen a black MacBook, when are those from? – penguinrob Aug 7 '12 at 13:15
Black MacBook bought in 2007 – Dave Sag Aug 10 '12 at 2:51

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Once you have downloaded it from the App Store, but before you run it, you can copy the Install Mountain Lion app into the Applications folder of any Mac you have an Admin account on (and have signed into the App store as you obviously) and run it from there. If the Mac is not recent enough to install Mountain Lion the installer will tell you, otherwise it will happily install Mountain Lion for you. That's how I updated all the Macs at my place.

Note that once run the installer will delete itself from the Applications folder.

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So the Installer has all the drivers for all the supported mac models, and doesn't download a specific Installer for eeach model? – penguinrob Aug 7 '12 at 0:00
No, I can confirm that it will work on any given model. I've installed it on a 2011 MacBook Pro as well as a 2012 MacBook Air. – Terrance Shaw Aug 7 '12 at 0:03
@TerranceShaw Ok, thanks. – penguinrob Aug 7 '12 at 0:06

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