An interesting and, sadly, accurate read. I will miss building my Hacks, but I knew as soon as Apple announced their switch to arm64 that the good times were over.
Maybe sometime in the future we’ll have a powerful and open arm64 system that we can somehow run Apple Silicon macOS on?
I suggest reading some of the Asahi Linux wiki to get a feel for the Apple Silicon architecture. There’s a lot of tight integration there with many custom co-processors, that’s going to make life difficult for the prospective hackintosh.
Yes, there absolutely is a lot of integrations and even if a consumer level SoC existed that could run arm64 macOS, it might not last long as all Apple would have to do is slightly change some aspect of their particular architecture and it would stop working. I don’t expect it to ever happen, but then again, I never expected macOS on x86 either.
Asahi, by the way, it’s astounding how far they’ve come with porting over to Apple Silicon. I haven’t had the itch strong enough yet to give it a go, but I will eventually.
I think the Apple silicon devices are going to have a pretty locked boot loader
Couldn’t be further from the truth. The OS is heavily locked down to prevent malware from modifying the kernel / boot process, however bypassing it is as simple as holding down the power button until you see an options screen (equivalent to BIOS on a PC) and one of the options is a tool to adjust boot security including the option to boot into an arbitrary third party kernel. As long as it’s compiled for ARM64 (which is a decades old industry standard CPU architecture) it will boot.
The only real headaches are around drivers. For example Mac laptop trackpads don’t have any buttons at all. Instead the trackpad is pressure sensitive and the software should detect pressure that looks like a press action, treat that as a click, and send haptic feedback (vibrating the trackpad). None of that is standard stuff and if you want a Mac laptop to work at all… you need to figure it out yourself.
An interesting and, sadly, accurate read. I will miss building my Hacks, but I knew as soon as Apple announced their switch to arm64 that the good times were over.
Maybe sometime in the future we’ll have a powerful and open arm64 system that we can somehow run Apple Silicon macOS on?
I suggest reading some of the Asahi Linux wiki to get a feel for the Apple Silicon architecture. There’s a lot of tight integration there with many custom co-processors, that’s going to make life difficult for the prospective hackintosh.
Conversely it’s amazing how far Asahi has come. Hector Martin and team are freaking geniuses.
It really is! I can’t wait for the future where I take a couple cheap and used M1 Mac minis and run Linux servers on them.
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Yes, there absolutely is a lot of integrations and even if a consumer level SoC existed that could run arm64 macOS, it might not last long as all Apple would have to do is slightly change some aspect of their particular architecture and it would stop working. I don’t expect it to ever happen, but then again, I never expected macOS on x86 either.
Asahi, by the way, it’s astounding how far they’ve come with porting over to Apple Silicon. I haven’t had the itch strong enough yet to give it a go, but I will eventually.
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Why do you get that idea? Apple put quite a bit of effort into bootcamp for ARM Mac’s to especially allow other OS to be run on the arm Macs
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I think the best entry here would be the Asahi Linux FAQ „does Apple allow this“. It has links which explain it in more detail than I ever could.
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Couldn’t be further from the truth. The OS is heavily locked down to prevent malware from modifying the kernel / boot process, however bypassing it is as simple as holding down the power button until you see an options screen (equivalent to BIOS on a PC) and one of the options is a tool to adjust boot security including the option to boot into an arbitrary third party kernel. As long as it’s compiled for ARM64 (which is a decades old industry standard CPU architecture) it will boot.
The only real headaches are around drivers. For example Mac laptop trackpads don’t have any buttons at all. Instead the trackpad is pressure sensitive and the software should detect pressure that looks like a press action, treat that as a click, and send haptic feedback (vibrating the trackpad). None of that is standard stuff and if you want a Mac laptop to work at all… you need to figure it out yourself.