Only the late 2011 17″ MacBook Pro succeeds/supersedes it, and it can also technically run Snow Leopard.
In addition to this Mac being one of the last MacBooks to run Snow Leopard, it’s also one of the last of the 17″ MacBook Pros that will ever be made (unless Apple brings it back). I was ready to jump to Intel over the past year or so, and this January I wound up getting a February 2011 17″ MacBook Pro. When these machines are all refreshed, you will no longer be able to run PowerPC applications (without slowing it down somewhat through virtualization) on any brand new Mac, since there will be no way to boot into Snow Leopard, and thus no way to run Rosetta. The only reason these Macs can still boot into Snow Leopard is because they were first manufactured before Lion was ready to ship, even though the 2011 Mini wound up shipping with Lion installed and they have not had a hardware refresh yet.
Only a few currently produced Macs still can technically support Snow Leopard (such as the Mac Pro, Mac mini – via FW Target Disk Mode install from a 2011 MacBook Pro, and iMac (supported with machine specific 10.6.6 install disc), although they are all likely shipping with Lion or Mountain Lion by now. Without Rosetta, you lose all of your old PowerPC applications. Mountain Lion now feels like it has matched it as far as overall performance goes, but as Dan Knight mentioned, Snow Leopard enabled PowerPC applications to run courtesy of Rosetta. I see Tiger, then Snow Leopard as something of “lines in the sand” in which large numbers of Macs can/will never cross.ĭan Bashur ( Apple, Tech, and Gaming): Snow Leopard is still the OS for Intel Macs bar none. We will see many lower-end Intel machines running Snow Leopard many years into the future. Steve Watkins ( The Practical Mac): Simon hit the nail on the head: I believe Snow Leopard will be to Intel Macs what Tiger is to PPC.
Snow Leopard is the slick and fast Intel OS, much as Tiger was to the PPC platform.
Lion was quite a bit slower than Snow Leopard, and while Mountain Lion brought back some of that speed, Snow Leopard really was a slick and streamlined OS. My first impressions were “wow, this thing is fast.” It was so much faster and a lot more stable than Leopard on my MacBook.Ī few weeks after, I upgraded to Lion, and then on launch day I upgraded to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Being a PPC Mac user for a long time, I had no experience of Snow Leopard until 2012. Leopard was great, but Snow Leopard blew me away. I bought it in 2012 and picked up a Snow Leopard disc only a few days after purchasing it. Simon Royal ( Tech Spectrum): My MacBook – an early 2009 model – shipped with Leopard. By eliminating legacy PowerPC code, Snow Leopard needed less drive space and ran some things faster than ever, as well as introducing some new technologies to the Mac. That came to an end with OS X 10.7 Lion, so for a lot of Mac users with older software, Snow Leopard will always be the last version of OS X to run those PPC apps.īut there were improvements as well. It still worked like earlier versions, and although it didn’t support PowerPC Macs, it still ran PowerPC software. And with 10.6 Snow Leopard, it completely left PowerPC Macs behind.įor PowerPC users, it was an insult, but for Intel users, Snow Leopard would become the last traditional version of OS X.
With OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple had shipped a universal binary version of its OS that could run on either hardware platform. Macs had uses PowerPC processors from the System 7.1 era up until 2006, when the first Intel-based Macs arrived running a special Intel-only version of OS X 10.4 Tiger.
Dan Knight ( Mac Musings): It’s hard to believe that it was just three years ago that Mac OS X went Intel only.