Intel Atom Support Returns in Latest Mac OS X

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Hackintosh people rejoice!

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.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Hellbound
    Knowing how Apple is, I will never purchase their products.
    Reply
  • Glorian
    Apple needs to just give in and start letting people install their os, they could actually start making more money and encroach further on the pc market. If they do I will definitely install osx on my old pc.

    But you know they won't, that' s why a lot of people hate them.
    Reply
  • wildwell
    I hope this isn't temporary.

    Reminder, Tom's is currently conducting a poll for a Mac OSX forum:
    http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/32340-12-forum
    Reply
  • digitalrazoe
    Apples hardware architecture is "closed" where as you deal with MSI, ASUS, ASRock, EVGA, etc. is some what open ... where as Intel, nVidia and AMD has their reference systems ( or one of the mentioned ( and not mentioned )) The minute differences is enough to bring rocksolid stability or hair pulling instability to any system. ( I had to ditch a motherboard with an old VIA chipset because it was rocksolid running windows 7 but blue chunks running any flavor of linux I through at it so I can only imagine what would happen if I tried to run OS-X !) Apple should open up on the system level .. hell they used the same damned chips minus some rom hooks they put in their own system. This would weed out some of the "not so good" mobo manufactures or make them step up!
    Reply
  • sstym
    This is actually interesting. It looks like Apple did not intentionally block hackint0sh netbooks but just screwed up on an update.
    Given the fact they only have to test their OS on the hardware configurations they sell, it is not surprising that OSX would have some issues on the vast majority of untested hardware.

    Now imagine the uproar if Microsoft pulled something like this. They can't afford it, because their OS HAS TO WORK on almost every x86 processor available, be it Intel, AMD or Via (and I'm not even counting video cards, sound cards, RAID cards, WiFi adapaters, etc.).

    I think this illustrates how easy Apple has it compared to Microsoft when debugging and testing their OS. As more people strive to install OSX on a wider range of hardware, this is going to get more common.
    Reply
  • digitalrazoe
    I am sooo glad via is out of the chipset making biz... makes porting OSes to other boards much simpler... hey .. remember when you could buy WinNT on MIPS, Dec Alpha, Sparc, PowerPC And what ever came your way? I miss those days !!!
    Reply
  • doc70
    this goes to show you that MacOS is actually very immature and Completely unprepared to take on any other OS, including Win or Linux distros. I mean, one could easily find support in linux for all kind of hardware, but if it is not natively supported by Apple, goodluck saying the same for MacOS.
    Also, as someone said before, the more "wild" MacOS installations out there, the more exploits/hacks/vulnerabilities will be found... just wait and see.
    Reply
  • rooket
    I get kernel panic when trying to install this lousy o/s on my dell laptop. not really too keen on it so far.. looks like i'd have to install the older version onto my desktop and then make the memory stick boot loader.. a lot of work to cripple my laptop with mac osx ;) lol. my laptop loves windows 7.
    Reply
  • rooket
    I get kernel panic when trying to install this lousy o/s on my dell laptop. not really too keen on it so far.. looks like i'd have to install the older version onto my desktop and then make the memory stick boot loader.. a lot of work to cripple my laptop with mac osx ;) lol. my laptop loves windows 7.
    Reply
  • christop
    I knew it was a total sham for them to say they are killing netbooks with atoms.. Nice lie.... Fail again
    Reply