- You buy the right hardware. Intel CPU and AMD GPU. Choose Ryzen if you like those and like tinkering and hacking on your OS a lot. And no, it's very unlikely your Nvidia GPU will ever work with a recent macOS.
- You use the vanilla method of macOS install. The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need. Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "beast" in the name. Run screaming from them. Do not mess with the OS install, do not put any kexts into the OS install. Put everything into EFI.
- You set aside the occasional day for OS updates (and possibly updating OpenCore). You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.
I've been using a 8700K/RX580 hackintosh for years now, and in many ways, it's been more stable than my actual Macs -- and certainly more modular and expandable.
Dont use Ryzen, virtualization does not work, including Docker and some other apps like Adobe ones are buggy. Other than that I agree. I made a hackintosh a month ago for half the price of what I would need to pay Apple and it is rock solid. Everything works including all wireless features like sidecar, airdrop, etc. Sleep, thunderbold, rx5700xt, everything is working well.
I'd sort of do it the sort of reverse way... Run KVM with pass-through to a VM MacOS instance and then run all your docker shit on the Linux host. Best of both worlds right there:
1. You get MacOS with GPU acceleration (which is like the primary feature for making it usable).
2. You get a legit environment to run docker containers... That doesn't have to boot a VM and rob you of all your ram. If you haven't ever used containers on a metal Linux environment, you're missing out... it's much better experience than doing it on a Mac (as far as development goes).
The recommendation to use an AMD GPU still stands, since it's passed into the VM. I've been using an RX 560D on Catalina (the one that didn't advertise having 2 fewer CUs, grrrr) without any graphical trouble.
iCloud mostly works, the only two apps that I can't get working are iMessage and FaceTime. This is a common issue for all Hackintoshs, it's not a VM specific problem. It comes down to needing to provide a real Apple SN that matches the kind of Mac you set your Hackintosh to identify as. I'd half recommend picking up a broken / for-parts iMac off eBay to lift the serial number off of (and to say you do actually own a Mac =P ).
I did have some trouble doing passthrough of NVMe drives in the past. I don't know if this was the VM's fault or the fact that it would get hooked by Linux on the host boot and then be unbound before booting the VM. I haven't tried again in the last 18 months, so it's entirely possible any issue there got fixed. I've been booting from an iSCSI volume from my NAS (QEMU hides this fact from macOS).
I should add that I moved away from the Apple ecosystem awhile ago in terms of my personal data. I use a mix of Google services and NextCloud (hosted on my own hardware). My Apple ID getting banned isn't too much of a concern for me. I've never heard of someone actually getting their Apple ID blocked for using a Hackintosh, I figure there are so few people actually doing it it's not worth it to Apple to enforce.
That being said, I don't know how they'd respond to a wealthy company using a bunch of Hackintoshs. I still don't understand how they expect people to properly do CI/CD for iOS without macOS in a server / virtualization environment though. My employer uses rack mount sleds for Mac Minis, but without proper IPMI, managing them is a pain. I wish you could license macOS for a virtualization environment so you could deploy a few 1U dual socket 64 core EPYC servers (128 core / 256 thread total) rather than 4x 6 core boxes per 1U.
Either that, or they should let the toolchain run on more than just Macs. I think that is one of the major features of React Native - you can develop your apps on whatever machine you want. You only need a proper Mac when you're bundling for release.
I joke in jest, but even official apple hardware has serious virtualization issues these days. Crazy kernel panics and vmware indicated they're not sure they can fix it (all in the hands of Apple).
I do agree that Intel HW is better for the hackintoshes though, even more so if you need thunderbolt!
I've been tempted before but am super wary of the fact I may suddenly become stuck on a certain version of macOS because updating it breaks everything.
I imagine you're knowledgeable as you've built one - is that a genuine risk? Or do all versions become hackable eventually?
I'm not the person you replied to but I've used hackintoshes since the Snow Leopard days. Generally if you set it up properly as was described at the beginning of this thread minor updates will work fine without any user input. Some major updates will be the same, with others you might end up needing to change some kexts to fix audio or wifi but it'll generally boot. With major updates that change a lot you might be better off backing up your data and doing a fresh install.
So far all versions have become hackable (generally in a matter of days or weeks) but with Apple's transition to their own silicon I imagine the last version they put out that supports x86_64 will be the final hackintoshable build.
