Snow Leopard’s 64-bit mode only for certain Macs
One of the most anticipated features in Apple’s next generation operating system, especially for video and image editing specialists, is 64-bit mode. Now, although final code hasn’t physically shipped, those who’ve gotten their hands on the Mac OS X 10.6 golden master say expanded memory addressing won’t be a direct boot reality for most users.
OS News is reporting that all of the currently shipping Macs only the Early 2009 Xserve will run OS X 10.6 in 64-bit mode by default. Moreover, this detail comes directly from Apple via the seed notes for the latest developer build [10A432] of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
See also: Wikipedia’s 32-bit vs 64-bit comparo
For the Macs that are listed as “capable,” a user can invoke 64-bit mode by holding down the “6″ and “4″ keys during boot and, contrariwise, holding down the “3″ and “2″ keys will boot in 32-bit mode. Further, one could use the NVRAM or the com.apple.Boot.plist file to more permanently boot into 64-bit mode.
What’s “64-bit” on Snow Leopard? (Macworld)
Our friends at 1 Infinite Loop
The knee-jerk reaction here is that Apple, those control freak bastards, are keeping expanded memory mode bottled up for some nefarious purpose. However, as pointed out by OS News, it’s more likely that Cupertino’s keeping a light lid on 64-bit simply because few third-party drivers and applications are available that take advantage of it.
Moreover, 64-bit booting is there if your Mac supports it and, as pointed out by Macworld, any Core 2 Duo or Xeon Mac will support 64-bit applications regardless.
Nevertheless, there’s a certain amount of irritation when we have to play these definition games, parsing which Macs and what level of support we get rather than being able to say, “It just works”…
What’s your take?
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August 20th, 2009
Please, stop the lies. 32bit kernel does not mean that 64bit applications can’t access more than 4GB. Lets get real and learn before opening your mouth.
August 20th, 2009
Actually, it means you can’t access more than 32 GB of RAM. Not a big deal today, maybe it will be in 2015.
August 20th, 2009
Only those who really need 16 exabytes of RAM need be worried.
August 20th, 2009
RE: veggiedude
Mate, and in 2 years time, Apple would make 64bit kernel as standard and the problem ceases to exist. People are whining now as if they had applications needing to address more than 32gb of memory!
August 25th, 2009
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/32252/32–or-64-bit-kernel-startup-mode-selector
September 16th, 2009
Beside Startup Mode Selector there is a system preferences panel which does the similar thing: http://www.thrull.com/corner/mac/SystemModeConfigurator/