Apple finally killed support for Classic in Mac OS X 10.5 when Macs made the switch to Intel processors. Mac OS X Public Beta’s support for running pre-OS X Mac apps in the Classic Environment wasn’t perfect- users reported many bugs-but Apple included it anyway because it needed extensive testing from users. It also lacked an integrated search box and the ability to show or hide the permanent location icons (home, favorites, apps, and so on) at will. While it supported icon view, list view, and column view, it lacked the left hand customizable list of icons called the “Sidebar” that Apple introduced in 10.3 Panther. The Finder in Mac OS X Public Beta was slow, rudimentary, and buggy-as was to be expected with beta software. Spotlight remains a key feature of Snow Leopard today.
Apple quietly killed Sherlock in favor of Spotlight, a more powerful system-wide search feature that first shipped with Tiger. In OS X’s Public Beta, Sherlock not only let users do advanced searches through their own files, but searches for Websites, people, products, news, and more. OS X Public Beta included Sherlock, a much-hyped search tool that Apple had introduced as part of Mac OS 8.5 in 1997. The last version of OS X to support PowerPC chips was Leopard, released in 2007.
These days, Snow Leopard only runs on Intel-based Macs. Mac OS X Public Beta only ran on PowerPC processors, which all contemporary Macs used at the time.