10.6 Developer Preview DVD image ( Table 1). It was one of these 2008 DPs.Įver since, the PowerPC Mac community have been learning all we can about the UB components in Snow Leopard - advantages, performance advances over Leopard, and areas where collective work will bring PowerPC Macs a big step beyond Leopard. In March 2020, read a tweet by who posted a screenshot of Snow Leopard running on a PowerPC Mac. Knowledge that Snow Leopard’s earliest DPs could be used on PowerPC Macs was broadly forgotten. By then, most of Snow Leopard’s code base was Intel-only, but a handful of residual, “tri-architecture” components lingered. Internally, Apple may have maintained a UB fork as a plan B contingency.Īfter many more DPs, an OS X 10.6.0 “Golden Master” shipped August 2009. Although a “tri-architecture” kernel could boot on PowerPC Macs (namely, during startup “beneath” the grey Apple and loading wheel), it could not launch Finder. By Build 10A222 ( Darwin 10.0.0d3), December 2008, an all-new Finder, the first written wholly in Cocoa, was re-worked for Intel CPUs only. Though still PowerPC-bootable, 10A190 revealed just how much UB code, relative to 10A96, was gone and how less supported PowerPCs had become. 
Nevertheless, a second DP in October 2008, known as Build 10A190 ( Darwin 10.0.0d2), included UB code to run on PowerPC Macs and, like 10A96, a mach kernel compiled for three architectures - Intel 32-bit, Intel 64-bit, and PowerPC. The following week, Apple clarified Snow Leopard would be Intel only. At an early stage in Snow Leopard’s development, continued OS X support for PowerPC Macs was still on the table.
Apple withheld comment on the UB nature of this DP, designated Build 10A96 (with a Darwin 10.0.0d1 kernel). When Apple supplied a first Developer Preview (DP) of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at WWDC in June 2008, its operating code prioritized Intel hardware but included a working kernel, Finder, and Universal Binary (UB) code for PowerPC Macs. OS X 10.5 Leopard, on sale October 2007, would be the last major version retailed for PowerPC Macs. During Apple’s product transition from PowerPC to Intel Macs, OS X supported both architectures, but a phase-out of PowerPC support neared.
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