It’s true that latest macOS 14 (Sonoma) still supports the latest generations of Intel Macs and it’s very likely that at least one or two major versions will still be compatible. But there’s one particular development that is de-facto killing off the Hackintosh scene.
In Sonoma, Apple has completely removed all traces of driver support for their oldest WiFi/Bt cards, namely various Broadcom cards that they last used in 2012/13 iMac / MacBook models. Those Mac models are not supported by macOS for few years now thus it’s not surprising the drivers are being removed. Most likely reason is that Apple is moving drivers away from
↫ Aleksandar Vacić.kext(Kernel Extensions) to.dext(DriverKit) thus cleaning up obsolete and unused code from macOS. They did the same with Ethernet drivers in Ventura.
Everybody, especially the small but active Hackintosh community itself, knew full well the writing was on the wall the day Apple switched to ARM, and we’re seeing the first signs of the impending end of the community. Sure, enough people will remain who are interested in building Hackintoshes using older, unsupported versions of macOS, kind of like retrocomputing, but the days of running the latest macOS release on non-Apple hardware are coming to an end.
As a fun side note, this old OSNews article I wrote in 2009 is one of the most-visited articles on our site of all time. Hackintoshes were way, way more popular than people gave them credit for.
Purchased Dell Mini 9 for the express purpose of running OSX on it, it was an amazing device, The prospect of running OSX on your standard Wintel box was just awesome.
Same. I traded a Toshiba laptop to someone for the Dell Mini 9 over CraigsList. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to get rid of a full size device, and I couldn’t understand why one would want to carry something so bulky everywhere. Anyway, we met to trade up and the guy was an F-350 driver and I was a bike commuter and it made sense and was a reasonable trade.
Between Arch Linux and macOS, the Mini 9 was a very good netbook. I upgraded the SSD to whatever the larger one was, and used it until it died (not my fault). At that point, the MacBook Air 11″ was recently new and I went that direction.
Hackintoshes don’t have any value beyond hack value today, if you want an Intel Mac, there is a sizeable stock of used Intel Macs and they will be much less problematic than a Hackintosh (get one before they become collectible if you want one). In the early Intel Mac years this wasn’t the case.
There’s definitely a purpose – Apple just doesn’t offer a big box of current-ish hardware without a ridiculously exorbitant price. If you need tons of RAM, storage and GPU for things like 3D, it’s a good and stable (!) alternative still.
Exactly this. When my 2017 iMac started having performance issues, i considered a hackintosh as I was looking at $3000 just to match the storage and ram configuration I already had. Adding $1000 to the price and taking away upgradability at the same time was just too much. I went another route, and just built a PC and threw linux on it. I miss some things about macOS but I’ve only got about $1200 into the PC and it has double the storage of the Mac I would have bought and I upgraded the GPU. I also can play more games on steam on linux than on macOS. Win-Win. It’s about the same for software development.
When apple announced the throw away macs (due to no upgrades or repairs), I had hoped that they would have lowered prices to compensate for the low resale value in the future as well as the need to buy a new system sooner. No dice.
Mostly true, with the exception that the most upgradeable Intel Macs, the Pro series, are either woefully outdated (2010-2012 models and the 2013 “trash can”) or still grossly overpriced even on the used market (2019 Pro). If you want something that you can customize and upgrade but still run macOS, you have to bite the bullet and spend the money for a last-gen Pro, or else roll your own Hackintosh and chase hacks every time Apple does a point release.
I’m right there with you otherwise though; right now OWC has 2011 through 2014 Mac mini units for under $100. If you just need macOS for a specific purpose or you just want to play around with it, it’s a no-brainer to pick up a used one for 10% of the cost of a new mini. The 2014 model can run up to 12.x Monterey, and all the way to 14.x Sonoma with a simple utility.
I fully understand that these things have a limited life, but even so how can the globe make it’s limited resources last when we discard so much hardware long long before it’s natural use-by-date simply because some software somewhere says “No!”
cpcf,
+1
This is such a travesty. Unfortunately I encounter these scenarios regularly as I’m sure the vast majority of us do. It’s not for lack of looking for better solutions, but we’re largely dependent on manufacturers getting it right and until they improve there’s often not much one can do as a consumer. Too often we don’t hold the keys & code to our own hardware 🙁
Love it or hate it, x86 has trounced every other platform and architecture for viable long term 3rd party support. I hope x86s doesn’t loose track of this tradition…
What does x86 has to do with this? ARM64 OSes are just as bad if not worse (see my other comment).
kurkosdr,
Yes, ARM platforms are worse, that was the point I was making.
