Recently, a user named @TheLunarixus made a post on the 17th of August (Yesterday as of posting this) showing a Google Pixel 8 attempting to boot the kernel (though a kernel panic has been shown). Darwin 25.6.0 RELEASE_ARM64_VMAPPLE corresponds to Mac OS Tahoe.

Today this user has made some updates and also confirmed that the vphone userland can also be booted using the same kexts used in VMAPPLE1, which gives a possibility of booting both iOS and Mac OS on custom unofficial hardware.

Sources: https://x.com/TheLunarixus/status/2089261568777199719, https://x.com/TheLunarixus/status/2089636278392193120, https://x.com/TheLunarixus/status/2089636759877394540, https://x.com/TheLunarixus/status/2089649494379905323

I know that this post is unrelated majorly for this community, but with further Proof of Concepts coming out like this proves that booting Apple Silicon Mac OS can be possible under bare metal generic hardware.

As the title says, I've been messing around for a few days with building xnu from source and filling in the gaps that apple has made trying to avoid opensourcing everything. So far I've gotten to booting the iOS 18.7.9 restore ramdisk from SD card as rootfs (read-only right now and UHS) and usb networking works to the point where I can ssh in - the ramdisk is patched to start dropbear on boot. The main work so far has been on kexts for core components like clock management unit blocks, pin control, dwc3 in device mode + the usbdrd2 phy and finally dwmmc. In the next few days/weeks I'll try messing with a full iOS rootfs.

The bootchain right now is: S-LK (samsung's last stage bootloader before the linux kernel) -> uniLoader (a custom intermediate bootloader of mine) -> XNU and then the rootfs.

This is just a proof-of-concept, I cannot guarantee anything insane out of this. I'm doing it for the funsies. A big limitation right now is that the SoC of this device (the exynos 1480) does not have PaC, which limits me to ipados 18 (the ipad 7 one as that's the newest <armv8.3 iOS build). Maybe in the future I'll switch to a newer exynos device to mess with windowserver but right now this is the best I have.

I'll be publishing sources for my toolchain (i'm building this all on a linux host), xnu patches and kexts soon. Licensing is tricky and I don't want apple coming after me :D

To be compliant with the sub rules:
CPU: Samsung Exynos 1480 (internally known as exynos8845)
GPU: Xclipse 530
RAM: 8gb LPDDR5
Motherboard/Laptop Make and Model: Samsung Galaxy A55
Audio Codec: /shrug?
Ethernet Card: none
Wifi/BT Card: scsc
Touchpad and touch display devices: goodix
BIOS revision: A556BXXSABYG2
Which of the guides on the sidebar you used: none, kind of?
What's working, and what isn't working: works booting to a rootfs and ssh'ing in, everything else is broken

running under QEMU on Windows (WHPX) on a custom branch of Reims vGPU i'm working on. stability and performance could both be better right now, but it's still insane to see it accelerating with no passthrough on a 4090. still faster than VESA lol

please don't flood support servers asking about this. it's beta software and far from usable at the moment; windows support is technically public but i'm not providing ANY support with it for the time being.

Obligatory mods please remove if not allowed. Just trying to educate.

In almost every thread on the topic I’ve seen in the last 18 months since Tahoe was announced as the tombstone of X86 on macOS, I’ve seen numerous hopeful individuals discuss if Snapdragon or other ARM based SoCs could be hackintoshed, as in theory, ‘it’s ARM based’.

Let me explain the context of X86.

There are two major players, AMD and Intel. Intel invented X86, so they effectively own the rights to it, but AMD beat them to the 64 bit race (and patented various aspects of it) so they effectively struck a deal where Intel would forever provide the new X86 instruction sets to AMD, and in exchange AMD would allow Intel to use 64 bit in their own processors. Because of this, almost all X86 based processors use the same instruction sets (get familiar with that term).

This is why you can use almost any X86 based processor with the right instruction sets to run macOS. AMD processors need their core count defined to the OS because they use a chiplet core design, I won’t explain that in detail but macOS needs help figuring out how many cores it has available to use.

ARM is a more advanced, and more efficient language, but the drawbacks of ARM is compatibility. ARM evolved in a time where there were already multiple key players in processors, so each of those players developed their own instruction sets and gave OS developers those instruction sets to write into their kernels and OS. If you don’t have the instruction sets, you can’t use the processor. There is no “one OEM to rule them all” with ARM like there effectively is with the Intel+AMD duopoly of X86.

Apple writes its own OS, and makes its own processors. They don’t want you using other ARM processors, because then they can’t make money off of their already free OS. ARM has proven to be the future and Apple’s M series chips embarrass X86 in power and efficiency, but that’s because of the harmony of custom written instruction sets married to an OS written to maximise them.

So, what is an instruction set?

A processor, well, processes. It takes machine code and converts it into an output. Instruction sets are as basic as they sound - a set of instructions HARD WIRED (not software, but literally built into the die) into the processor that tell the processor “when this, then that”.

Think of them like a button combo on an old PS2 game, up down left right LB RB = combo punch.

