Came across an article earlier which mentioned Apple’s removed driver support for certain Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cards instrumental in current Hackintosh builds. Is this not something that eventually happens with all old hardware at some point? Could someone not potentially write in their own driver supports, or some other method be used to bypass this issue? Maybe I’ve already shown it, but I’m not especially tech savvy.
In: Technology
Like on Megamind: the rumors of hackintosh death are greatly exaggerated. But let’s explain everything.
Hackintosh is installing macOS on non apple hardware, because before the Apple Silicon M chips, Apple used plain Intel CPUs up to 10th gen Core processors. So, clever people made it possible to trick macOS to think it was running on Apple hardware provided the right hardware was used.
The WiFi/BT thing, is that, on Intel, Apple used Broadcom WiFi chips and they lost support on the latest macOS version: Sonoma. Apple then used their own WiFi 6 chips on their M series hardware and there’s no native WiFi 6 card that works. However, it’s possible to use drivers (in macOS they’re called Kexts) from previous macOS versions in Sonoma.
On macOS, all the drivers are included in the OS, because all the apple hardware is known. So, people extract the drivers from a previous macOS version, and install it on Sonoma. It works for now, but eventually it won’t.
The same happens with graphics drivers and other components.
The problem is, that eventually, a future macOS version will only work on Apple Silicon. That’s when it will be the death of hackintosh. That’s not soon, because people can install previous macOS versions. Most mac software requires at least macOS 10.15 and we’re on 14.
This will eventually happen at some point if it didn’t already happen. Apple has switched to their own chips that are ARM based. They do no longer manufacture Computers with Intel chips. And therefore they have no interest in generating the software or support for these chips. They have only been releasing software for them so far due to the fact that they support older Computers that they have sold in the past. These computers are for certain age they will no longer produce software or support them.
Apple used make sandwiches with their own special type of bread. This made it very difficult for people to make the same sandwich
Then Apple decided to use the same bread as most other bakeries. So people at home figured out they could make sandwiches really similar to Apple at home.
Apple now decided we want to make our own bread again. And it’s now very difficult to make a similar sandwich at home.
I hope that was ELI5 enough. /shrug. If you want more detail I’d be happy to try and give it a go.
At some point, someone will figure out how to emulate or virtualize an Mx series Mac in a x86 or Arm environment and then we’ll be back to Hackintoshing again. But it might be a while.
It’s not because of Apple Silicon. That would *eventually* kill Hackintosh, but not while Mac OS still supports Intel CPUs. The problem is that Mac OS has replaced its old driver system (kernel extensions) with a new one (userspace DriverKit). Many Mac OS features only work with specific wireless chips. Apple has used custom wireless chips for a while, and the supported chips that are publicly available don’t have new-style drivers. Someone *could* probably write new drivers, but no one has. (The chip-dependent features might still not work even if someone did.)
Writing drivers is hard and fairly specialized. It’s even harder when you don’t have full specifications of the internal workings on both ends. Also I would be surprised if there’s a security layer for drivers they didn’t specifically certify.
ELI5: It’s like trying to rob a sophisticated bank vault.l, where you have to figure everything out and build all the tools you’ll need from scratch
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