Title says it all. Once Apple drops OS support for Intel Macs in a future version will the idea of a hackintosh be dead? May be a few years before the Intel Macs are deprecated but we can expect it to happen sometime.
Given the 10th Gen Intel based Macs that exist now (particularly, the 27" iMac), you'll likely be able to keep running Intel versions of macOS on Hackintoshes that are at newest, 10th Gen, just fine. Where it will become ugly and hard to do will be when there's Intel hardware that Apple doesn't have in their Macs. It won't be impossible to, say, make an 11th Gen Intel based Hackintosh when Apple doesn't have 11th Gen chips in any Mac (and won't). But it will start to require more third party drivers to be concocted rather than being able to use what Apple has baked in natively. But, yes, the hard limit will be when Apple puts out a macOS release that doesn't support the Intel x86-64 processor architecture.
As for a timeline for that, let's suppose the following:
- Intel Hackintosh Hardware is available that is similar to current Apple Macs - Another 6 months to 1 year
- More modifications are required for hardware newer than Apple's final set of Intel-based Mac hardware - Between 1 year from now until Y date ("Y date" being defined as the release date of the first macOS release to drop support for x86-64 versions of macOS); with increasing difficulty
- Intel Hackintoshes are effectively dead
And, no, there will not be ARM64 based Hackintoshes. Apple may use ARM64 instruction sets on their processors, but it's not like you're going to be able to run ARM releases of Big Sur and onwards on a Qualcomm Snapdragon or a Samsung SoC. Apple's designs are custom enough that it'd be like trying to run a PowerPC Mac OS X release on an Xbox 360 or some other 3rd-party PowerPC box.
Suffice it to say that, now is a fantastic time to buy 10th Gen Intel hardware and build yourself a Hackintosh as after this it's going to get increasingly more difficult before Apple stops producing x86-64 releases of macOS altogether.
No expert here but couldn't they start hacking the ARM laptops that are out there:
https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
Nope. It's not just that Apple's Silicon runs ARM64 instruction sets. That's about all it has in common with other ARM64 SoCs. It's to the point where you'd need substantially more than drivers to get Apple Silicon Big Sur and beyond to run on a system that wasn't using the Apple SoC.
Take a look at the WWDC video on "System Architecture of Apple Silicon Macs" - the last half talks about Boot/Start-up.
Based on what I see/hear there... There's a reduced bootup security option - more for devs, but seems to potentially allow for using custom bootup security. I'd say it's undecided at this point...
You're talking about the ability to run other operating systems on Apple Silicon hardware. And toward that end, I agree. But the discussion here is more on running Apple Silicon based releases of macOS on non-Apple ARM64-based hardware.
Will likely be able to hackintosh an Intel PC for some time (for at least as long as macOS supports Intel processors, which could be another 6-10 years), but I strongly suspect macOS for ARM will only ever run on Apple’s custom systems.
Not necessarily. It works effortlessly because the CPUs that people use for their Hackintoshes are of the same families that Apple is using on actual Intel Macs. Once Apple stops producing Intel Macs, then the work to get those processors going will be a bit more difficult (probably not unlike how it is to get an AMD Hackintosh going) and they'll get more and more difficult the longer time passes after those final Intel Macs are produced. I'd say that anyone wanting to build a 10th Gen Hackintosh should do so now.
IMO the Hackintosh is 100% dead for some time following the ARM transition. Even if someone gets a future ARM-only version of macOS running on non-ARM hardware, it will suffer all the problems of being non-native. Not worth it IMO.
It won't be possible to get Apple Silicon macOS releases to run on non-Apple Silicon ARM64 hardware and it will be impossible to get it to run on a non-ARM64 system without an emulator. It'll be much easier to get an x86-64 release of macOS to run on an ARM64 system via emulation, but that really won't be worth it.
The Apple ecosystem managed by T2 (therefore will become inaccessible to non-Apple hardware with an exception of iTunes and iCloud storage) opens up much more opportunities. Apple has a banking mechanism, is totally independent from network carriers (eSIM), has unique and robust authentication mechanisms... I can imagine a hardware-as-a-service offering quite soon, even with unlocking additional cores on the CPU or allowing access to cloud processing power for additional fee.
The T2 has nothing to do with whether you can or can't Hackintosh. It's possible that once Apple limits x86-64 releases of macOS to Macs with a T2 chip (which I can totally see happening along the road to eventual Intel Mac obsolescence from the macOS system requirements side of things), it may be impossible to get Hackintoshes going, but even then, I find that highly unlikely.
I agree with some of the above comments - the hackintosh scene has been largely dead for some time now. It really hasn't been worth doing (beyond tinkerers and "because I can"ers) for a good few years.
Especially since if you're building a hackintosh to save costs, you're probably buying AMD gear considering the bang-for-buck vs intel chips at the moment, and hackintosh on AMD is always a pain. Most people have worked out that by the time you buy the full system, using compatible parts, add in a decent display, you may as well just buy an iMac, upgrade the RAM and add external storage. The couple of hundred you may save just isn't worth the crap you have to go through at every OS update.
No, you're wrong. Hackintoshing is not currently dead. This transition will see it dying, but it is not dead yet. Those wanting an affordable and more powerful alternative to the 2020 27" iMac can build an Intel Hackintosh that's more powerful. But it's not dead and it hasn't been dead just because you don't see a point to it.
Also, the notion that Hackintosh users are going for AMD to save costs is ridiculous; AMD Hackintoshing is a completely different realm of tinkering than is required for Intel Hackintoshes and those wanting to Hackintosh aren't necessarily game for that. They want a Mac more powerful than an Intel iMac and they want to pay less for it than the nonsense that Apple charges. That doesn't mean that they're going to opt for AMD to save money and then quit altogether because AMD Hackintoshing is a pain in the a$$.
