Big Sur on Unsupported Macs | Hacker News Reader

Big Sur on Unsupported Macs

parrotgeek.com

142 pointstodsacerdoti123 comments

According to dosdude1's thread on macrumors.com[1], more devices will eventually become compatible and wifi will get patched.

1. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-11-big-sur-on-uns...

I just upgraded my wifi card from my MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012). And I love it. Wifi AC and unlock with Apple Watch worked out of the box. Also the upgrade process is easy to do and you have a reason to finally clean the inside of your mac.

Typing this on my Mid 2012 rMBP, I'm very interested in the details.

(I put off upgrading because of keyboard issues, and now with the new "Apple Silicon" coming, plus, the machine is great-- I did replace the battery at one point but other than that it's been completely solid.)

Apparently you need a BCM94360CSAX from a rMBP 15" Late 2013.

https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/147393/Can+I+use+its+802...

Would you be willing to share what that WiFi card is and where you got it from? (I have same device and I’m interested in getting another year from it)

What wifi card did you buy?

which wifi card did you buy?

Just realized this is the first time my iMac will not support the next update (iMac 14,3)- if this list is exhaustive and not subject to change, that is.

Due to other crashes and issues I had already been considering the switch to Windows or Linux (I already use those operating systems for other PCs I have in the house).

I've enjoyed using MacOS as my daily driver until Catalina, and even then, there are things I still really like about it compared to other operating systems, but especially now that Apple wants to force me to upgrade hardware to run a newer OS, I'm not sure I want to stay in Apple land.

Maybe it's time.

I'm in the same boat. The MacBook I bought in 2013 was mind-blowingly awesome, most notably with the Retina display, and the sheer power of machine.

Almost every difference between that laptop and the MacBook I bought a few months ago is negative (touchbar for volume and brightness, the flimsiness of USB-C connectors against the weight of the cable (though that's not Apple's fault), enormous trackpad, less of a "crumple zone" in the keyboard to absorb the energy of my typing, etc)

I actually like Catalina more-or-less, except for the lack of 32-bit support and the way the fan always runs on my 2013 machine now.

But I think this is the last Apple computer I'll buy. It's too much money for a declining experience.

It’s 7 years old. Imagine what your experience was with a 7 year old windows machine.

What’s in Big Sur AND windows 10 that is not for the current macOS?

Copying my reply to someone else as I think is applies here too:

That's a legit argument against Android, but the exact opposite holds for Windows. You can run Windows 10 on 10 years old hardware, 15 if you push it and I'm not exaggerating. I'm typing this on my 10 years old desktop PC running Windows 10 as we speak, and it's very smooth. I'd have been very pissed off if three years ago Microsoft decided to not support my PC because "7 years is long enough". Yes I hate forced reboots, but that's beside the point here.

As another commenter pointed out, 7 years old mid to high-end hardware will typically give you a fine experience on Windows 10, as long as you have an SSD.

The cutting edge has moved on in 7 years, but a Dell XPS 13 from 2013 [0] has an i5 (ivybridge), 8GB ram, a 256gb SSD and a 1080p IPS screen. I'd be more than happy to use that as a primary bon-developer machine, and I bet it runs great on windows 10.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/6849/dell-xps-13-q1-2013-ultr...

I switched to Windows 10 several years ago and don't regret it. Stay on the "happy path" and get hardware that's well supported and your experience will be just as smooth as any Apple experience. I use Lenovo laptops, which are built very well.

The forced reboots meant there was no happy path in Windows 10 for me.

Xubuntu did me for years but I hate the new snap thing that happened to Ubuntu so I assume that will happen to Xubuntu too.

Debian Testing seems to be the way to go now.

For what it's worth, Windows 10 since 1809 has supported prompt-before-download for Windows Update, and corrected many of the other annoying "do as I want, not as I say," issues from previous releases.

Why do you hate snaps?

I assume you mean forced reboots for updates? Linux is definitely leading here, my MacBook needs a reboot fairly frequently for updates, I'd almost guess at more often than my win10 machines. That said, one reboot a month isn't an outrageous ask I don't think.

