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Comment by mackid | Hacker News Reader

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mackid·

Congrats, great project and great writeup. That would have won MacHack back in the day.

Now that the MacBook Neo has an A18, I wonder if you could get MacOS running on an iPhone? :)

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There is a zero percent chance of that ever happening.

Are you willing to elaborate on the _why_ or is this a challenge comment, similar to the reddit comment that spurred this project? ;)

Go ahead and downvote krsw, he is correct on every single thing he said.

It's already been done https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/1mn7mk1/your_jai...

I wonder if you can place an A18 from a Neo onto an iPhone board, and then make that work somehow... You wouldn't be able to use the one originally from the iPhone because it's differently fused to only accept iOS images.

Is it possible that a jailbreak is found that could allow a “kexec” kind of thing to load a new OS? Of course it would be a huge amount of work even if theoretically possible

marcan once said this was not possible on M1 macs. It was possible before, as coolbooter demonstrated, but it seems now that the hardware cannot be completely reinitialized without being power cycled (it was on Mastodon in 2024, he has since deleted his account so I cannot give you the exact quote). But you can do wizardry to load macOS' userspace on top of iOS' kernel [0] with a jailbreak.

[0]: https://x.com/khanhduytran0/status/1954724636727587237

You can't reinitialize the hardware, but if whatever you are trying to load is compatible with what's going on, then it should work. In a sense you could consider kexec to be like booting on a kind of weird machine where your interface to talking to the hardware is whatever macOS initialized the devices to.

Or better yet, an iPad!

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