Apple May Be Done With Intel Macs, But Hackintoshes Can Still Use the Newest CPUs (arstechnica.com) 53
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple hasn't stopped selling Intel Macs just yet, but it's safe to say that we'll never see a Mac with one of Intel's 12th-generation Core processors in it. But that minor detail isn't stopping the Hackintosh community from supporting new Intel and AMD processors and platforms. The developers behind OpenCore, the most powerful and actively maintained bootloader for loading macOS on standard PC hardware, improved its Alder Lake support in this month's release, version 0.7.7. In a blog post over the weekend, the developers also detailed their efforts to update OpenCore and its associated software to work with Intel's Z690 chipset.
The key to building a functional Hackintosh is normally to build a PC that's as close as possible to actual Intel Mac hardware -- most crucially, the CPU, GPU, and chipset. OpenCore's job is to bridge whatever gap is left between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS boots and works properly. It adds support for reading and booting macOS filesystems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system's audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs hardware to take advantage of macOS's built-in support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that is similar to but not quite identical to a GPU included in a real Intel Mac). As OpenCore has developed and matured, it has gotten better at bridging larger and larger gaps between PC hardware and "real" Macs. It can get old versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) up and running on old hardware, and it can even be used to run newer macOS versions on real Macs that Apple has dropped from the official support list. It can even run macOS on AMD processors, albeit with some caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality. The still-active Hackintosh Reddit community is full of people running macOS on all kinds of different hardware.
It's that sort of flexibility that will keep macOS working on 12th-generation Intel CPUs and the Z690 chipset. All of that said, running macOS on newer hardware isn't for the faint of heart, and some things just aren't going to work. Trying to use 12th-gen processors' new efficiency cores (or E-cores) can also cause general slowdowns because macOS doesn't know how to best distribute work between the different types of cores -- macOS doesn't (and never will) support Intel's "Thread Director" technology, which needs to be baked into your operating system to get the best performance. The GPUs from 11th- and 12th-generation Intel processors also won't work in Hackintoshes because they were never supported in real Macs, so you would need to rely on a dedicated AMD GPU to handle display output and other tasks (in real Intel Macs, even iMacs and MacBook Pros with dedicated GPUs still use the integrated Intel GPUs for video and photo encoding and decoding). Apple is still adding support for newer AMD GPUs in macOS releases, presumably so those cards can work in the Mac Pro -- the Radeon RX 6900 series, 6800 series, and RX 6600 XT are all supported -- but Apple could easily decide to stop supporting newer GPUs whenever it wants. And Nvidia GPUs aren't supported at all.
The key to building a functional Hackintosh is normally to build a PC that's as close as possible to actual Intel Mac hardware -- most crucially, the CPU, GPU, and chipset. OpenCore's job is to bridge whatever gap is left between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS boots and works properly. It adds support for reading and booting macOS filesystems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system's audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs hardware to take advantage of macOS's built-in support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that is similar to but not quite identical to a GPU included in a real Intel Mac). As OpenCore has developed and matured, it has gotten better at bridging larger and larger gaps between PC hardware and "real" Macs. It can get old versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) up and running on old hardware, and it can even be used to run newer macOS versions on real Macs that Apple has dropped from the official support list. It can even run macOS on AMD processors, albeit with some caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality. The still-active Hackintosh Reddit community is full of people running macOS on all kinds of different hardware.
It's that sort of flexibility that will keep macOS working on 12th-generation Intel CPUs and the Z690 chipset. All of that said, running macOS on newer hardware isn't for the faint of heart, and some things just aren't going to work. Trying to use 12th-gen processors' new efficiency cores (or E-cores) can also cause general slowdowns because macOS doesn't know how to best distribute work between the different types of cores -- macOS doesn't (and never will) support Intel's "Thread Director" technology, which needs to be baked into your operating system to get the best performance. The GPUs from 11th- and 12th-generation Intel processors also won't work in Hackintoshes because they were never supported in real Macs, so you would need to rely on a dedicated AMD GPU to handle display output and other tasks (in real Intel Macs, even iMacs and MacBook Pros with dedicated GPUs still use the integrated Intel GPUs for video and photo encoding and decoding). Apple is still adding support for newer AMD GPUs in macOS releases, presumably so those cards can work in the Mac Pro -- the Radeon RX 6900 series, 6800 series, and RX 6600 XT are all supported -- but Apple could easily decide to stop supporting newer GPUs whenever it wants. And Nvidia GPUs aren't supported at all.