There's a difference though: on macOS the system will say "there's an update, do you want to install it now?". If you select "yes" the system will upgdate and eventually reboot, otherwise you can go on with whatever you're doing without worrying. On windows instead you get a notification that says "I just installed an update and you need to reboot, if you don't do it right now the machine will reboot outside of the active hours". I just don't understang why Microsoft doesn't put a simple toggle for automatic updates in W10. MacOS has it, all the linux distro have it, even iOS has it, why is it so difficult for them?

> my MacBook needs a reboot fairly frequently for updates, I'd almost guess at more often than my win10 machines.

I call bull, unless you’re on a beta channel.

When was the last time you had to reboot macOS for an update, and how long ago was the second-last update?

I had to reboot to do the update from 10.15.4 to 10.15.5

And cannot remember the last time any one of the 100+ windows 10 machines I administer had a forced reboot.

In 10 years I have never had a forced reboot on macOs, that I explicitly did not allow.

Meanwhile there are plenty of horror stories of people being unable to work, or worse, losing their work, because of Windows 10 updates.

I don't get forced reboots either. I'm running a stock Windows 10 Pro, and I haven't changed very many settings from the default. I'll get a notice that I should reboot to get an update about once a month, but not a forced one.

> I hate the new snap thing that happened to Ubuntu

I installed sshd using what I thought was apt. It actually happened that Xubuntu installed a snap. I also couldn't enable or start/stop `sshd` using systemctl, for some reason.

I'm quite sure there's some way I could learn to manage services in snaps... or maybe it was a bug? Either way, I don't want to waste my time. I don't see how this change makes my workflow any easier than centralised package and service management. I'm looking at MX Linux/AntiX now.

Sorry but I'm calling bs.

`sshd` isn't a valid package name in Ubuntu repos which Xubuntu uses directly and without modification (it's openssh-server you are looking for) so apt would throw a package not found error.

Also `sshd` doesn't exist in the snap store[1], neither does `openssh-server`[2].

Given Canonical/snapcraft.io are the only source of snaps what you have described is impossible.

1. https://snapcraft.io/search?q=Sshd

2. https://snapcraft.io/search?q=Openssh

I wasn't fibbing; it is disingenuous to lie in support of a cause. I did genuinely encounter this issue. But with what you've said, I'll accept that it wasn't to blame upon snap.

While the package wasn't named "sshd", that's an abbreviated way to refer to the ssh daemon. The package name varies between distros, but the config file and executable are known as "sshd". I was installing the ssh daemon package by whatever name the Debian/Ubuntu maintainers christened it.

Something else must've broken it, then.

Try searching for "files missing after windows 10 update" and Google will prompt you to see if you mean the incident in 2018, 2019, or 2020.

That's not a happy path.

I switched back to Linux in 2018. It's not as polished as Mac OS but it works well enough now that for the most part I don't really care.

That is a 7 years old iMac. Apple is not forcing you.

A 7 year old iMac keeps running Windows 10 fine.

My laptop is from ~2006. I can still run OpenBSD and Chromium with ~15 tabs open, and play videos well up to 720p, 1080p is wasting HD size because the screen is smaller than that.

If I want to run Big Sur, it's my only legitimate option.

So yes, if I want to continue to use macOS and want to stay on the latest release, then "having to upgrade hardware" is the only route. If you take issue with me calling that "forcing" then fine, but it's obvious how I'm using that term.

Plenty of hardware from 2013 runs current operating systems- basically only in the Apple ecosystem is this a problem. I doubt there's any _technical_ reason older hardware cannot run newer versions of macOS. Apple just draws a line whereever they want.

I understand this is a "known concern" of being a part of the Apple ecosystem- but it's one of the first times I've encountered it personally, so yes, it's frustrating.

A known “concern”? It’s a known benefit of owning Apple hardware. 7 years of support. You’re asking too much. Hope you enjoy forced reboots and telemetry on Windows

I already use Windows on another PC, and while I don't love telemetry, the only reboots I get are during my scheduled "okay to install updates" hours which is at like 5am when I don't notice it.

I'm not MS's biggest fan, and I have my own peeves with Windows, but the way you worded this seems unnecessarily hostile.

I use Windows, Linux, and macOS for various purposes and I understand the benefits and drawbacks of using them. You don't need to talk down to me about telemetry and updates.

