Apple may be done with Intel Macs, but Hackintoshes can still use the latest processors

Apple hasn’t stopped selling Intel Macs yet, but it’s safe to say we’ll never see a Mac with one of Intel’s 12th Generation Core processors. But this little detail doesn’t stop the Hackintosh community from supporting new Intel and AMD processors and platforms. The developers behind OpenCore, the most powerful and actively maintained bootloader for loading macOS on standard PC hardware, improved its support for Alder Lake in this month’s release, version 0.7.7. In a blog post Over the weekend, the developers also detailed their efforts to update OpenCore and its associated software to work with Intel’s Z690 chipset.

The key to building a functioning Hackintosh is normally to build a PC as close as possible to the actual Intel Mac hardware, most importantly, the CPU, GPU, and chipset. OpenCore’s job is to bridge the gap that remains between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS starts up and runs smoothly. It adds support for playing and booting macOS file systems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system’s audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs the hardware to take advantage of built-in macOS support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that’s similar but not quite the same as a GPU included in a real Intel Mac).

As OpenCore has grown and matured, it has improved to fill the growing gaps between PC hardware and “real” Macs. It can get older versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) old material, and it can even be used for run new versions of macOS on real Macs that Apple has ditched from the official support list. It can even run macOS on AMD processors, although with a few caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality. the Hackintosh Reddit community still active is full of people running macOS on all kinds of different hardware.

It’s that kind of flexibility that will allow macOS to run on 12th generation Intel processors and the Z690 chipset. That said, running macOS on newer hardware isn’t for the faint of heart, and some things just won’t work. Trying to use the new 12th generation processor efficiency cores (or electronic cores) can also cause general slowdowns, as macOS doesn’t know how to best distribute the work between the different types of cores. Intel’s “Thread Director” technology, which must be integrated into your operating system for best performance.

GPUs from 11th and 12th gen Intel processors will also not work in Hackintoshes as they have never been supported in real Macs, so you will have to rely on a dedicated AMD GPU to handle the display output and other tasks (in real Intel Macs, even iMacs and MacBook Pros with dedicated GPUs still use the built-in Intel GPUs for encoding and decoding videos and photos). Apple is still adding support for newer AMD GPUs in macOS versions, presumably so these cards can work in the Mac Pro – the Radeon RX 6900, 6800, and RX 6600 XT series are all supported – but Apple could easily decide. to stop supporting the newer ones. GPU when he wants. And Nvidia GPUs are not supported at all.

While I don’t actually recommend running out and buying the parts for a Hackintosh at this point, the ability of OpenCore and its developers to run macOS on all manner of x86 hardware is a remarkable technical achievement. The process could (and probably will be) more difficult to maintain as Intel’s hardware moves further away from what Apple uses in real Intel Macs. And once Apple decides to stop supporting its Intel Macs altogether, it’s extremely unlikely that macOS will be able to run directly on non-Apple, Intel, or whatever hardware. But at least for now, the Hackintosh community is still going strong, and your Hackintosh 2022 doesn’t need to be stuck with 2020 hardware if you don’t want to.