Only older hardware can run older versions of Mac OS X in general, attempting to install Snow Leopard on something like a new Retina MacBook Pro will fail and is not worth attempting.

It’s very important to note that new Macs can not run Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The virtual machine approach continues to work with all modern versions of OS X, letting Snow Leopard run atop Mavericks and Yosemite.įor running on native hardware, the system requirements for Mac OS X Snow Leopard are quite basic, including an Intel processor, 1GB of RAM, and 5GB of disk space. Once you get the dmg files you can either burn them to a DVD to make an installer disc, create a Snow Leopard bootable install drive from them, or run Snow Leopard within a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare. Download Mac OS X 10.5 9a581 DVD image (direct link from Apple).Download Mac OS X 10.6 10a432 DVD image (direct link from Apple).The downloads come directly from Apple, and require an ADC login to access. The following two disk images are the complete installer DVD in DMG format. Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) Direct Download Links We’ll touch on install methods with links to appropriate tutorials in a moment. System requirements for legacy versions of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard are quite basic, and the releases run fine in virtual machines as well. Downloading these prior releases of Mac OS X requires an appropriate Apple Developer login that you’d get with joining the Mac Developer program, and are otherwise inaccessible from free developer accounts or the general public.

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