Can run a hackintosh (Score:2)
Without consuming 80% of my cpu. The OS is unusable at that point. It has been like this on every hardware combination I have used for the past 10 years.
What am I doing wrong?
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The OS, IMHO is inferior to any Linux desktop for the kind of work you'd want to do on a Hackintosh.
If you're using it for the things that software suites on Macs excel at, then you're probably purchasing a real Mac.
I switched from Linux as my main work OS for the last 15 years to Mac when I purchased my M1 Air... The hardware is phenomenal, but the OS is just a more polished Windows. If we ever get a truly functionin
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You can make Linux behave exactly like MacOS from a clicky-pointy standpoint with relatively little effort these days. But I have yet to hear of a purpose for which MacOS is actually superior to Linux underneath.
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No, sorry, you cant.
You can make it look like OSX, but the feel is completely off - you might delude yourself that you can, but an OSX user can instantly tell.
Ive used Linux for 25 years now, and have never got on with it on the desktop - OSX meanwhile, floats my boat just perfectly.
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No, sorry, you cant.
You can make it look like OSX, but the feel is completely off - you might delude yourself that you can, but an OSX user can instantly tell.
Ive used Linux for 25 years now, and have never got on with it on the desktop - OSX meanwhile, floats my boat just perfectly.
Same. And I actually worked on Linux distros around the turn of the century, but even I have almost zero interest in running it as a general end-user OS, even now. It still hasn't reached the level of UI polish that Mac OS 9 had. It is in some ways a prettier UI, but the functional aspects of the user interface still stink on ice.
The closest I ever came to seriously using Linux on the desktop was when I installed Linux on a 16-core Mac Pro because NDI stutters badly when decoding 4K video in macOS even o
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The first problem I had was with a lack of hardware support. Apple's hardware codec chips don't work in Linux, and AMD's hardware codec is unusable at 4K in Linux, so I had to buy an NVIDIA card. Unfortunately, when it comes to the NVIDIA cards that actually support hardware video compression, Apple's support is nonexistent, so my Mac Pro contains a video card that won't work at all in macOS, which exists solely so that Linux can use it to do hardware video compression. :-/
Slight correction. Hardware with the low-end version of the H.264 CODEC is supported. AFAIK, nothing with the H.265 codec or 10-bit H.264 is supported. Either way, the point is that none of the modern hardware works.
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Livestreaming, not editing.
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You say "It still hasn't reached the level of UI polish that Mac OS 9 had. It is in some ways a prettier UI, but the functional aspects of the user interface still stink on ice."
There is no user interface in Linux. The quote makes no sense. There are very many very different ones. There is no 'it' to be a prettier UI, because there is not just one UI. There must be well in excess of a dozen completely different UIs.
Gnome
KDE
Enlightenment
Fluxbox
Mate
XFCE
Openbox
and there are people out there still who are u
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You say "It still hasn't reached the level of UI polish that Mac OS 9 had. It is in some ways a prettier UI, but the functional aspects of the user interface still stink on ice."
There is no user interface in Linux. The quote makes no sense. There are very many very different ones. There is no 'it' to be a prettier UI, because there is not just one UI. There must be well in excess of a dozen completely different UIs.
Gnome KDE Enlightenment Fluxbox Mate XFCE Openbox
and there are people out there still who are using ICE and FVWM... not to mention too many more to keep listing them, why there are even diehard Windowmaker users, there's LXDE and LXQT...
Its nonsense to talk about a Linux UI without specifying which one you mean, because they are all far more different from each other than OSX is from Windows, any version.
