Will Ivy Bridge MBAs run Snow Leopard

[pgflmac]

Went through the roaring apps list of Lion compatible SW and some SW I still use have issues.

I am extremely happy with Snow Leopard.

I am thinking about replacing my MBA rev A with a new MBA to get use of a Tbolt monitor.

Now see the projections of ivy Bridge MBAs real-soon-now.

Will Ivy Bridge MBAs run Snow Leopard?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

No. Snow Leopard has no drivers for Ivy Bridge CPUs and even the 2011 MBA can't run 10.6 properly, due to a different Thunderbolt chip, that has no driver for 10.6.

 

[gentlefury]

Apple doesn't believe in legacy support....new hardware only runs on new software. No drivers in SL for nonexistent hardware.

 

[pgflmac]

Any one else?

No. Snow Leopard has no drivers for Ivy Bridge CPUs and even the 2011 MBA can't run 10.6 properly, due to a different Thunderbolt chip, that has no driver for 10.6.

This comment does not make sense

"drivers[sic] for CPU".

Current MBA does support Snow and TBolt.

 

[oneMadRssn]

This comment does not make sense

"drivers[sic] for CPU".

Current MBA does support Snow and TBolt.

This isn't true. The current MBA cannot run Snow Leopard reliably because SL lacks support for the current MBA hardware. There are drivers for a CPU (and the imbedded graphics functionality as well), and there are drivers for the specific thunderbolt chips used. Unfortunately, only Lion comes with the drivers for these.

You can use the advanced search and find the numerous topics of users attempting to run SL on the 2011 MBA. They all end the same: They can get it installed, and after borrowing the kext from Lion they can get it semi-working. But it is never stable, it's full of kernel panics, the cpu gets hot, the fan runs wild, and it's not a good experience.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

This comment does not make sense

"drivers[sic] for CPU".

Current MBA does support Snow and TBolt.

What I meant, is that the Ivy Bridge chips (CPU and chipset) will not have any drivers for 10.6, as they still haven't been released yet (the IB chips). And the second part of my sentence probably should have been a separate sentence like "The 2011 MBAs coming with Lion can run 10.6, as 10.6 has drivers for the CPU and GPU, but the 2011 MBA uses a different Thunderbolt chip than the 2011 MBPs and 2011 iMacs and 2011 Mac minis, thus installing 10.6 onto 2011 MBAs will result in unstable machines", though I thought my sentence was clear enough.

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Maybe have a look at Advanced Search to find threads about 10.6 and 2011 MBAs, there are quite a lot of them out there:

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