is the macmini (early 2009) 64bit ready ?

It seemed a bit of a question. I was confirming that your were correct.

I have a early 2009 Mac Mini and Snow Leopard is running applications in 64 bit but the Kernel I believe is not. Anyway I used the Activity Monitor and saw that most processes are running 64 bit. I used the default install upgrade from Leopard. Last I heard their was a command line you could do to install 100% 64 bit. However I think Apple may have left some things 32 bit on purpose because of compatibility issues possible. Whatever the reason it was not enough difference for me to be concerned about considering most things are running 64 bit.

Some folks have mistakenly advertised that 64-bit chip + 64-bit EFI automatically = 64-bit mode. Not true.

Apple has chose to not allow the mini and any MacBook to use the 64-bit kernel. The list of Macs that can actually use 64-bit is much smaller than folks had assumed.


The list of the ones wot can!

I thought the core2duo a 64 bit chip

All C2Ds are a 64-bit chip.

Thats what I said...

Nah, more of a speaking out loud kinda thing ..but thanks anyway

Did you run the EFI bios update for the mini that came out no long?
I haven't tried it myself but here's how to verify if you are running in 64 bits of if your mac is capable:
http://www.9to5mac.com/snow-leopard-64-bit-32-bit-firmware-efi

It IS possible to HACK your way around this artificial barrier:

http://www.osxbook.com/blog/2009/08/31/is-your-machine-good-enough-for-snow-leop ard-k64/

I think the big obstacle (at least in my case) is how much are you comfortable changing a binary value in boot.efi file to make this work.

Now the real question is why does Apple do not want to support this.

They probably don't want some university to buy up a ton of them to create a supercluster like some have been doing with the PS3 and their cell processors?
More mundane explanation is that they probably just don't want to deal with the associated support issues if they say they support it. Same thing with 64 bit Windows in bootcamp. Officially only 32 bit version of Windows is supported on the mini via bootcamp although the 64 bit versions seem to run just fine.
More troubling though is the posting someone made a while back saying that performance on the mini was purposely degraded if you tried to use more than 4GB of ram.

Been there, done that! Apple has been proud of its superclusters. I guess that you have never heard of the Big Mac at Virginia Tech. I think that they have built two. The first was 1,100 PowerMac G5s, and the second was 1,100 xserve G5s.

Dah•veed