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I bought a 17" MBP last week and it will run Leopard

gmanterry

gmanterry

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 31, 2008
113
0
Phoenix, AZ
This surprised me. I bought a new 17" MBP because my late 2007 15" MBP is having problems. The trackpad has problems and the DVD drive won't work. I made a Carbon Copy Clone of the 15" MBP hard drive which is running Leopard. The new 17" MBP came with Snow Leopard. Just for fun today I decided to see if I could boot the new 17" MBP from the Leopard disk image. It works fine. I was always under the impression that when you bought a new Mac it couldn't be down graded. This 17" MBP likes Leopard just fine.

Terry
 
Thanks for the link.

There is no reason to go back to Leopard with the new 'puter. The point was that it ran just fine. I used it all day and even posted this thread with it. That surprised me, that's all.

Terry
 
miles01110 said:
It might appear to install well, but there could be more serious issues as time goes on running the older system on the newer hardware.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2186
Click to expand...

What? all the current macbook pros were released with leopard to begin with, and Snow Leopard was released months later. I know bought mine with leopard installed and snow leopard in the box.

Whatever you linked to sounds like ********.
 
And one final thing.

Just to clarify, I booted the 17" MBP off of the CCC image of the 15 " MBP drive which was made on an external hard drive. I hope this makes sense. I didn't install Leopard on the 17 " just booted it from the 15 " drive image. ;-)

Terry
 
gmanterry said:
Just to clarify, I booted the 17" MBP off of the CCC image of the 15 " MBP drive which was made on an external hard drive. I hope this makes sense. I didn't install Leopard on the 17 " just booted it from the 15 " drive image. ;-)

Terry
Click to expand...

There is no technical reason you could not install leopard if you wanted to and run it without issue. This is no different than buying a laptop with Vista (before 7) and wiping the disc and installing XP.
 
kny3twalker said:
What? all the current macbook pros were released with leopard to begin with, and Snow Leopard was released months later. I know bought mine with leopard installed and snow leopard in the box.

Whatever you linked to sounds like ********.
Click to expand...

It's not BS, I wouldn't roll back to an early version of OS X then what was out when the computer came out, but since Leopard was what was out at the time there is no big deal.
 
reallynotnick said:
It's not BS, I wouldn't roll back to an early version of OS X then what was out when the computer came out, but since Leopard was what was out at the time there is no big deal.
Click to expand...

I understand there could be driver issues and whatever with an older OS, but yeah Leopard was the current OS when the current macbook pros were released. And I think more the point was that poster trying say the op could have issues. ********!
 
I did this with a 13" MBP i got a few months ago, and though it ran leopard fine, it does have driver issues that will appear.

I even ran Leopard on a 27" iMac but wouldnt necessarily trust it as my main machine with leopard running.
 
ThirteenXIII said:
I did this with a 13" MBP i got a few months ago, and though it ran leopard fine, it does have driver issues that will appear.

I even ran Leopard on a 27" iMac but wouldnt necessarily trust it as my main machine with leopard running.
Click to expand...

Huh cause leopard ran great on my 13" until I fresh installed snow leopard after a few months of use.

What specific piece of hardware was having the driver issue, please explain this more because otherwise I will believe this was user error.
 
When rolling back OS versions, certain changes in hardware may not be supported by the drivers included. That isn't very surprising or foreign, is it?

However, with the newest MBP that was released originally with Leopard, there haven't been any changes at all other than Snow Leopard being released. There is no compatibility issue here.
 
kny3twalker said:
What? all the current macbook pros were released with leopard to begin with, and Snow Leopard was released months later. I know bought mine with leopard installed and snow leopard in the box.

Whatever you linked to sounds like ********.
Click to expand...

That's nice, but current models don't ship with Leopard. You've got no basis for assuming that there have been zero hardware changes that would make the official Apple support document relevant.
 
Go back to Snow Leopard.
Time Machine a copy of your old computer.
Run the new one with Snow Leopard and click 'import back-up' - or something along those lines ...
 
miles01110 said:
That's nice, but current models don't ship with Leopard. You've got no basis for assuming that there have been zero hardware changes that would make the official Apple support document relevant.
Click to expand...

There has not been an update. So I do not know what you are referring to. You think Apple is going to switch hardware vendors?
 
When I first bought a mid 2009 13" MBP back in September, I was disappointed because with SL, it has and still has to this day, a bug where watching a video or movie through Front Row will not increase it's play count and will only show as partially watched in iTunes even though the movie was watched till the end.

I decided to install Leopard instead since Leopard never had this bug. It installed correctly but most of the touchpad gestures would not function under Leopard even after installing all updates.

I ended up switching back to SL and haven't used Front Row because of the bug mentioned above.
 
SpaceKitty said:
When I first bought a mid 2009 13" MBP back in September, I was disappointed because with SL, it has and still has to this day, a bug where watching a video or movie through Front Row will not increase it's play count and will only show as partially watched in iTunes even though the movie was watched till the end.

I decided to install Leopard instead since Leopard never had this bug. It installed correctly but most of the touchpad gestures would not function under Leopard even after installing all updates.

I ended up switching back to SL and haven't used Front Row because of the bug mentioned above.
Click to expand...

Did you format the drive before installing leopard?
 
The hardware ran Leopard just fine back in June of 2009. Get back to me when you can replicate a Mac Pro 2008 running Tiger situation.
 
kny3twalker said:
There is no technical reason you could not install leopard if you wanted to and run it without issue. This is no different than buying a laptop with Vista (before 7) and wiping the disc and installing XP.
Click to expand...

I would hesitate to install a Leopard retail disc on that MBP. Apple's advice is that re-installing the current OS is OK when using the disc that came with your computer (the grey install CDs) because they may have additional software needed for your computer. So the 10.5 DVD that came with that MBP would be fine, but a 10.5 retail DVD might not be. But it is OK to install retail versions of any compatible OS's released *after* your computer came out as those retail copies would include whatever necessary hardware drivers were added to the grey Install CD that might not have been on the retail DVD. I know that's wordy, hope it makes sense.
 
Actually, you're 100% correct.

Eidorian said:
The hardware ran Leopard just fine back in June of 2009. Get back to me when you can replicate a Mac Pro 2008 running Tiger situation.
Click to expand...

The 'puter did come with Tiger installed. I upgraded to Leopard, I think, in November of 2007. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Us 70+ year olds aren't the sharpest tack in the box. :)

Terry
 
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