Spinning having to buy unnecessary new hardware to continue running an up-to-date OS as a benefit seems ridiculous to me.

This is remarkable spin on what is objectively a bad thing.

Strictly speaking, "company drops support for software X" isn't always a bad thing, when it forces people to move on. For example, Windows XP dragged on for far too long, and there's a good argument that it should have been discontinued earlier.

Sure, but here it's support for hardware costing 4-5 figures being dropped after a paltry 7 years.

The latest version of Windows 10 runs great on 10 year old desktops, and will probably be supported for many more years to come.

I have 10 year old PCs that are perfectly functional. My main desktop is mostly from 2012 with a couple upgrades in between and works like a champ. 7 years is far too low. This is planned obsolescence.

With Apple preventing dual boot on ARM this problem will only get worse.

I mean...it is what it is, but my desktop is based on the previous year's Intel CPU, cost about as much, and still runs Win10 and Linux just fine.

I run Mojave perfectly well on a mid 2012 Macbook Pro, a friend of mine even on a 2008 one (also well for his needs).

Durability has long been a feature of these machines, even sadder to be forced into hardware upgrades by what seems to be intentionally broken core features like wifi.

What makes the broken wifi seem intentional?

It has nothing to do with a lack of capability of the older machine. They just decided it wasn't worth the effort to support the model of wifi chipset present in the older models, effectively killing them off.

I think you may be projecting. Wifi cards go bad. It happens. Sometimes they can be replaced. Sometimes not. I've had it happen to lots of my machines over the last two decades.

But I don't think it's fair to characterize what could very well be a hardware fault as the work of some bean counter in Cupertino sitting behind his desk rubbing his hands with glee.

I can't find reference here, but I remember a discussion with an Apple engineer who said that AirDrop had been blocked in a certain model, "due to incompatible wifi", but that the wifi card mentioned was not one they'd ever heard of being put in a production Mac, i.e. "ass-covering BS".

Even Apple doesn’t have unlimited resources. They may still offer patches for outdated WiFi cards in a future update but it’s silly to commit to doing so in your initial OS release.

> That is a 7 years old iMac. Apple is not forcing you.

This attitude needs to stop.

If a user's needs are met with a 7 year old machine and they are happy without upgrading then artificially obsoleting it in the name of capitalism is not progress, it's irresponsible.

If he was required to upgrade to Big Sur in order to keep his computer working, I'd agree with you. But nobody is forcing him to upgrade.

I have an old Mac that I use daily that maxed out at Mojave. It still functions fine. Nobody forced me to do anything to it in the name of capitalism.

You said yourself that his current machine meets his daily needs. So what's the problem? It's not going to turn off the day Big Sur is released.

Apparently I should not have used the word forced because some people went full-boar pedantic about it unfortunately. It's forced in terms of "if I want to run Big Sur, I have no choice" (thought that was obvious).

Not forced, but unnecessarily required to purchase new hardware to run the latest OS version which should not have any reason for not working on the older hardware. I still think that's a problem.

If there was a feature of Big Sur that required particular hardware to run, then I would be more understanding. Yes, I can stay on Catalina on my iMac, but it will continue to get more out of date when Apple could have easily kept supporting it. I'm understanding enough to know Apple has business reasons for doing it, and maybe even technical ones (that no one has yet explained) but it doesn't mean I agree with it.

This is so silly. First, Apple’s history is that they will continue to support older hardware with security updates even if they can’t support them with the latest OS.

Sometimes older hardware isn’t capable of supporting new features. In prior cases it might not have a 64 bit processor or not enough memory, and of course you can’t expect support in those cases.

In this it’s old WiFi hardware that can’t support new features. It would be dumb for Apple to take engineers off making Big Sur more solid for 98% of Macs to waste time on this problem for a tiny percent of the active base.

Apple is doing exactly the right thing. Make it work well for the vast majority, then see if they can take it farther back in the first couple of bug fix releases.

I would love it if Apple allowed us to run Big Sur on the iPad, if I could use one as a more real computer I definitely would. Probably would cannibalize a lot of Mac sales though.

