Not including the new Apple Silicon products, why can’t you install MacOS on an Intel-based PC (like Dell/Lenovo/HP), but using Boot Camp, you can install Windows on Intel-based Macs.
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A non-Apple computer with MacOS installed is commonly referred to as a Hackintosh. And they do exist. You just need the right combination of components and some modifications to the software. But these do not comply with the MacOS End User License Agreement. So you can not sell Hackintoshes or help others build them without violating this. It can therefore be hard to find information about these or official support for this.
However there is nothing in the EULA of Windows saying you can not install in on an Apple computer, nor anything in the Apple computer EULA saying you can not install Windows on it. As you say it is officially supported in Boot Camp.
Because windows saved Apple from bankruptcy as it prevented windows from becoming a monopoly. As part of the bail out agreement Apple had to support windows processes
The OS can’t do much by itself. It’s a bunch of software for managing applications, but most of what we need to do needs to interact with hardware like storage controllers or graphics cards.
Each piece of hardware like that is like a tiny secondary computer, and it needs to be told what to do using special commands unique to each model. The way most OSes deal with that today is to have “drivers” for hardware. A “driver” is some code designed to tell the OS what the hardware can do and to have ways for the OS to tell it to do those things. So one “side” of the driver is defined by the people who write the OS: “We will talk to hardware using these function calls.” The other side of the driver is the people who write it implementing those calls so it behaves the way the OS expects.
Think of it like maybe your OS speaks English, but your hard drive speaks French. The driver is a person who speaks both English and French and can translate between the two.
Apple has traditionally only let Mac OS run on their own computers. Because Apple only offers a limited number of models *and* chooses the hardware *and* doesn’t really support buying different hardware, they only include a very small number of drivers with Mac OS. If a graphics card isn’t being sold in some Apple machine, it’s not worth the manufacturer’s time to bother writing a Mac OS driver because VERY few people will upgrade to that card on Mac.
From the start, Windows has been about widespread compatibility. The IBM Compatible PC world had lots of different vendors, so Microsoft couldn’t afford to support just a small number. Part of what sold early versions of Windows was that it offered wider hardware compatibility than what little competition it had. Even when it comes to laptops, there are numerous Windows-focused models that can have various pieces of hardware swapped out for anything the user wants to buy.
So drivers are the main problem with trying to run OSX on non-Apple computers. It works best if you can build them with hardware that uses the same or similar drivers to the computers Apple sells. Since OSX is based on a certain family of Linux computers, some Linux drivers are compatible with OSX. That broadens the number of computers that might run OSX, but also requires more tinkering to talk OSX into using drivers it doesn’t know about. Since OSX is only designed to support a small set of hardware profiles, it doesn’t exactly have a way to easily configure it to add more drivers to its world view. Apple only wants you using Apple hardware, so they don’t invest effort in helping you use other hardware.
Windows, on the other hand, is easier to adapt because many of the components in Apple hardware have Windows drivers, or Windows has drivers that are “close enough” and can get the hardware working. In addition, Windows is already equipped to let you tinker with which drivers are used for what hardware because it has to support millions of devices that aren’t Microsoft certified. Microsoft thrives on supporting everything, so they had to add features to help you add things they don’t know about.
From 1995 to 1997, Apple licensed their OS to a small number of computer manufacturers. The result was cheaper computers with lower quality components running MacOS that undercut Apple’s own sales and damaged the reputation of their software. Since then they have kept strict control over where their OS can be legally installed. You can use online guides and if you use compatible software make it run. But like the 90s experiment, you will find that using hardware that is not certified for Apple computers there is a risk that the drivers will not work as expected. Some people have made their own versions and distribute them, but Apple uses their legal team to stop as much of this as they can through copyright and trademark law.
Because Apple does not permit it, but Microsoft does.
That’s really the only reason. Windows is intended to be run on hardware from lots of vendors. So as long as the hardware is considered compatible you can install it (and sometimes you can install it on incompatible hardware, lol). Functionally Microsoft simply allows windows to be installed unless it can’t be installed. In fact, Microsoft encourages people to install windows on computers.
Apple on the other hand, does not want anyone to install MacOS on anything other than a Mac computer. So Apple does a check to verify that you are installing the software on Apple built hardware. Even if you are using the exact same spec components the system won’t identify it as an apple built computer and therefore MacOS will refuse to install. Note, this has nothing at all to do with the ability for MacOS to work on the device or not. It’s only about who built the device.
Now, it’s not THAT hard to bypass, but it’s the fact that you must perform this bypass that’s the hack part of a hackintosh, and also makes it technically illegal in the US.
MacOS cannot be installed on non-Apple hardware because Apple does not want people do be able to do this. If they did want it, it would be trivially easy to do so. To the point where Apple has taken special measures to make it not work. Without those special measures, people could install MacOS on lots of PC hardware. Apple does not want this to happen, so they prevent it from happening.
And that is why you can run Windows on an Apple computer, but not MacOS on a non-Apple computer.
Apple sells the software AND hardware, Microsoft sells the software only. Apple doesn’t want customers to be able to use their software without their hardware, so they implement restrictions in macOS to prevent this. On the other hand, Microsoft doesn’t care where you’re running Windows, as long as u buy Windows.
Apple likes to brag that their system is hassle-free and “just works” without having to mess about with finding the right drivers or worrying about how to get everything from different vendors to work together. It’s a thing they bragged about since even long before OSX, back in the days when what Microsoft was offering was DOS and its complex mess of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS settings that you had to know a thing or two to be able to maintain.
BUT, that brag comes at an enormous cost, and that cost is that the means Apple uses to be able to make this brag is to simply not *try* to work with a variety of hardware from different vendors. They create one locked in official selection of hardware for the product and that’s the set of hardware that works – don’t change it. It’s similar to buying the latest XBOX product instead of a gaming PC. They both might be a PC on the inside, but one is a locked in set of hardware and the other allows you to swap in new things like different graphics cards, different sound systems, different memory strips, and so on, after purchasing.
So what happens when you try to run MacOS on a Windows PC is that the MacOS is encountering that wild-west environment of “just about any graphics card” and “just about any hard drive” and “just about any motherboard”, and so on, which it just wasn’t designed to handle.
It *is* actually possible to run MacOS on some Windows PCs, but only in the case where the PC was built selecting from a much more limited list of hardware options so it wouldn’t have anything in it that MacOS doesn’t know about.
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