You are incorrect regarding the link I posted. The Ivy Bridge CD will boot Snow Leopard on a 2012 Mac Mini which is what I have. The issue was with the ivy bridge Intel chip. But you have to boot from the CD. I know because I tried it.
By the way, when you ask for help, you are going to get a wide variety of responses so which may veer off from what you’re looking for.
Of all the people working on this issue and publishing their results on the Internet, you are the only one to claim you can successfully run Snow Leopard on a 2012 Mac Mini.
However, those who were successful in the past added to the common based of knowledge by posting step by step instructions on how to replicate their successes (on the 2011 Mac Mini for example).
With all due respect, all we have from you is your claim that you can run Snow Leopard on your 2012 Mac Mini, but you do not share with the Community a step by step guide on duplicating your success.
The reason that I continue to hammer on this issue is that the 2012 Mac Mini is an important moment in time for the evolution of the Mac Mini, and many people seek these out for their use.
The ability to run Snow Leopard on that model, 2012, would be an important step forward.
So, please, share with the Mac Mini community a step by step guide on how to run Snow Leopard on the 2012 Mac Mini and please link us here to that guide. Thank you.
If you are unable or unwilling to share such a guide, then your solo ability to do it is as helpful as your bald claim that you did it: no help at all.
I have now read all of the comments to this post.
Most of these users are attempting to run Snow Leopard on their Ivy Bridge Hackintoshes. There is not one reference to it running properly on the 2012 Mac Mini.
Furthermore, the author of the article posted on November 7, 2012:
If you’re interested in permanently running Snow Leopard, don’t get an Ivy Bridge system. Get Sandy Bridge or earlier.
And a moderator of that thread reiterated on January 9, 2022, to someone asking why:
For the same reason WindowsXP will not run on modern computers. Lack of support in the OS for the hardware. Apple stopped supporting 10.6.8 before Ivy Bridge based motherboards were released. Also, newer chipsets with newer instruction sets developed for Ivy Bridge and later CPUs have no support in 10.6.x
Your tone is quite disrespectful and since you have not done your research, you want others to do it for you. I only post what I have done or have knowledge of. If you check out the link I gave for the Tonymac site as well as Macrumors you should be able to find out the information. I did this at least eight years ago so it’s not something I can recall with specifics and it’s not that I don’t want to share, I don’t recall everything. I have shared recently on running Monterey using VMware Fusion which some were not aware of and even posted the link to receive a free license. Like many people here, I give up my little free time to help when I can but when someone takes a negative and disrespectful tone, I do not respond any further so this is my last response to you.
jk2gs: You are confusing disagreement with disrespect.
Yes, I understand you are “experimental” and want to let us know how successful your experimentation has been in the past:
You’ve run an experimental variant of PowerPC Snow Leopard; and
You’ve booted your 2012 Mac Mini with an Ivy Bridge Boot CD and then loaded Snow Leopard.
But we are talking about real world stuff here, not experimentation.
I help people who need to do things like, for example:
• Open Macromedia Freehand MX files, and perhaps even modify them;
• Gain access to Appleworks database files;
• Convert Quicken 2004 and earlier files to the new Quicken Deluxe 2022:
You may remember that this thread was broken off of Glenn Fleishman’s excellent post: “How I Learned to Love Quicken Deluxe and Give Up on the Past.”
In one post on the comments to that article, I pointed out how to use the PowerPC version of Quicken 2006 to convert her Quicken 2004 data to Quicken 2006-2007 format and then it can be properly imported into the new Quicken Deluxe 2022.
However, Quicken 2006 must be run in the PowerPC environment and not everybody is like you, and keeps one or two functioning old PowerPC Macs around just in case!
So the topic is now “How to run Snow Leopard on an Apple [silicon] Mac” and it is to solve all of the aforementioned problems and more!
The fact that you perhaps got Snow Leopard to boot on your 2012 using an Ivy Bridge CD, does nothing to solve the main problem: of how to continue to help these people using existing Intel Macs and ultimately Apple Silicon Macs.
Try not to take these responses so personally just because I back up my disagreements with you with hard cold facts.
