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.
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