Honestly I really wanted them to announce containers on iPadOS in a vein similar to how ChromeOS does it.

Having them later in the presentation say "Hey look at all these ARM containers running on Apple chips on macOS" was an especial kick in the teeth.

I used my potato-tier iPad with a Logic Folio as my main computer for a couple of months while my MacBook was getting replaced and it was honestly a vastly better experience for me save for not being able to get work done because of the absence of spinning up a Linux workspace.

Even if they artificially limited it to iPad Pro (it's Apple after all) I'd still be happy.

Current iPads just don’t have the hardware support to make this possible. Hence why the DTK won’t support all the features mentioned in the keynote. (It’s using the iPad chip.)

Even if Docker wasn’t possible (because no virt), a sandboxed terminal with enough utilities to bootstrap Brew is just a software problem. It wouldn’t require special hardware stuff, just as chroot doesn’t. As long as it could be accessed by other apps and stay alive in the background, it’d be a great way to code on the go.

They can make something work if Swift Playgrounds works (which is a pretty silly experience anyway. “Hey kid, great job learning Swift. Want to make a real app? Buy a $1200 MacBook and get to work!”

You mean $899, right? I guess $1200 was a typo.

Or hyperbole. Macs are “expensive” or “overpriced”, at least to the populi.

I’ve always found that strange given the demographic of HN. I’ve never considered good tools to be expensive. Continuous lost productivity is usually more costly than “Apple Tax”.

I don't think the cost of the MacBook is the point. Pay us more money because of artificial restrictions we put in place is the point.

What exactly is missing from an iPad that would allow this to happen?

ARM EL2.

And 4KB page support is missing on A12X/Z too.

Right, but I’m sure someone would just recompile Linux with the right page size :) And I guess I’ll figure out what magic the DTK is doing to make 4K pages work once it arrives.

Nothing.

Some people have said ARM EL2, but virtualization in hardware isn't required if we can get a terminal with a jailed environment (akin to chroot) with brew. At worst you could spin up a Linux kernel in userspace if you needed to.

You might find iSH interesting, though it’s a bit slow.

I love iSH, but it frustrates me for being unnecessarily slow.

It forces emulation of x86. If only it could cut QEMU out of the equation it would be perfect.

iSH actually uses a homegrown emulator, not QEMU.

In any case, I’d love iSH if it could just give me an arm64 workspace without emulation.

Sadly, this is a bit difficult to do on iOS.

A touchbar

A mouse pointer. macOS was designed for the mouse / trackpad.

A mouse pointer.

iPads work with standard mice, and have an on-screen mouse pointer. I used mine with an old mouse I had lying around a couple of weeks ago. Works fine.

I had an iPad2 which I jailbroke and used with a bluetooth mouse back then (mostly just because I could).

I can't imagine it's still impossible for them to add similar functionality if it's the only thing holding it back from running macOS.

iPad OS does have mouse support actually. I'm really not sure why they haven't made it possible to develop on iPads yet, I know I would get a 13 inch iPad Pro in a heartbeat if I could develop on it and sideload apps onto it.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211008

Apple’s iPad Magic keyboard?

Why would I need a pointer to run a container?

It's not ready yet, but it's pretty clear that that's where they're headed.

The Dev machines come with 16Gb of RAM, iPads have nothing if that sort so probably it won't be more than a fun weekend project.

On iPhone and iPad, apps are terminated when the memory is scarce so all the apps are build to expect that to happen.

What I would expect to happen is Mac OS constantly complaining that you are out of memory and you need to choose one of the following apps to terminate.

Sure, a lot of swap can be used but this would degrade the performance significantly IMHO.

iOS doesn’t swap, FWIW. I think possibly because it’d wear out the flash and then they just rolled with the other benefits.

It’s interesting that the installer package for the beta is just made available with no authentication…

Apple doesn't seem to care all that much, it's been like that for many years now. "swscan.apple.com" is the search keyword to find all the things it offers for downloading (including all versions of macOS since ~Lion or maybe a little later...)

Oh, huh, I’ll have to look into that. I’ve often had the need to grab old installers…

Those older Macs will just need a supported WiFi card e.g. Broadcom.

Hackintosh community deals with lack of driver support every day.

