New Imac's coming late 2012 with Snow Leopard?

[patearrings]

Hi guys,

As the thread title really. I am thinking of buying one of the new imacs when they are refreshed later this year. My question is, will it be at all possible to install Snow Leopard on one of these machines as by default they will come with Mountain Lion I would think.

Besides it not wanting to install SL (I heard there are problems), if it is some how possible, won't there be a problem with the chipset drivers, graphics card drivers etc as I am essentially installing an OS that has drivers from 3 years ago and no drivers for the brand new hardware in my new iMac.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

hardtofin

 

[simsaladimbamba]

It will not work, as Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard only has drivers for 2011 Macs, but not upcoming 2012 Macs.

Example: [SUCCESS!]Late 2011 Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard, which only works, because the late 2011 MBP uses hardware for which there are drivers for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

 

[Bear]

...
As the thread title really. I am thinking of buying one of the new imacs when they are refreshed later this year. My question is, will it be at all possible to install Snow Leopard on one of these machines as by default they will come with Mountain Lion I would think.
...

Lion or Mountain Lion depending on when they get released. And you pretty much said why they won't work with Snow Leopard, that being the missing hardware support.

 

[patearrings]

Lion or Mountain Lion depending on when they get released. And you pretty much said why they won't work with Snow Leopard, that being the missing hardware support.

And i assume that apple will never release the drivers as part of an update? And that they cant be extracted from a mountain lion disc etc?

 

[Bear]

And i assume that apple will never release the drivers as part of an update? And that they cant be extracted from a mountain lion disc etc?

At this point Snow Leopard only receives security patches, so you won't see new device drivers for Snow Leopard.

As for extracting it from Mountain Lion, device drivers tend to have issues between major versions of OS X due to changes in the kernel. And it's not just the graphics drivers, it's the pieces of the kernel that talk to the chipset supporting the processor. And so on.

If you really want to run Snow Leopard buy one of the current systems that shipped with Snow Leopard originally and get a set of the Snow Leopard recovery discs for that Mac.