I anticipate that ARM macOS will not run at all on systems without Apple Silicon (as they are calling it) and never will. I assume these systems will have the proprietary secure enclave on-die, which would be missing from all other ARM systems.
I agree. No one has ever managed to get iOS on non-Apple hardware†, and I don't see why ARM macOS would be any different.
† Except maybe Correllium, which was a large commercial effort. Since they don't make any details public, I'm not clear if Correllium just built a sort of emulator or if they actually have the OS running "natively" on 3rd party hardware.
The Darwin on ARM Project[1] attempted just that. It depends on what you mean by "iOS" if you want to say they accomplished it - for example, they got XNU, the kernel, running on a Nokia N900, but they never got a UI up and running (only single-user mode).
This is only if you use a vanilla kernel, right? (Which of course has its own advantages, since with a custom kernel updating is guaranteed to be a pain.)
>The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need
>Avoid ..., insanelymac,
Where did the tools mentioned in those guides come from then? Hackintosh scene became what it is due to countless hours poured into development by developers from insanelymac, olarila & couple of other Russian sites; almost every other major hackintosh site started as guides using the information from the aforementioned sites.
In fact the development discussion of OpenCore, happens at insanelymac[1].
The tools largely come from a Russian guy who goes by vit9696, along with some of his developer friends.
He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion, but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice and to keep things short for the noobs I was speaking to, it's easier to steer people away from it.
Pretty much everything can be done just using the Dortania guide and /r/hackintosh and maybe the "official" Discord, if something goes wrong.
>He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion,
Checking the discussion shows it's not true.
>but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice
May be you had a bad experience with the site, or may be it really isn't 'noob' friendly anymore, but that doesn't mean you should discredit the actual developers of the tools in favour of the 'How To' guides written about the very same tools.
I'm just attaching the fundamental components of Hackintosh nowadays, but if we dig back in insanelymac the contributions goes back more than a decade when Apple used to sell their OS on discs. The content there are worthy of preservation at The Computer Museum.
The InsanelyMac site is riddled with bad advice from questionable sources. Eg. using the beast tools, binary patching kexts for dumb reasons, rando plist changes.
I did not have a "bad experience" per se, with the site. It's just full of unschooled people all too eager to offer bad advice.
I respectfully disagree, learning what's happening with your machine is helpful for troubleshooting and for security. Further, I feel the parent comment was disrespectful for the actual creators.
Can't agree more on Intel CPU and AMD GPU combination. Ideally it'll be cousins of what Apple has used in their actual products, e.g. 8th gen processors and RX 580 or Vega 56 GPUs.
I've done it a couple of times and only takes an hour, with plenty of guides available on YouTube too. Especially if you need a high performance system, putting one together yourself can save thousands than purchasing from Apple.
My 2015 MBP is showing its age and I would love to build a powerful desktop as I spend 85% of my time working at the same desk. But I'm very accustomed to the Mac workflow and tooling. Years ago when I tried the Hackintosh thing I could never get iMessage to work and that made it a no-go for me.
It required some tinkering for me and the upgrade to Catalina before I could get it to cooperate, but iMessage did eventually work and has continued to work since that initial upgrade.
Tonymacx86's useful information is smothered in a quagmire of utterly useless garbage, outdated, invalid information, and in general a user interface from 2001 where somewhere 65 pages of a single forum thread is the information you seek.
As a learning resource, it is a complete waste of time for trying to build a hackintosh.
> Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "beast" in the name.
Huh. When did avoiding tonymacx86 become a thing? I built my first Hackintosh in 2010 and relied on tonymacx86 but I haven't paid attention to the community since 2014-onwards.
There's a ton of great advice on Tonymacx86 and InsanelyMac if you keep your tongue straight in the mouth, but also a ton of mediocre and even bad advice (like using their "helpful software"). Not to mention the petty conflict between the two sites.
In general you're much better off following advice from the Github guides, /r/hackintosh and Discord channels.
I haven't run a Hackintosh in over 5 years but there was this transition, it used to be necessary to install custom kexts and do some pretty weird stuff. Then came these uefi bootloaders that did some magic that let you install just fully vanilla MacOS. Pretty great but it basically made all the old guides and advice obsolete. I bet avoiding the old names can keep you out of trouble, even if they're probably still pumping out good stuff.
