Hackintosh enthusiasts worry that the end is near

Image: Aleksandar Vacić

For years, there’s been a dedicated assemblage of tech tinkerers who’ve built unofficial “Macs” retired of PC hardware oregon successfully gotten macOS moving connected a laptop that ran Windows successful a past life. But now, immoderate of those enthusiasts judge the Hackintosh imagination is becoming much and much untenable.

This blog post by Aleksandar Vacić, highlighted by 9to5Mac, runs done immoderate of the difficulties that look to beryllium increasing by the day. In a nutshell, macOS Sonoma removed enactment for galore drivers that were recovered successful Intel Macs a decennary ago. Vacić says these drivers were “the cardinal constituent to galore afloat functional Hackintosh builds.” It’s inactive imaginable to cobble unneurotic a Hackintosh with the Sonoma OS, but you’ll person to beryllium comfy with immoderate analyzable workarounds that mightiness lessen your machine’s wide security. For now, the champion proposal is to stay connected macOS Ventura, which won’t beryllium a realistic solution forever.

One happening successful peculiar astir this blog stuck retired to me: Vacić mentions that the Hackintosh country truly came into its ain during a clip erstwhile Apple was releasing immoderate of its worst-conceived Macs that prioritized signifier implicit function. MacBook Pros were more quality than brawn, and that’s earlier you adjacent get to the trash tin Mac Pro.

By contrast, today’s lineup is impressively powerful: MacBooks get tremendous artillery life and person mean keyboards again! Even the Mac Mini is getting updated connected a regular cadence. Yet, it wasn’t that agelong agone erstwhile it felt similar the Mac was adjacent the bottommost of Apple’s precedence list.

In much caller years, Hackintosh machines with the close components could adjacent tally circles astir Apple Silicon Macs. But arsenic the steps to support those machines moving go much tedious — particularly if you importune connected utilizing Apple’s latest bundle — radical are inevitably going to get fatigued and not bother. This comment implicit astatine Hacker News sums up that vexation well: “these days I privation to use the computer, not walk clip trying to person it to work.” Hackintoshes had their clip and a worthy purpose, but it looks similar that clip is astir up.