True, and I've used several of them, and that describes each of the ones I've tried in the past few years. That fragmentation is a big part of the problem. As long as there are a dozen different ways to do hot keys at the WM level plus various framework-level bits that intercept keystrokes differently depending on what app you're running, you're going to have problems, because there's no single centralized daemon/service/API that is in charge of everything and no cross-app-framework API for manipulating i
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First- I acknowledge that for your workflow for A/V work, you're comfortable with MacOS, it's way of doing things, and it's what works for you.
Second- your Linux problems don't feel that dissimilar to my annoyances with MacOS while trying to get it to replicate basic functionality that I had in Linux.
I think think when one is steeped in one way of doing things, any different way feels illogical and stupid.
Every single MacOS update on even my brand new Macs (Air, MBP- both
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I do have a question for you, coming from Linux where I was used to being able to control volume for every single app that talked to the sound server (mute a specific app), how do you do this on a Mac?
That's one of the things I wish were possible in macOS, but Apple never exposed any CoreAudio APIs for doing so. The best you can do is change the default output device to route apps' audio to a third-party virtual input that provides that level of control.
The only tools I've found to be able to do it (Background Music) has such janky breakage if you look at it wrong, that I've just accepted that I can't do it.
There are a few others [stackexchange.com] out there besides the one you tried. I have no idea if any of them work any better. It's probably worth filing a bug/sending feedback, because it should be incredibly easy for Apple to expose that functionality.
That seems like it'd bug the hell out of someone who was livestreaming.
I literally have n
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You can make Linux behave exactly like MacOS from a clicky-pointy standpoint with relatively little effort these days. But I have yet to hear of a purpose for which MacOS is actually superior to Linux underneath.
Well, as the above AC said, there's "Audio Work".
That alone is a very big one.
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But I have yet to hear of a purpose for which MacOS is actually superior to Linux underneath.
Ypu can basically run every linux tool/app on MacOS - but not the other way around.
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If you need 100% compatibility with first-party apps like Microsoft Office, Zoom, etc. for real work but also want Unix-like features and don't want to mess around and have things "just work", macOS is better than Windows. Instead of a bolt-on Linux kernel running parallel (WSL), it is actually BSD-based at its core.
I love Linux and I love running it behind the scenes all over the place, but I use a lot of commercial software.
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Zoom runs natively [zoom.us] on Linux.
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This
All my servers run Debian - because it does its job with minimal hassle.
All my desktops and notebooks run MacOS - because it does it just works.
I have one windows partition because work requires me to use some crap that only runs on windows about twice a month and that's exactly how often that is booted up.
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macOS is not "BSD based"
It's Mach, with BSD bolted onto it for user-space friendliness. Over time, the BSD subsystem in Darwin has become more usable, but even today, you still can't really do anything without using Mach ports to communicate with the kernel.
Unix-like features, from the perspective you speak of, is a matter of user-space interface, which WSL satisfies just as well as the BSD subsystem on macOS.
i.e., in WSL, you can run Windows binaries that do the real work, just like in
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But it's whatever. I can do that, so I don't mind doing that. XQuartz works, and X forwarding is still a thing, until the Waylanders complete their takeover.
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Haven't had that problem personally, but really I don't see the appeal to a Hackintosh.
Beyond something to tinker with, no, there's not much point to it. Even with nearly compatible hardware, there's still some glitches and gotchas, and more things tend to break every time Apple pushes out an update. X86 support essentially has a looming expiration date now that Apple has moved on to using their ARM-based CPUs, so there's a limited future for hackintoshes.
If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. If you want PC hardware, run an OS where the vendor isn't user hostile with arbitrary hardware restriction
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If we ever get a truly functioning Linux kernel on this thing, MacOS is gone in a heartbeat.
LOL!
The Year of the Linux Desktop, Macintosh Edition!
Corollary to the "Apple is Doomed!" meme. . .
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I ran Linux for years on older Mac hardware, and kernel support is getting closer every day for Apple Silicon.
How is it a corollary to the "Apple is Doomed!" meme? Are you confused about what corollary means?
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One of the biggest appeals of Hackintosh is for developers that do multiplatform work and need to make a Mac/iOS build once in a while. The kind of jobs where it's nice to have the option available, but you don't need it often enough to justify the cost.