We tagged along with the deprecations of the last years (32 bit, kernel extensions, OpenGL), and right before the big payoff, our Macs fell out of support. :)

Do people with unsupported macOS versions still need to modify each patch release or can they update their macOS X.Y.Z to X.Y.(Z+1) without any additional tinkering?

Ouch, I was hoping for support on my Late 2008 model, it runs absolutely fine otherwise.

Assuming you're not joking, which macOS version are you currently running?

Surprisingly, you can get the current macOS Catalina running on 2008 Mac(Book)s with the tools published by dosdude1 and other contributors [1].

macOS Catalina will actually still get security updates for two years after Big Sur is released (they support macOS releases three years after release). So that's until ~late 2022, a pretty long run for that 2008 hardware until you have to go to Linux or Windows for your patches.

It looks like Big Sur has a hard requirement on Metal (at the moment at least), which kills all pre 2012 Macs [2] that were still running Mojave/Catalina using OpenGL.

[1]: http://dosdude1.com/catalina/ with various important caveats of course, depending on your model.

[2]: Metal is supported on GPUs since Intel Ivy Bridge and Vulkan compatible AMD/Nvidia hardware. The Mac Pro 2010 is the exception since you can upgrade its GPU to a Metal compatible one.

>The Mac Pro 2010 is the exception since you can upgrade its GPU to a Metal compatible one.

You can also do this with the 2008 Mac Pro; either by using a recent nVidia GPU (though every time I've done this I've seen a bunch of weird artifacting) or by using an AMD GPU with the patch that removes the requirement for the SSE 4.2 instruction set (which the CPUs in the 3,1 don't support).

RX570s and RX580s being 100 dollars makes the decision upgrade that much easier.

Ah that's interesting. I hope the 2008 Mac Pro can be stretched to run all Intel macOSes like this :)

Not joking at all, I still use it daily, works fine as a machine for browsing the internet and watching youtube/netflix, with ocassional dev in terminal. Replaced the HDD with an SSD years ago and it's still very brisk. It runs El Capitan 10.11.6, which I don't have any issues with, but I am mildly concerned about the lack of security updates for it.

I have a very good experience with Mojave so far on my mid-2012 MacBook pro. I upgraded straight from El Capitan last year, skipped both Sierras.

Haven't moved to Catalina because, you know, 32bit.

I guess you upgraded the RAM to 8 GB? Because I don't see how the web is usable on a machine with 2 GB of RAM...

I'm running a 2011 MBA with way less than 8 GB RAM and the web is perfectly usable. Why wouldn't it be?

Sometimes I use a quad-core laptop with 2 GB of memory and no swap (because it doesn't have enough disk space for a meaningful amount of swap) and five tabs is practically a hard limit. Even with adblocking, news sites and sites like imgur or reddit -- or really anything using heavy and fancy scripting or animations -- demand to be the sole tab on the machine.

Yeah, it's a Late 2008 MacBook Pro unibody, 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 8GB of ram, 240GB SSD.

Just speaking of performance, I can easily see systems where there's about a five-year gap before a low-end system catches up in performance to a higher-end one. e.g. a 2010 iMac performs about the same as a 2015 12" MacBook, though the latter will retain support to a much later date.

Seems like I'll need to upgrade the wifi card in my 2012 Macbook Air. As a bonus I would get AC wifi, so it might be worthwhile in general. Good that this is a possibility still in my hardware, and that these tools are made.

Same here! and Apple Watch unlock, no password to unlock anymore :)

Seems like Apple is intent to discourage rather than deter people from running unsupported systems. Lack of wifi kills wanting to use Big Sur on unsupported as that's a fundamental unit that is needed for laptop utility.

This is the main reason why I'm thinking about not getting a MBP as my next laptop. Apple declares a laptop "vintage" after 5 years and doing so it basically kills any possibility to get the machine repaired since they're not user-serviceable at all. Furthermore they stop updating the OS just a bit later and if you have a newer model with a T2 chip you won't even be able to install Linux on it.

(To be fair though, I'm not sure I would pay for an expensive repair on a 5+ years machine anyway)

Apple is actively hostile towards its customers and having to resort to hacks like this are one of the reasons I permanently moved to Linux about ten years ago.

