
Ask HN: End of Hackintosh or macOS on Raspberry Pi 6? - Abishek_Muthian
Hackintosh - macOS running on non Apple hardware.<p>Hackintosh community has some of the extraordinarily talented developers, who has over  the years developed sophisticated tools and methodologies to run vanilla macOS on non Apple hardware[1] or on AMD CPU with custom kernel.<p>Apple so far hasn&#x27;t explicitly indulged in sabotaging hackintosh scene(Only those who sold pre-built hackintosh hardware incurred Apple&#x27;s wrath), in-fact some hackintosh specific kexts where whitelisted officially in the macOS few iterations back when kext signing became mandatory.<p>Apple&#x27;s blind eye towards hackintosh made sense as besides increasing penetration for macOS, it provided access to iOS app development in markets where price of Apple hardware was the primary barrier to entry unlike Android development.<p>But, interest for hackintosh seems to be declining steadily[2] since it&#x27;s peak in 2008(snow leopard 64bit?); may be because tools for hackintosh are very stable now, macOS hasn&#x27;t undergone major architectural change until now (or) is it economic uptrend around the world which makes entry level MacBook a promising investment for iOS development.<p>Anyways, things have changed today;  macOS Big Sur is the official transition of macOS to iOS with better mouse and keyboard support. Would apple lockdown MacBooks further to the level of iPhone&#x2F;iPad that, macOS upgrades wouldn&#x27;t be available as separate package on Mac AppStore? I don&#x27;t see a reason why it wouldn&#x27;t in the future.<p>macOS upgrades available as a separate downloadable package is crucial for hackintosh, without it accessing macOS would amount to piracy.<p>Would this rekindle the hackintosh development to support other ARM hardware(RPi 6?) for macOS or will Apple doubling down on lockdown kill the hackintosh scene for good in this decade.<p>[1]https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insanelymac.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;73-developers-corner&#x2F;<p>[2]https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;q=hackintosh
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qubex
I think the “hackintosh” (as we have intended it since Apple’s transition to
Intel in 2006) effectively died yesterday.

The idea that “Macs” will be relatively generic _x_ 86-64 machines made by a
specific company to run its OS preferentially is gone. Macs’ inner workings
will go back to being comparatively exotic, as they were in the PowerPC days
and before: incompatible with the prevailing _wintel_ hegemony, which for
Apple has the pleasant side-effect relieving them of many competitive forces
(but I digress).

In future getting macOS to run on non-Apple hardware will be far more
difficult. The A _x_ series SoCs are _ARM-based_ but contain loads of Apple-
specific implementations and additions. Think of the T2 chips and the _Secure
Enclave_. Those won’t be turning up on commodity silicon before the relevant
patents expire!

Look at it the opposite way: how successful, really, have efforts to get Linux
running on Apple’s iPad, iPhone, and AppleTV platforms been? Why? Because it’s
undocumented. That’s what ARM macs will be like in the future.

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rzzzwilson
I'm more interested in running a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware than the other
way around. After seven years of running MacOS on Apple laptops I want to
ditch the walled-garden and MacOS.

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shams93
They're making custom boards for the Mac, the pi wouldn't be compatible at
all. I also doubt we will see a price drop either.

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Abishek_Muthian
Logic board for Mac was under same premise, ofcourse SoC would be much more
tightly integrated and current Pi wouldn't be compatible; I'm interested
whether hackintosh scene would evolve into supporting one in future.

