alt Hacker NewsWasn't a lot of Snow Leopard an exercise in removing old cruft from the PowerPC architecture, and the last release to support 32-bit Intel machines? From my perspective at the time, it was really meant to set up Mac for the next decade or so, which it did brilliantly.
Mountain Lion dropped support for 32 bit kernel. I only know this because Apple didn’t provide a patch for first generation Mac Pro users, even though the CPUs were 64 bit and could run Mountain Lion just fine.