I've stopped playing with these around 10.5 - I had some unsolvable issues with my Radeon x1600 back then; OS updating was also somehow broken; the one of most popular "distributions" of 10.4 was most reliable on my hardware. I haven't touched Hackintosh world since then.
I know it's obviously impossible that Apple would ever enter PC market with MacOS but damn, that would be great.
It has gotten better in recent years. No one uses "distributions" anymore (or at least, if they do, its very misguided). Point-release updates almost always work fine if you set up the machine right—in fact, I've never had a problem from a point release update during a decade of Hackintosh use.
Damn, this is a buzzkill for me. I just built a new computer a month ago and was hoping to get a Hackintosh setup working but didn't do much research into it beforehand. Why will Nvidia GPUs never work? Because they won't publish open source drivers to work off of?
Because Apple computers don't use nVidia cards, and nVidia no longer makes their own Mac drivers (as they did until recently). Porting the Linux driver would be a massive amount of effort, even if nVidia was more open.
If you have a slightly older nVidia GPU (1000 series or older), it will work in High Sierra via nVidia's in-house drivers. But you will never be able to upgrade past High Sierra.
AFAICT the answer is that Nvidia and Apple are not the best of friends, and Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers.
This may have been at least partly because it restricts the numbers of people who try making hackintoshes out of existing machines.
I think this is probably a factor in the lack of support for intel Wifi too - it keeps a lot of laptops from neing able to 'just work' as hackintoshes too
> Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers.
People think this based on a vague statement from nVidia's PR. It doesn't make any sense to me. nVidia has continued to release (minor) updates for the High Sierra drivers, and Apple has been perfectly happy to sign those. Also, this is a technically-advanced audience that would probably have no trouble installing unsigned drivers.
I really think that nVidia realized they would have had to do a major driver rewrite for Mojave (because much more rendering goes through Metal) and decided it wasn't worth the effort. The Mac drivers were clearly a very low priority for nVidia; it took the better part of a year before the company added compatibility with their new Pascal graphics cards, and even then the drivers had all sorts of bugs with applications like Little Snitch[1]. It's even possible that nVidia had some knowledge of the upcoming ARM transition, and decided to cut their losses ahead of time.
Depends on your definition of "allow". By default they're blocked, yes, but you can change that by booting into recovery mode, opening a Terminal window, and typing:
csrutil disable && csrutil enable --without kext
Now unsigned kexts will be allowed to load (while leaving the rest of System Integrity Protection intact).
For most software this requirement would be a massive problem, but I'm not sure that applies to the type of person installing 3rd party graphics cards in Macs...
The nVidia Web Drivers never officially supported eGPUs anyway. In order to do it at all you had to use a hack which—surprise!—also required disabling System Integrity Protection!
There is a hack that allowed me to use the Nvidia web drivers on Mojave on my 2012 15" rMBP. Not sure if it works on Catalina. You have to reapply it every OS update. I don't think there is a hack to get CUDA working, which was last supported on High Sierra.
Not sure if the same hack could be used on a Hackintosh (with an old enough card). But for now I would just use High Sierra if you have an Nvidia card, unless you really needed something in a later OS and the hack made it possible. I downgraded that 2012 to High Sierra, and keep other older machines on it as well (didn't have a choice with my 2019 16"). It runs very smoothly and currently has enough software support (e.g. latest Office 365 still supports it).
Aww, I didn't realize that Nvidia stopped making the macOS driver. I was hoping they might stick with it because the new Mac Pro has proper PCIe slots.
> - You set aside the occasional day for OS updates (and possibly updating OpenCore). You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.
This is good general advice for updating even apple-built MacOS machines.
- You buy the right hardware. Intel CPU and AMD GPU. Choose Ryzen if you like those and like tinkering and hacking on your OS a lot. And no, it's very unlikely your Nvidia GPU will ever work with a recent macOS.
- You use the vanilla method of macOS install. The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need. Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "beast" in the name. Run screaming from them. Do not mess with the OS install, do not put any kexts into the OS install. Put everything into EFI.
- You set aside the occasional day for OS updates (and possibly updating OpenCore). You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.
I've been using a 8700K/RX580 hackintosh for years now, and in many ways, it's been more stable than my actual Macs -- and certainly more modular and expandable.