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Comment by bilegeek | Hacker News Reader

Tangent: Did the switch to ARM put up more legal barriers than technical barriers for future ARM-based Hackintoshing?

Sure, lots of special features in Apple silicon, and probably not enough time or manpower to replicate them; but wouldn't it be easier to suppress such projects, via "trade secrets" or copyright or somesuch, that they are quickly taken down on the open web? With Intel there was still some limit on how much they could keep completely secret.

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Apple has a pretty clear track record as far as this goes: they largely ignore it unless it’s attached to a business model effectively reselling their (free as in beer) software. They’ve made several gestures of support of being open to reasonable software flexibility around macOS and Mac hardware in principle, and sometimes materially contribute. Most recently they indirectly aided development of Linux on M* devices, released updates to Boot Camp, and have continued to produce freely downloadable OS images for so long I won’t bother characterizing the time span.

Apple has a lot of marks against them in terms of overall attitude towards software freedom, and hardware moreso, but they evidently don’t give a damn about a Hackintosh unless you’re selling them.

There's even been a lot of iOS/Mac apps developed and submitted on hackintoshes. Apple can probably pick out hackintosh users pretty easily (a few years back, one of their engineers griped about logs coming from hackintoshes being junked up and effectively useless), but up until now have not chosen to act on that, probably because they only stand to lose by kicking these users out of their ecosystem.

From what I understand, the reason why we are still able to run newer macOS through OpenCore on older, unsupported Intel Macs is because these newer macOS are still supported on older Intel Mac Pros. Once Apple starts releasing ARM only macOS, we will no longer be able to run it on any Intel machines (except through virtualisation).

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