Our insiders today told us that the forthcoming release of Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system is set to disable support for Intels Atom processor.

Update 10.6.2 prevents Snow Leopard from running on any systems with an ATOM processor installed – we previously reported that Apple loathe Intel’s low performance CPU and have dismissed any possibility of releasing a netbook with an Atom at the heart. Apple have been rumoured to say that they want the best experience for their customers and that the Atom doesn’t deliver the goods.

There is however a deeper issue at heart, it could actually be that Apple do not want end users to hack their operating system to run on low end netbooks – a growing community are supporting running OSX on netbooks as they say it runs extremely well, much better than any Windows OS.

There are rumours that Apple are developing their own ARM based processor as well for an upcoming tablet release although we have yet to get any solid confirmation on this. It seems unlikely.

Mac OSX 10.6.2 is due for release in the near future and Apple claim that over 150 components will be updated.

Netbook hackers wishing to keep OSX however will need to stick with 10.6.1 for the forseeable future.

Allan Campbell: Heaven Media