Earlier in the week, we learned that a developer build of Snow Leopard 10.6.2 is incompatible with netbooks running the Intel Atom.
Melkort, a programmer known for his works on the Dell Mini netbooks, wrote in the MyDellMini forum, "It does turn out that the 10.6.2 kernel reboots before it's finished loading (before the bsd subsystem is initialized I believe). Might be a chameleon thing, might be an atom thing (as I haven't tested it on any other machines). I'm looking into it, but the 10.6.0 / 10.6.1 kernel works fine with 10.6.2."
This sent the Hackintosh community in a minor scramble as theories of Apple's proactive blocking of Mac OS X loaded on non-Apple computers.
Mac OS X is designed and supported to only run on Apple's machines, but a notable percentage of the netbook community has shoehorned the operating system into their modest portables. Thanks the Apple's use of Intel hardware, certain models of netbooks – such as Dell's Mini 9 and 10v – are fairly comfortable running Mac OS X.
It seemed that all the panic may be unwarranted, however, as Intel Atom support is back in the latest (10C535) build of Mac OS X 10.6.2. It's unclear as to what Apple was playing around with from version to version, but those with Hackintosh computers get a new glimmer of hope.
