Hey I want to buy a macbook pro, but I have to have snow leopard installed…which is Mac OS X 10.6 and beyond.
Everyone selling old MacBook pro on Ebay and in the Apple refurbished store only seem to sell it with Leopard (version 10.5 and less)
So am I missing some secret why NONE of these computers have the latest OS installed? Even apple isnt upgrading these to Snow Leopard when they resell them? Why not? Can you not install Snow Leopard on these computers?
I am happy to buy and install the upgrade, as it only costs $30…I just want to make sure I don’t buy a machine that cant run it.
Will I have any trouble installing Snow Leopard on a macbook pro with…it looks like an intel core 2 duo with 1GB plus ram?
Think you answered your own question. They want to squeeze that extra $30 out of you.
As for the private sellers on eBay, same basic concept but in reverse. If you were selling a computer, would you bother spending $30 for an upgraded OS you’re not going use, or would you just sell it as is and let the buyer spend that extra money?
The reason Apple doesn’t do it from the refurb store is that they redo the OS from the discs that came with it - some of which include customised software (for example, the iMacs came with iLife preinstalled), whereas the 10.6 disc does not have that (but will preserve the software you have if you upgrade).
As far as the OS goes, it will install and work just fine on that hardware. It runs beautifully on my late 2006 iMac: 2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, ATI X1600, so it will be very happy on that Macbook Pro.
I bought a refurbished Mac recently. It came with Leopard installed, but also came with the disks to install Snow Leopard. I don’t know why they would not still be doing that.
I don’t know if Snow Leopard has a similar limitation built in, but when I tried to install Leopard (10.5) on my aging Powerbook G4 laptop, the Leopard installation halted with a message saying my system was too old (as far as I can tell, because the Leopard installation saw my processor speed and deemed that it was inadequate.)
P.S. that laptop is about 7 years old IIRC. I must have purchased it around 2002 or 2003.
I also use an aging G4 PowerBook. Snow Leopard (10.6) is Intel processor only. So, no PowerBooks can run it. PowerBooks with 867 MHz or faster G4 processor can run Leopard (10.5). Those with processors slower than 867 MHz are stuck with Tiger (10.4).
Correct. I was wondering if there were some Intel Macs on which Snow Leopard would not install if the processor were too old. But I doubt it, since the earliest Intel Macs came out only 4.5 years ago approximately.
Snow Leopard also had a rather large amount of flaws when it was released, leading a lot of people to avoid upgrading. (Driver issues, shuffling things around leading to software errors from old software, lack of compatibility, etc.) Some never did, since Leopard worked fine and the new features weren’t vital or, really, that hot.
Of course, the laptops Apple sold after SL came out with SL pre-installed, can’t be downgraded to Leopard. (Except 10.5.7, and you’d have to get a separate 10.5.7 disc) Which is a real PITA, especially if you’re trying to stick to Leopard for compatibility reasons. (I work at a school with about 300 iMacs and 400+ Macbooks, plus the students’ own.)