Made an account to share my success story.
Macbook 4,1 (4gb ram and 500GB HDD upgrades)
This was a lot less painless than I anticipated.
TOOLS:
MacOS patcher from RMC team - downloaded the latest build from Github
Copy of Mojave Install .app (10.14.5)
Disk Utility (stock)
PROCESS:
#i didn't have a usb on hand that was 16gb, so I made a janky multi-partition install. I have Leopard installed on the mac, I made a second installer partition (20gb), and a third Mojave partition (250GB), so I could dual-boot in case i didn't like the outcome. Don't judge me.
I followed all the instructions from the RMC page, and everything just worked. That's it! No special things or edits, or fixes.
SOME ISSUES:
- When I used the tool to make the installer it did not read my volumes/partitions, so I just typed the target volume by hand and that worked.
- First time I tried to boot into the Installer partition it didn't load and just restarted, but the second time it worked.
- The install took around 35min (so the estimate on screen was never accurate).
- When I first booted into the Mojave partition after post-patching it took a long time to load; screen was loading white for about 60%, the switched to black loading theme for the remaining time. But, it worked.
- Due to it being on an HDD, and still not sure how much the post-patch does for graphics acceleration on this GPU (has it been resolved? or is it still crippled?), the system is rather slow on some tasks.
- Maps does not work
- Brightness keys do nothing (they show on screen the OSD, but it is not changing the brightness)
SOME TWEAKS:
I found a couple of sites mentioning which terminal commands can disable some extra animation options, and some debugging features that are not necessary (i think i would just spook an apple employee if he saw a crash report saying macbook 4,1 mojave 😛 )
Safari was too slow, so I am now using UR browser (works very well).
Thanks to this forum, and RMC for all their hard work!
Hello, I'm the RMC team leader and also the sold scripter for macOS Patcher. Thanks for sharing your experience. I'll try to answer some of your notes here.
- The volume listing issue is probably due to age of your OS. macOS Patcher has only ever been tested using a 10.14 Mojave (or 10.15 Catalina) machine as a host machine. I'm planning on improving support for older OSes in the future.
- The installer failing to boot is probably just a random issue and the estimates are always off. That's not a patcher issue at all.
- Since you're running on a hard drive, the OS runs very slow. I highly recommend an SSD (and 4GB of RAM to speed up application launch times). You were also entering the setup screen on a clean install which always talks longer even on supported machines.
- The graphics acceleration patches are only for other models. I patch all models equally except for the dual GPU patch, some AirPort patches, and of course all the MacBook4,1 specific patches. Graphics acceleration will never work on this machine.
- No idea about the Maps issue but that seems to be a particularly annoying app for graphical patch issues so it might just be a fluke.
- Brightness is in the same boat as acceleration, sleep and brightness control will never work either. I'd recommend checking out QuickShade in the App Store (Brightness Slider if you're running an older version) and Fermata on GitHub. The first app emulates brightness control by applying a filter on the screen. And the second one, keeps the machine awake to prevent it from freezing after trying to sleep. The lock screen functionality should still work but the backlight will always be on.
I'd like to shoutout another member of RMC,
@Larsvonhier. He was the first person to try Mojave on the MacBook4,1 and has been the main pioneer of the extensive patches for it. I basically just had a platform to include it on but his work is extremely indispensable in this effort. And thanks to him and
@dosdude1, I now have my own MacBook4,1 for testing.