The nasty side of operating systems upgrades being available “free-of-cost” or “free-of-cost on licensed hardware”. All 4 major OSes today (Android, Windows, iOS, MacOS) have their upgrades available either “free-of-cost” or “free-of-cost on licensed hardware”, but with the catch of planned obsolescence for the hardware.
Even Windows gets free upgrades now, if you have had a Windows 7 license from 2009 you were given a free upgrade to Windows 10 and then to Windows 11 (with the Windows 7 -> 10 upgrade being terminated only very recently). That’s 15 years of upgrades! As long as the hardware can do it, of course, which is where the decision to bar CPUs from before 2017 in Windows 11 comes in.
I strongly miss the days when Microsoft was charging for OS upgrades and they had a financial interest in making sure your old hardware worked with the new OS. Before Windows 11, the only breakage I remember when it comes to hardware was during the Windows XP -> Windows Vista transition, which coincided with the bulk of the x86-64 transition anyway (and even then, some hardware vendors provided 64-bit drivers for XP-era hardware, I have a scanner from 2004 I use to this day). With very minor exceptions, drivers for Vista and above work on Windows 10 and 11 (or if they aren’t, a newer driver is usually available). But as I said above, even Windows is on the planned obsolescence treadmill now by arbitrarily blacklisting CPUs before a certain date.
kurkosdr,
Indeed. Windows was better on this front when paid upgrades gave them the incentive to support everyone. Microsoft making updates free has perverted incentives towards deprecating hardware in order to sell new OEM licenses. Unfortunately this is exactly what they are doing now.
Still. at least x86 hardware is not so tightly tethered to the OS that it can’t be repurposed. The hardware is still likely supported by other x86 operating systems. While the alt-OS market doesn’t have a big market share, at least those interested in alternatives do have that option thanks to the relatively high degree of cross vendor standardization that x86 offers. This means there’s a healthy market for used equipment that’s still in great shape.
This is so much better than hardware turning into doorstops because the software can’t be replaced 🙁
I agree with both of you, but I also wanted to point out that Microsoft now sells PCs (surface line) so they have a big incentive to deprecate old hardware and force upgrades.
I built a Mac Pro (i9 10850k, 64 GB RAM and a 6800 16 GB) alternative Hackintosh in 2020 and been using it ever since for broadcast editing. It’s a frikkin workhorse. But yes, the lack of Wifi without compromising security and stability and Sonoma is a sign of an end.
It’s a great way to have a machine that Apple doesn’t offer anymore – unsightly big box full of hardware. I also have a M1 MBP and almost complete lineup of their products – phone, iPad Pro, watch, Airpods
I gave a try recently at installing Monterey with OpenCore on an old Intel NUC (with no previous experience with Apple hardware or software).
It was mostly fun and not that hard, though I struggled a bit to find out what the correct Intel graphics plaform ID was.
The few developers who made the whole hackintosh thing possible clearly did some incredible work.
It’s sad that this is coming a dead end, but well, that was always part of the deal.
I, like many others ran a hackingtosh at times I couldn’t afford real ones! I even contributed a kext for an msi board.
And I honestly think Apple lost a massive opportunity here. I’d Never have touched a kext had it not been for hackingtosh. Apple could have softly supported the community via Darwin (which is open source) to help with creating drivers and other parts via the community. It might even have given Darwin a niche against Linux / *BSD. Instead they watched an exited and committed community from a distance and let it fizzle out.
Adurbe,
I was thinking about this as well. IMHO it would have been popular, however it might have eating apple’s own hardware sales so not sure what the net benefit looks like.
It’s pretty clear that apple owes it’s explosive growth to their mobile devices rather than their personal computers so things might have been very different on the computer hardware side and it would probably have gone ok for apple.
I’d like to see Apple license MacOS for Intel machines. “Here’s our driver API so 3rd parties can make drivers, here’s the OS. If you want to run it on an x86 PC, pay us $200.”
Those that want the powerful ARM hardware have to buy their computers from Apple, those that want the flexibility to roll their own have to pay the software license, and cross their fingers that 3rd party driver support exists. Win-win for Apple. It would also keep the codebase flexible (supporting 2 different architectures) which would reduce platform-specific code from accumilating, making future porting efforts to, say RISCV easier
The123king,
I agree, many would find this compelling.