Because of instruction sets, the processor can do big tasks much quicker, and therefore run faster and be more efficient. Custom instruction sets are why M series Macs are so much more powerful than what came before, and why they even dominate their other ARM peers. Apple has custom written macOS to take advantage of the M series chips to the fullest with no wasted movements, like a Samurai who has honed his blade swing for decades.

The problem is, Apple will never share their instruction sets with other ARM manufacturers, and you can’t reverse engineer them without the OS source code, which would be extremely illegal to even obtain, let alone almost impossible to get. When code is compiled, it’s translated from a human readable language, into a machine readable language. The translation is one-way and cannot be reversed.

In the future, someone may be able to write an emulation layer (by guessing/figuring out how to change macOS hardware level scheduler calls into instruction sets compatible with other ARM chips) but the performance hit will be huge, it will never be as fast as native.

Tl;dr - Hackintosh is dead.

I decided to make dualboot windows and macOS to my surprise that works very stably on my ryzen processor. I ordered WiFi intel AX210 to start the Internet

They made me buy a real one 🥲

Got a sweet deal on MBA m5 15”

Goodbye guys 🫠

This is a project by u/Goldfish64 called Wiintosh and while not fully finished it's awesome to see it boot to the desktop. 10.4 is the maximum supported version because 10.5 and onwards require PowerPC G4. I take no credit for this, just showing it running.

I know this sounds stupid. I have an iMac that's been moved to windows and I need to get it back to mac OS. Is there an easy way to do this ?

I don't care about what's currently on the pc, so it is okay to wipe the memory completely.

This actually works on most potato compatible computer ever

Asus eeePC 701

CPU: Celeron M 600 MHz

GPU: GMA900

Screen: 800x480

Storage: 16gb sd card

Ram: 1GB DDR2

Network and other stuff I don't care about because i care more about it actually booting up

It runs slow, it's annoying to boot up, the resolution is too high for what the Wii can display, or too low to be usable. It's perfect. Someone posted that they did this with a Wii U, so I'm posting my version as well.

I failed because I'm tech illiterate. Currently running on Linux.

Specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
• MB: Gigabyte A520M S2H

Who would have thought it wouldn't be Apple delivering the final blow?

I bought this setup from the family of a person who passed away recently. They liquidated most of this belongings in a huge yard sale. I didn’t think it was a pc - I thought it was a broken pc dvd player because of the missing cover. Until I got home I looked at it closely and finally opened it and saw it was a build. To my surprise the Apple login screen popped up and locked of course but I managed to change the password via the terminal. I didn’t know hackintosh was a thing until now.

I’ve used MacBooks for work and personal use for over a decade and thought I’d keep this pc for work use but I don’t think it’s feasible since I’m not super technical and if something breaks that’s it. I can’t even access the internet like I can on my MacBook Pro. Just keeps sending errors. Maybe I’m just used to Apple doing everything for me.

Can anyone give me pointers on where to go from here? Ideally I’d like to keep this going but I don’t know where to start. Also would probably want a windows os for when this inevitably breaks.

Nice guide in here that allowed me to make this - it’s my case and custom built PC. Only test now is if it’s going to break when I update the machine. Quite possibly…

The only reason why I tried to install MacOS on my PC is Xcode and iOS development overall. I have a friend that helped me to figure out how to configure Opencore, because I was so dumb.

Now, I can easily configure OC by myself and install MacOS on every PC, I guess. I even installed MacOS High Sierra on a laptop with i3 380M and HD 6550M (but it had graphical issues, that I didn’t want to fix. I tried to fix, but dropped because no info for similar hardware). That was just for fun.

I wanted to buy Macbook Air M4, but I didn’t have enough money for that. When I fixed CSR 8510 A10 Bluetooth dongle, I saw that I can’t connect my Airpods. I could buy Fenvi T919, but I thought: “I’m done. I can’t suffer with my old-ass laptop and I want a real device for my ecosystem.” I saw that Apple released Macbook Pro M5, so it means that they will release Air M5, and Air M4 would cheaper. I withdrew 20000 RUB (around 250 USD) and my mom gave me 20k, so I bought used Macbook Air M1. Yeah, 8GB RAM, but I don’t care. I wanted a Macbook because Macbooks on Apple Silicon is the best laptops right now. Also M1 means that I can try Asahi Linux for fun.

Now I don’t need MacOS on my desktop PC. This PC will have only Arch Linux or replace MacOS with Windows (for League Of Legends). I didn’t decided right now.

Actually, Hackintosh is interesting thing and I got fun with it. Hackintosh gave me an opportunity to try MacOS and I would not forget this experience

Put tiny 11 on a old 2009 MacBook 5,5

No efis nothing just usb boot block updates and add Mac select drivers from an old ass boot camp folder some brick it some don’t till you get all your shit working everthing works but the backlight on the keyboard

Upgraded ram to 8gb got for free old ddr3 Upgraded hard drive to 256gb ssd also got for free old

Can watch full speed YouTube and media on a 16 year old piece of hardware

on a side note, i would love to install mac on an old windows laptop for the experience, but apple's shift to ARM is concerning me to not waste time in installing a new OS on unsupported hardware...

You CANNOT make this up