I had a black Macbook (dual-core, maxed out RAM, etc.), which I liked very much and was plenty capable, and Apple decided (I don't have proof, but I'm almost certain it was an instance of planned obsolescence) that Lion (I think?) would not support it. I installed Ubuntu on that machine and it continued to work well until the screen died a few years later.

Might have been planned obsolescence, but the reason Intel Core Duo was not supported by Lion was due to Finder being exclusively 64-bit, and thus the OS going 64-bit only. Only the early 2006 black MacBook was affected by this, as all the later ones used Intel Core 2 Duo.

That means the breaking update came five years after the release of the computer, but Snow Leopard still had another two years of security updates (AFAIK). Personally, I don't think that's unreasonable.

That's a fair retort.

This is just one instance among many, though. I'm aware of others both firsthand (e.g. my iPad Mini that can't be upgraded past iOS 9) and second (e.g. "slowing down" of old iPhones that resulted in a class action lawsuit).

Was it one of those old core duo Macbooks with the first intel onboard graphics? Those graphics were shit, Apple discarded them quickly and changed to Nvidia GF9400/9600, those Nvidia machines were officially supported from 2008 - 2015.

Yes, I believe it was. That's all well and good, but until the screen stopped working (may have been related, it's been a while) it was a perfectly good machine.

Snow Leopard didn't stop working after they introduced Lion. In fact it received security updates long after that, and programs like Chrome supported it for a very long time.

> planned obsolescence

Oh boy.

iOS 14 supports iPhone 6s. What’s the oldest phone supported by the latest Android?

This discussion is about desktop OSes, not mobile.

Depends on whether you could XDA-Developers ;)

I'm in the same boat. I have two Mac Pro 3.1 with dual Xeons and 32 GB/64 GB RAM. These are still very powerful computers and I love their internal build. Still, in order to run Mojave on them I had to resort to the patched version. These machines cost over $4000 each in their original configuration, so I'd expect Apple to show a bit more respect to their loyal customers. It's ridiculous that the same machine can run a competing operating system without any problem.

After inspecting the patching tool, I made a Homebrew Cask for it in order to have a basic integrity check for peace of mind.

To install the tool using Homebrew, run:

    brew cask install claui/cask-public/patch-installer

To patch the Big Sur installer, run:

    patch_installer.sh <drag the installer partition here>

After patching the Big Sur installer, you can uninstall the tool:

    brew cask uninstall patch-installer

Is this helper utility open source?

> Sidecar shows up in System Preferences on an iMac14,2 even though it is not supported and does not work. Does that happen on any other computers?

Yep, that happens on my 2015 Macbook Air, which officially supports Big Sur but not Sidecar.

Just download this random zip file and voila, you can run Big Sur and possibly pwn your own computer!

You mean you don't trust unknown source/host tool0.1.3.zip with no hash to execute patch_installer.sh? Don't blame you.

Everyone has their own comfort levels, and that's fine. However, dosdude1 and parrotgeek have been doing this for many years, so I think they're pretty trustworthy at this point.

Still would be nice if they posted source, though…

Check out the tools.zip, as far as I can tell it's just shell scripts and a single library, "Hax.dylib". The source for the latter appears to be included in the download.

Once you install Big Sur this way, will you get Big Sur updates from Apple automatically?

yes, you will get new updates as usual.

This is fantastic! I've got a 2012 Mac Mini (switched to SSD and upgraded RAM) and it has been working extremely well. It is nice to know that I can get a few more years out of it.

Patched Catalina at least runs flawlessly on my mid 2010 MBP (7.1). (Note also, upgraded to 16GB ram — officially unsupported — and 500GB SSD). The machine absolutely flies. Using it for home recording and as my daily development (C++ mostly) driver.

How did you upgrade the RAM? Isn't it soldered?

Thankfully not, I’m terrible with a soldering iron. 13 inch mid 2010 MBP, model number 7.1, I think.

I heard the latest MBPs have soldered ram. Horrible and one of the reasons why I’m not thinking of buying one (besides them being rather pricey!).

iMac Pro missing in that list?

The iMac Pro is officially supported.

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