The ARM macs are very close to x86 counterparts on the single-threaded front. They’ve even beaten their x86 rivals on occasion. But with multi-threading it’s a different story and I don’t think they can catch up due to having painted themselves into a corner with the CPU/GPU/application specific accellerators/RAM on a single chip. Benchmarks confirm there’s no thermal headroom remaining. By contrast x86 CPUs can dedicate more silicon to CPU cores.
If apple provided official support for 3rd party hardware, then I suspect many would be interested in trading in their ARM PCs for more powerful x86 workstations. Of course a major benefit of ARM traditionally is greater power efficiency, but for people who need more computing power more, such as rendering & compute jobs, then x86 is a clear winner especially since apple don’t support any discrete GPUs under ARM.
I agree this can be beneficial. Linux has proven to be extremely flexible in this regard, not merely as a temporary transition from one architecture to another but providing support across a plethora of architectures long term. It’s something apple could do if they wanted to, but realistically this is not in their DNA. Their whole business model revolves around full control rather than flexibility.
MacOS has had licensed clones in the past, but that was back in the PowerPC and MacOS 7 and 8 days (so not Intel machines). Guess what: Apple decided it wasn’t worth it because they could produce the hardware themselves and keep all the margin for themselves. OEMs today don’t do much other than subcontracting a design to Foxconn anyway, which Apple can do themselves.
tl;dr: Apple doesn’t want you to pay $200 to legally run MacOS on an x86 PC, they want you to pay through the nose for a Mac Pro (or Mac Studio with a Thunderbolt enclosure for PCI-E expansion cards). Even back in the Intel Mac days, they wanted you to pay through the nose for an Intel-based Mac Pro, not run it on a generic PC.
No, it’s not, they are making much more money by massively upmarking the hardware than by selling $200 software licenses (to those who wouldn’t pirate the software), MacOS has been that way even back in the Intel days. And despite that, MacOS has a pretty big market share. People who want MacOS pay through the nose for a Mac, and Apple knows it.
They can do that internally, not that porting an OS that has been written decently is hard anyway: MacOS X has already gone from PowerPC to Intel x86-32 to Intel x86-64 to ARM64. They can do it again if they want.
Those were the days. When you could buy a Quadra, with a better CPU and more memory than an Apple Macintosh (like the performas).
I guess the difference between then and now is Apple were very much a hardware company that made software to sell the hardware. They are now a services company. They even changed the company name from Apple Computers Inc to Apple Inc to really highlight the change in focus.
A user locked into their store is where they make their money, not the computer they sold you.
Apple was always a software company that made hardware to have better control over the user experience (and also disguise the cost of software in the hardware), all the way back to the Apple I (which was made out of off-the-shelf chips with the only distinguishing feature being the ROM). One of the first things Steve Jobs did upon returning to Apple was kill the clone program because he realized it was against Apple’s financial interests (even if Apple was demanding exact hardware specs from clone makers to maintain control of the user experience, the financial issue was still there).
Apple started becoming also a hardware company with their first ARM SoCs for the iPhone and a services company when they launched the App Store for the iPhone. Now they are a primarily software and services company: people buy their hardware for their OSes and services, not the other way around.
I wonder how long virtualized macOS on x86_64 hardware will be supported.
But I never got the appeal of Hackintoshes. macOS is horrible. The rudimentary window management for example. If someone gifted me a Macbook I’d install Linux or even Windows on it.
The right thing is to just install Linux on these machines and let go of MacOS on old hardware. I have a Macbook Air 2011, a Mac Mini 2014, and before it died, a Macbook Pro 2015. They all ran Linux (either Debian XFce or Mint Cinnamon, depending on their speed). They worked lovely.
OSX86 has been dead for a long time. XFS is faster than HFS+, system cal handling is may i say poop or excement in osx an can not compare to even windows or linux in the sliightest. NewOS kernel has all the benefits of iOS and it measurably faster than OSX.
Just slap a OSX theme on Haiku if that is what you want, and it will perform better, and also it runs wine so you can run all your favourite windows software as well.
Linux also run wine.
Hopefully this is also the writing on the wall for the death of the MacOS platform and ecosystem as a whole.
The hackintosh is dead, long live the Deadmoo!
Apple Tricks people into buying their hardware, locking them into their ecosystem. They purposely kill their products for Profit. Why does the new mac costs so much? Apple Failed to turned people over to use their computers. They prefer giving handjobs to rich people for their stuff. Do I want to spend $2k on a graybox, no, but they gave me no choice. Think They broke the wireless drivers on purpose to push people to buy their stuff for the future. They know what’s up. They are losing their profit cow. The new Apple sucks like in the 90’s. Time for a change.