Our responses crossed paths and if you carefully read my last post, you will see that even Tonymacx86 does not agree with your assertion to use a 2012 Mac Mini to natively run Snow Leopard.
Thank you!
Or in a one-line summary: There is a huge difference between “I can do X” (without getting into how hard it might be or if it is really possible) and “I would recommend my customers/clients do X on their production systems”.
I agree with your statement but it is not difficult to run Snow Leopard in various ways as stated earlier in some of my posts. The CD boot method did work when I tried it but since I have always had at least one or more old computers around that still could run PowerPC apps, I didn’t have any need for it on my 2012 Mini. I’ve also done one Hackintosh and that was more difficult compared to anything else mentioned.
For those who in the future might want to run PowerPC, I would try to find a model which will work for your apps like a G4 Mac Mini which can be found readily on eBay. If you would rather use your Intel Mac, then use virtualization as mentioned previously. The easier ones are Parallels and VMware Fusion bit since free is best sometimes, then use VirtualBox as I and others have done. This is one reason I still have a Performa 6400 available for Classic OS 9 apps, some of which don’t work well under the Classic environment under OS X.
That’s fine if you’re a retro-computing hobbyist, but if you’ve got production software that only exists in PPC form, relying on old/used hardware is not a sustainable solution. Old equipment breaks, and as time goes on it gets more expensive and harder to get.
If you (or your customer) is in this situation, My advice is:
If at all possible, find an alternative software package that will run on modern hardware with a modern OS. Yes, this might be expensive, and the transition may be time consuming, but if you don’t plan on going out of business first, you’ll eventually be forced to. Better start the work now while your legacy system is still operational so it won’t impact the rest of your business.
If that’s not possible, work on configuring an emulation or VM environment that can run your app. For this example (a PPC app):
If you have an Intel Mac, you can run Mac OS X 10.6 in a VM and use its Rosetta environment for PPC apps.
If you have an M1 Mac, you’ll need to use an emulator. Either a PPC emulator that can boot Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 or an Intel emulator that can boot Mac OS X 10.6.
Emulators are far from perfect, and they may take some effort to get them up and running in a way that can run your app, but once that’s done, you can run the emulator on modern hardware and even move it to completely different platforms, if necessary in the future
If a VM or an emulator isn’t an option, then you’re back to tracking down and using old hardware that can run the OS and application natively. But this is not a viable long-term solution because you will be forever working to maintain that hardware and the work will get harder over time as parts fail and get harder to replace.
For example, my PowerPC Mac uses parallel-ATA hard drives. These haven’t been made for a long time so any replacements will necessarily be with old drives. Hopefully new-old-stock and not used, but either way, it will be a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on. This Mac can boot from USB, but the computer’s native USB ports are 1.1, which is not usable for a running system. It can also boot from SCSI (since I paid for that option when I bought it), but SCSI drives are expensive and hard to get.
All valid points David and my Performa is in the same boat as yours but that machine sees limited use so if it goes down, I would use some spare parts I have to hopefully get it going. I only use a few PowerPC apps like Appleworks so my G4 PowerBook is fine for most of that. My point is that there are many people looking for information and the hobbyist might be one extreme and the business owner on the other. But since it’s difficult to find help with older devices, that business owner will have to upgrade as you say if possible or seek out advice and more than likely, that information will come from someone who is a “retro computing hobbyist” to use your words or the internet. The discussion here on older versions of Quicken highlights some of the issues with older software as good as it may be.
I still recommend keeping some older hardware even if you think you won’t need it since there may be some files that won’t work in a VM or not as you anticipate. But yes, finding parts for these older systems will be difficult and sometimes the price of these parts may not be worth keeping an older system operating vs. a new one.
I’ve been in discussion with Ivan Drucker of IvanExpert fame and he noted that he will probably:
I may end up just setting up an old Mac, or a more recent Mac running Parallels, on my network, and access Snow Leopard via Screen Sharing.
This method avoids both the expense and undue worrying about the age of PowerPC Macs and maintains the advantage of running PowerPC programs faster than they originally ran on legacy Macs, even though they go through two levels of translation.
The Holy Grail continues to be able to run Snow Leopard on an Apple Silicon Mac…