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groove-agent

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 13, 2006
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One thing holding me back from getting a new MBP is having to use OSX Lion. Has anyone tried installing Snow Leopard on a nonR MBP, or even a R MBP to see if it works?
 
One thing holding me back from getting a new MBP is having to use OSX Lion. Has anyone tried installing Snow Leopard on a nonR MBP, or even a R MBP to see if it works?

Snow Leopard won't run on any macbook that didn't support it originally.
 
I have seen it being run on a late 2011 MBP, though I can't remember the guys name. He said it required a ton of tinkering with to get it to work, and a lot of the stuff didn't run as optimally as it could be run. Even if you found some fantastic solution to run it, I don't think it'd be worth it because the only advantage of Snow Leopard is the responsiveness and you would lose a lot of that by finding a work around.
 
Some have gotten SL going on a VM in Virtual Box...not sure if it's still possible.

Might have better luck with running a copy of SL Server in VM; I believe the license allows that.
 
I have only ever used SL on my late 2011 MBP.
No tinkering and no problems for me.
 
How? Through a VM?

Sorry for the late reply.

I used to run SL on a MacBook. When I received my new late 2011 MBP in January I took the hard drive out of the Macbook, put it in the new MBP, and turned on the machine. That is all.
 
It's pretty easy to run SL on a late 2011 MBP. One way of doing it is a clean installation from the DVD that came with an early 2011 MBP (that's 10.6.7 I think). A couple of things might not be working (such as media keys etc.), but that's resolved after running Software Update and updating to 10.6.8, everything will work as it should then.
The situation is completely different with 2012 macbooks though - as someone mentioned here, SL doesn't have the necessary drivers. It might be possible to make it work with some extensive tinkering/hacking, but it wouldn't probably run very well anyways.
 
It's pretty easy to run SL on a late 2011 MBP.
The difference is that SL had the Sandy Bridge kexts, so of course a 2011 could work, however with a brand new laptop, Snow Leopard does not contain the device drivers (kexts) for Ivy Bridge and thus won't work
 
I think your only option for a 2012 model is to have a Snow Leopard Server VM. It won't be your main OS and you'll obviously lose performance by running 2 OSes at the same time, so it's not ideal as a permanent OS. I only do it when I want to run Rosetta applications.
 
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