Almost a decade ago, I released a hackintosh guide on operating macOS 10.14 through a VM alongside an x86 host. A "Hackintosh" is the feat of operating macOS on non-Apple hardware, and has a former courtship rear to the delayed 1980s. At the period KVM and PCI passthrough were comparatively new technologies, and this guide provided near-native achievement alongside GPU acceleration.
A few years passed by, and we saw Apple publish the archetypal ARM-based Mac in 2021, the M1 MacBook Air. The timing was impeccable, Intel was unable to create rivalrous processors (due to being stuck on the 14nm node), and Apple had mighty and productive ARM chips already being shipped in their iPhones. The lengthy power division life, the fanless design, the instant wake, what's not to like? The benefits of switching to ARM were clear, nevertheless to most, this was idea to be the final division in the hackintosh community. x86 versions of macOS would shortly be discontinued, and the hackintosh community would gradually diminish away. That day has arrive and the latest type of macOS 27 (Golden Gate) released this twelvemonth is no longer compatible alongside x86...
Just a few days ago, I decided to create an iOS app for the archetypal time. It required XCode 26 for development, so I used my spare ThinkPad T490 as my betterment device and installed macOS 26 using a posted guide. The facility was gentle and painless. XCode 26 has integrations alongside Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, and this was my archetypal foray into AI-assisted coding. After several first tinkering alongside x86 workarounds, I was pleased that I had a functional iOS app inside a day, without touching a sole row of code!
So how does this all tie in? Well, this is exactly what the Hackintosh community could barely envision five years ago: the increase of AI. Waiting patiently and gently until now, the hackintosh and the hackios community has seen an complete detonation in development, activity, and achievement in the former few weeks! As one individual aptly wrote, this is the power of Claude Code alongside Ghidra on steroids. Just to catalog a few latest developments, we have:
macOS 27 operating on the Snapdragon Laptop:
macOS 27.2 Beta on an ARM SBC RK3588 alongside Mali drivers:
iOS 17 operating on the Nintendo Switch OLED:
Support for 50-series Nvidia GPUs alongside nullmoth:
I'm barely scratching the surface, alongside additional developments in AirDrop, accelerated video decode, and equal operating translated macOS 27 on x86. As much as we lament the disbursal of AI, there are several glimmers of hope: you fair power be capable to have your hardware and own it too.
