02-11-2012, 02:11 PM

Thinking of using my OEM Snow Leopard disk and rolling my MBA back to 10.6. To address the obvious questions that may come up so we can move on to the fun stuff:

-I've put OS X on USB before and am familiar with such methods of installation on Intel hardware. I don't have an external DVD drive and wouldn't buy one just for this.
-I have plenty of Time Machine and CCC disk backups, so I'm not really concerned with data loss or ability to reinstall Lion 10.7 again if desired.
-Let's also skip the "Why roll back to 10.6, 'cause 10.7 is just so awesome." Suffice to say I like 10.6 a bit more and am interested in at least trying it out.

Soooo... has anyone attempted this, or seen any step-by-steps, how-to's, or write ups? If so, could you post a link? Short of that, does anyone have a short list of possible gotcha's to consider? I'm guessing there may be graphics card or other hardware driver issues, but I really don't know much about what cards were released when in relation to 10.6 and 10.7 being available. Another thought was what effect the Lion recovery partition might have... prevent installation...gets deleted in the process...etc...

Anyhow, this is more a lark than anything else. I thought it might be nice to have my old OS back on my newer hardware. Comments are appreciated.

02-11-2012, 02:25 PM

I don't believe it's possible due to the lack of driver support. If the MBA came pre-installed with Lion you're pretty much stuck with that unless there is some sort of work around that I'm not aware of.

As far as "devolving" back to Snow Leopard, you have my sympathetic vote for wanting to do it.

02-11-2012, 02:29 PM

I tried to do this myself and ended up giving up. At the end of the day, it was just too time intensive to get my stuff ported back over. It's very unfortunate that Apple has tweaked the Migration Assistant to not allow for a downgrade. I wish I had some advice to offer - but just posted to let you know that you can't use Migration Assistant to pull your data and apps back in... so, unless you want to go back to a really old backup, you're looking at a completely manual migration.

I even went so far as to install 10.6 in a VM, so that I could continue to work and move things over as I had time, thinking that I'd eventually backup the 10.6 VM and use it as a basis to restore a freshly installed 10.6. I spent more time looking up licensing codes and trying to remember all of the crap that I had on the machine, that I just gave up.

02-11-2012, 02:33 PM

Technically there isn't a "Late 2011" MBA (and I guess never will be since it's 2012 now)...it's a "Mid-2011".

But more importantly (as "chscag" referenced)...all of the mid-2011 MBA's shipped with OS 10.7. And you can't install an OS older than what shipped with the computer (so no OS 10.6). If this was an older MBA (that shipped with OS 10.6)...then it could be done (but a pain in the neck as "cwa107" mentioned).

- Nick

02-11-2012, 07:32 PM

Doesn't sound very promising. thanks for the input all. Great forum here.