Minutes 2025-09-25

An amazing work of art that was left on the whiteboard
Hackintosh by Simone
1. What is Hackintoshing
  1. Running MacOS on non-Mac hardware
2. Why
  1. Cheaper, Macs are $$$
  2. More powerful
  3. More repairable
  4. Can run Mac exclusive software
3. History
  1. Pre-2008
    1. PowerPC chips
      1. “Special snowflake chips”
    2. 2006 Intel macs
      1. People realized: “wait, what’s so special about these macs anyway?”
      2. Immedietly set out on getting MacOS working on other manufacturer’s hardware
4. How it works
  1. Bootloader
    1. Clover is old, OpenCore is used nowadays
      1. mimicks Mac boot enviornment
  2. Kexts (kernel extensions)
    1. macOS krnel modules
      1. adds support for more hardware
  3. ACPI patching
    1. fixes firmware issues
5. Compatability
  1. CPU
    1. Intel works best
    2. AMD possible with more work
      1. issues with Adobe/32-bit/audio
  2. GPU
    1. NVIDIA is dead
    2. AMD
      1. Natively supported dGPUS (<RX6000)
      2. Some iGPUs can work with patches
    3. Intel GPUs (<= 10th gen) work natively
  3. Ethernet/Bluetooth/Wifi usually require community drivers
  4. Ultimatrely, if it’s not in a Mac, you’re gonna have to do some legwork to get it working
  5. Community drivers
    1. Wireless (few supported cards)
      1. Intel works because it was ported from OpenBSD
    2. Input
      1. Voodooinput supports non-USB devices
    3. Audio has drivers
    4. Some hardware just won’t work
  6. Install process
    1. Download MacOS
      1. It’s free!
  7. USB preperation
    1. Bootloader config takes time
    2. Simone also took a super long time getting the display working
  8. Updates/Maintenance
    1. Small updates like security patches usually fine
    2. Otherwise have to wait for community patches
    3. X86 support gone by 2026
      1. Effectively kills hackintoshing
      2. ARM is probably unfeasible
        Apple silicon specific instructions
        
        No GPU support
        
        Chips on the market are too varied from eachother
        Qualcomm chips
        
        And others
        
        All different from eachother
  9. Current status
    1. Still works for now
    2. Strong Community keeping it alive as long as possible
  10. Dane wonders if it’s possible for someone in the future to create a chip close enough to a real Apple chip that would work for ARM hackintoshing
    1. Kinda like how sellers on aliexpress sell desktop chips in laptop motherboard sockets for Thinkpads
    2. It’s possible, but unlikely
  11. Hackintoshers get tempted to just pick up a legitimate M-series macbook
    1. They’re (regrettably) actually quite nice
    2. Dane did
      1. can confirm he hates how much he likes an Apple product
  12. Windows on ARM sucks (well, more than Windows normally does)
    1. The OS itself works great!
    2. … until you try to run an application
    3. the majority of applications don’t even distribute ARM builds
      1. You see the “download for Windows x86/x64”, because even though there’s still someone out there using a 32-bit computer, notice there’s usually not an arm build
    4. Windows’ x86 compatability layer sucks
6. Legacy hackintoshing is still a strong community
  1. so long as you run the same applications you would have run back then, they’ll be just as fast
  2. the problem is if you try to run something modern
    1. like a browser
    2. …or a single electron app
7. Most compatible hardware
  1. Thousands of models of machines
  2. Best bet is following a guide on hardware support
    1. Intel/AMD iGPU from right era
    2. Machines from pre-2020 is generally your best bet
    3. No matter what machine you’re on you’ll have to do some extra configuration and work to get it running
Simone tries to give noah the slides for the talk
1. mfw 45MB odp file
2. transfer takes forever
3. Simone shows off the fancy USB 3.0 to 2.0 downgrader
  1. real bleeding edge technology over here
People shuffled out until ~8:30-PM ish