14 DAY TRIAL // Apple appears to have finally put the lid on Intel Atom support with the release of Mac OS X 10.6.2 yesterday, notable hackintosh sources say. The most prominent of the lot, StellaRola, signaled a while back that developer builds of OS X 10.6.2 had already dropped support, although one of the latest 10.6.2 betas seemingly reinstated compatibility with the respective architecture.
It seems, however, that with the final (public) version of Mac OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard, Apple has indeed put an end to hackintosh practices, at least starting with this OS version, and provided that the hackintosh community doesn't come up with a fix.
“In the current developer build of 10.6.2, Apple appears to have changed around a lot of CPU related information,” read StellaRola’s original post, which spawned a flurry of reports saying Mac OS X 10.6.2 had killed Atom support. “One of the effects of this is Apple killing off Intel’s Atom chip,” the post continued to point out. In the meantime, support for Atom appeared to have been re-enabled, but the current version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard says otherwise.
OSXDaily recently posted a report citing the same blogger as saying that various netbook and "hackintosh" forums are "blowing up with problems of 10.6.2 instant rebooting their Atom-based notebooks." Systems using the Atom processor will go into a startup-loop if the 10.6.2 update is installed, according to most reports focusing on the matter.
“My sources tell me that everytime a netbook user installs 10.6.2 an Apple employee gets their wings,” Stell continues to stress on his blog. “Just an FYI, this is OSx86 after all and none of the scenes hackers really let down on support. The latest kernel may not be “officially” supported but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a modded kernel around the corner," the post ends.