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You can rent time on one via Amazon now, though, so options are becoming available for that class of people
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Haven't had that problem personally, but really I don't see the appeal to a Hackintosh.
MacOS on PC hardware seems like the worst of both worlds. I want a Macbook running Linux with a keyboard that doesn't suck.
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Most Linux UIs are IMHO very similar to MacOS. And MacOS has nothing in common with Windows, no idea how you can think that.
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If you think I was referring to how the user-interfaces look/feel/work, then you've just merely made my point.
Let's discuss commonality.
In macOS, the kernel is Darwin. It's got a BSD bolt-on (that can't directly talk to hardware) for user-space, because Mach doesn't have a POSIX-compliant userspace interface.
In both cases, you've got mutually-conflicting kernel interfaces for doing things.
Outside of the BSD layer, you've got
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people who can and should use a Mac
What has using a Mac to do with kernel APIs, POSIX or not POXI Mach or not Mach?
Obviously nothing.
I can not comment on the rest of your rant, as I have never programmed "unix" beyond using the stdc library. So no idea what of your rant is true, not true, relevant or not relevant.
All my C programs on _every_ unix magically always ran perfectly.
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What has using a Mac to do with kernel APIs, POSIX or not POXI Mach or not Mach?
Because it was a direct explanation of how it's like Windows. On Macs, there is a clear delineation between BSD and DriverKit and other Mach interactions, which are notable very much not POSIX. This is like Windows, where the Win32 API includes mostly POSIX-compliant base functions, but to do any real work, you need to use the non-POSIX Win32 APIs.
All my C programs on _every_ unix magically always ran perfectly.
As long as your applications are high enough level to conform specifically to the SUS, that's pretty much a guaranteed.
Meaning yes, your implementation of "grep"
NVIDIA GPU's (Score:1)
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NVIDIA GPUs are still supported, just not anything newer than the GTX 600 series because for some reason Apple isn't allowing NVIDIA to make their web driver any more.
Wrong.
Apple isn't approving the Web Driver anymore; but it was nVidia's sole decision to stop offering it for download from their site.
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but it was nVidia's sole decision to stop offering it for download from their site.
You mean the web driver [nvidia.com] for Geforce and Quadro cards on macOS?
You will notice that is for High Sierra; which is now several versions of macOS ago.
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NVIDIA GPUs are still supported, just not anything newer than the GTX 600 series because for some reason Apple isn't allowing NVIDIA to make their web driver any more.
So ostensibly some nine-year-old hardware still works to some extent (albeit often downgraded to the functionality of even older cards). I'd call that "entirely unsupported", because exactly nobody buys a 9-year-old GPU for a new Mac, and the last PCIe-equipped Mac from that era hasn't been supported since Mojave.
My daily driver is a Hackintosh (Score:2)
Got back into again recently, since Apple has decided to abandon USB-A ports, doesn't make an affordable desktop & switched to M1. Would love to buy a MacPro, but I can't justify a $4000 purchase when I have a powerful gaming rig.
Instead got an RX460, installed OpenCore and done
Over-priced & poorly designed... (Score:2)
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Also had to put a Ubuntu sticker over the Apple logo on the lid so that Apple-fans didn't keep approaching me in libraries & cafés when I was using it.
You just had to give away that your entire anecdote is made up. When people see someone using a Mac they don't give a shit and they don't approach you to discuss your very common laptop.
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Anecdotes aren't data.
I've owned a couple of Macs over the years, and I've always been happy with the quality. I'm sometimes unhappy with their choice of graphics cards or other details. I feel like dropping 32bit support was premature (and I'm stuck on MacOS 10.14 because of that) but I've never owned a desktop computer as satisfying as my 27" iMac and my MacBook Air was an utterly amazing travel companion (at that time, no other serious notebook was as light).
Maybe I was lucky, maybe you were unlucky. In
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ApplePi (Score:2)
What I really want is an ApplePi. I don't particularly care about a high end hackintosh, I just want a mac service for running things that absolutely have to run on a Mac like imessage.