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Comment by mikae1 | Hacker News Reader

I ran a Hackintosh as my main machine for many years. I specced (using info found on tonymacx86[1]) and built it around 15 years ago to make it work well as a Hackintosh.

And work well it did. Incredibly well actually. But now the doors are closing. macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era. That's the reason I'm not willing to invest the time or energy to do the same again.

Hopefully sometime another era of Hackintoshers will find a way to make macOS run on non-Apple ARM hardware. Perhaps it's already happening? :)

After 20 years of Hackintosh and Apple hardware I eventually lost hope in Apple due to their unsustainable practices (mostly unserviceable and unupgradeable soldered memory and storage) and moved on to Linux (https://getaurora.dev/). Couldn't be happier with KDE Plasma.

[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com

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Funnily enough I hope for an exact opposite: the Apple hardware is IMHO the best and the most irreplaceable part of the whole Apple experience and I’d be a very happy man if there was a simple way of running not-macOS on e.g. the M3 MacBook Pro with full driver support.

Luckily we have Asahi Linux. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/

…with barely supported M1 and LKML drama. I would love for it to be an option, but it just isn’t.

To be fair - the reverse engineering has to be done for every of the M series, and the M1 is the best supported Apple SoC so far. I guess we should support the project if we want them to succeed (they live from donations).

We could also regulate that large hardware companies have to publicly document their systems. Otherwise the public pays with more ewaste.

This is too sensible of an idea to ever happen, though. Nearly every time a discussion comes up about this, the companies essentially argue that their right to fill the world with ewaste trumps all.

This is a very good idea! But how would we enforce and check this (see recent issues to enforce right to repair)? What would be the KPIs - repairability score? Apple for example is arguing against this by saying that when they repair things themselves it is more sustainable than making documentation available to external repair stores (Louis Rossmann has been talking about this for ages)

Not saying it isn't good, it is. I still use Silicon Macs at work.

Just depends on your priorities and what you value I guess.

I'm not on board with the iOSification of macOS either. IMO, it's has gotten progressively worse with every version since Snow Leopard. Atomic Fedora distros and KDE Plasma has made me look forward to upgrades again (and yeah, they happen automatically in the background).

With macOS I just stuck around as long as I could knowing that there'd be no upsides to getting the next macOS release.

I haven't noticed much, but they did ruin iTunes and Sysprefs.

There’s really nothing comparable when it comes to real world battery life in the x86 world. Things there have improved with Lunar Lake and the last couple of gens of AMD mobile SoCs, but there’s still a pretty chunky delta. Most x86 laptops still require active cooling too, and unfortunately reducing fan noise or at least improving the profile of said noise is rarely a priority.

I ran one for quite a while back in the netbook days - snowleopard worked quite well on the first Atom eeepc. Back then macos was a bit of a revelation - coming from Windows or Linux where the first thing you did after installing the OS was spend a few hours tweaking things, there was nothing to do and it just ran.

Eventually I went back to debian linux after a main disk failure and kept the machine going a few years longer by progressively lightening the software load, from gnome -> xfce -> lxde, but the time came when it was just too slow to browse any more, and it had to be retired.

> macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era.

Need it be so ? There will be a "final" version for Intel and it might have a lifetime on non-Apple HW of many years.

Exactly! And even if Sequoia is the last OS to have Intel support, it will be some years before it stops receiving updates. Currently you are only missing out on "Apple Intelligence" when using Hackintosh or Intel Mac - some even think abut this as a feature rather than a bug

Presumably ARM hackintoshes are, or will be, possible too? Recent ARM processors (eg: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X) have performance comparable to Apple’s M-series, and are even finding their way into desktops. So there shouldn’t be a shortage of candidate hardware in the coming years!

ARM processors significantly differ from Apple Silicon. Apple's M series are not fully compliant with the ARM64 ISA and contain undocumented instructions. There was a discussion about that a few month ago on /r/hackintosh https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/1c9rfdz/is_hack...

> "Apple's M series are not fully compliant with the ARM64 ISA"

Do you have a source/evidence for this claim (other than a reddit comment)? Apple's processors are (should be) not only fully compliant with the ARM64 ISA (AArch64), but Apple actively contributes to defining new revisions of the ISA.

It's true that M series has had some private extensions. eg: the TSO memory model to support Rosetta, and the AMX matrix co-processor. But that doesn't mean they aren't fully compliant with the ISA. And in any case, as of the M4 CPU, Apple have reportedly replaced AMX with the new, official ARM SME matrix instructions anyway.

My understanding is that it will be much harder as ARM is way less standardized than the Intel x86 platform. This is something that Linus Thorvalds has talked about in the past [1]. Think about how huge an effort it is to get Linux to run on Apple’s ARM machines or how some distros have a Pi specific variant. I guess getting macOS to run on other ARM machines could be similar challenging.

1: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410627/why-linux-pioneer-lin...

I would love to know more about this. Would it not be (at least theoretically) possible to hackintosh ARM, as Asahi Linux reverse engineered at least some parts of the M series?

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