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The latest Snow Leopard update (OS X 10.6.2) is out. While it does fix a number of bugs, it has introduced a major problem on its own. The new OS doesn’t seem to work with Intel Atom processors. It is not yet known whether this was intentional move by Apple or not.

Atom compatibility can’t be a huge priority for Apple simply because the company doesn’t have a product running on that processor. Another possible explanation for this incompatibility is that Apple wants to discourage the practice of installing their OS on netbooks using Atom processors.

There is still hope, though. Sooner or later a hacker is going to modify the OS so that it would support Atom powered netbooks. But for the time being, netbook users who have installed OS X on their device shouldn’t give into the temptation of downloading this new update.

Intel doesn’t normally talk about unreleased products, but bloggers do. Some rumors doing the rounds suggest that the successor to the Intel Atom Pine Trail platform would be known by the name Cedar Trail. There is no confirmation from Intel yet, but now it seems that more details have emerged.

Unofficial sources claim that the Cedar Trail platform could be based on a 32nm process. The Cedar Trail chips are expected to support DDR3 1066 RAM, HD Video and DirectX 10.1 standard. The platform is expected to be released in 2011 but the processors may not be available until at least 2013.

If the Cedar chips do support HD video playback, they would considerably improve the performance of netbooks. The current generation of Atom processors have very limited HD video capabilities and the upcoming Pine Trail processors won’t improve the situation much either as they are meant to consume less power than the existing Atom processors with n