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.
