9 ms·

OpenCore Legacy Patcher – Use new macOS versions on old hardware

205 points by frereubu 4y ago

Chernobog 4y ago
I highly appreciate the effort that goes into this! The only pity is that I need VMware Fusion and it seems to be broken in the patched Ventura with no fix in sight. Stuck on Catalina for now on my 2012 rMBP.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
Datapoint: I upgraded a min-2012 MacBook Pro to Monterey using this approach and it performs reasonably well for basic use. I also swapped the hdd for an ssd and maxed the memory to 16gb.
- alexott 4y ago
  Did you reinstall OS, or it works as upgrade?
  - jray 4y ago
    I upgraded from Catalina to Big Sur (without formatting), and then used Onyx to clear all the caches on my Mac. It works perfectly. Mac mini 2012, 16gb ram, 512 ssd. https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    > Did you reinstall OS, or it works as upgrade? I reinstalled thr os from clean when I swapped-out the storage, so unfortunately I can't comment on the upgrade path. The machine periodically prompts me to upgrade to Ventura - which I keep declining as Monterrey is fine for my purposes[1] at the moment - so it's obviously happy to do an upgrade. [1] Running Visual Studio for Mac to build .net apps for MacOS
- TMWNN 4y ago
  I did the same (upgrade from Catalina) and had no problems. I only bought an Apple Silicon MacBook because the mid-2012's hinge got too loose to keep the display upright. Yes, the new computer is significantly faster, but I could have lived with the older one. So, three cheers for OCLP! PS - the mid-2012 is now a backup, so is still useful.
hs86 4y ago
Catalina was the last supported OS for my 2012 MBA, and the following Big Sur upgrade worked well with OCLP because it only had to patch in WiFi support during the boot process. After that, macOS Monterey also dropped support for my Ivy Bridge GPU, and OCLP had to rely on persistent patches to my system volume to enable 3D acceleration again. These root patches caused some weird issues with 3D acceleration in certain apps, and driver-related regressions introducted by some later Catalina patches took longer to be fixed in OCLP than in the still supported Catalina release. I think macOS Ventura is the end of the road for macOS on my Mac. The OS now relies on AVX2 binaries, and the OCLP devs made some magic hacks to circumvent that requirement. Still, the OS now feels unreliable, and while I did not see hard crashes or errors, subtile breakage only disappeared, when I rebooted the system every few hours. The macOS 13.3 update also broke my GPU driver again for a few weeks, and I finally gave up on it. This old Mac now runs Ubuntu LTS without any issues. The battery life is at least equal, it boots faster, and the OS does not immdiately use half of my 8 GiB RAM for itself. There is also less swapping, and while not perfect, it feels more reliable than Ventura or Monterey. While I was not happy with these issues on macOS, it was still amazing to see how this group of volunteers enabled newer macOS releases on my device. macOS on Intel is dying, but if you have a pre-T2 Mac, you might be surprised by how well Linux might work on it.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  Does the T2 break Linux somehow?
  - hs86 4y ago
    https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/ https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/ Before these T2 chips, Intel Macs were very close to regular PC hardware. That's why I suspected better Linux support on those older models. The list of still open issues on that wiki seems to confirm this.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    Yes. The T2 is in charge of a lot, keyboard/trackpad input on laptops, the SSD, etc. To get keyboard/trackpad input working you need a custom kernel as drivers still aren't in the mainline kernel.
badkitty99 4y ago
[dead]
thangngoc89 4y ago
I've recently upgraded MBP mid-2012 to Monterey and it works really well. Except for the permission to use Automation/Microphone/Webcam in TCC. The app installation process doesn't add itself to the TCC database so I have to add it manually via SQLite cli. However, I wasn't able to add permission for Google Chrome to use Microphone and Webcam despite the same process works for Skype/Zoom and other applications.
j1elo 4y ago
The fact that simply patching the O.S. can be enough to make it work on older hardware is a testament on how Apple could make it work on it too, if they wanted, and without much effort. Which in my book reads as an artificial way to cut support for otherwise perfectly working machines. Forcing people to upgrade, buy more hardware, and discard the older one, even when they wouldn't otherwise have needed to do it (like when it isn't really crawling and too slow for your needs). Doesn't matter the years, if your 10-12 years old computer still works fine for you, and the needed changes for them are just a couple of driver adjustments, I don't buy the justification for not doing so. This doesn't feel like "well the gap between how our new software and old hardware work is so big that it isn't even remotely practical to keep them together any more". But more like "well we toggled a boolean and now your're out". So long for reducing the amount of e-waste in our polluted world!
- goosedragons 4y ago
  They've been doing this for a while. MacOS Tiger included "Built-in FireWire ports" as a system requirement which led to some weird things like the 2000 366MHz iBook and the 1999 B&W 300MHz PowerMac G3 being supported but not the 2000 350MHz iMac G3.
  - drewzero1 4y ago
    The frustrating part was that the requirement was only checked by the installer, so you could put the drive in a supported machine[0] to install, then swap it back and it would run fine. I think there was a similar thing with a processor speed check on Leopard[1]. There were also third-party workarounds if you didn't have access to a supported Mac. I had a friend who always had the latest and greatest, so I borrowed his machines to upgrade my last-year's-models. 0: https://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051211074138859 https://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200512110741388... 1: https://lowendmac.com/2007/unsupported-os-x-10-5-leopard-installation/ https://lowendmac.com/2007/unsupported-os-x-10-5-leopard-ins...
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Supporting old hardware costs money because you need to write more tests. Of course there aren't technical limitations for any but the lowest specced Macs. Things have changed the past few years but for a while upgrades to CPU performance weren't that meaningful between generations. A CPU that's over ten years old will still perform fine for light desktop use, because that's honestly all you need in most cases. All you need is a RAM upgrade and an SSD! There are some specific Mac downsides for using older models (the insufficient cooling solution in some laptop models, for example) that will impact long term usability, but the hardware still has a ways to go. With how much performance you can get out of an older laptop that cost a third of a Mac from the same era by installing an OS like Linux, it's a shame that Apple is abandoning these devices. The same is true for many smartphones; all the modern advancements are nice to haves, very different from the turbulent smartphone era around the late 00s. Apple needs to sell hardware to make the money needed to fund development but they exclusively focus on very expensive high-end devices, which naturally have a very long life span if it weren't for the software. I wouldn't be surprised if the higher end M1 Macs still be perfectly usable around the time when the 2k38 bug will wreak havoc across the world.
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
I have a 2015 iMac, that I spec'ed up as a custom build from Apple, so annoying they don't reconize the power of these machines still and cut support. I have an 4ghz i7, 32gb ram and a Radeon 395x graphics card, but support is cut. The machine still runs beautifully on Monterey, so I am hesitant to use the OpenCore legacy patcher, but may have to one day if apps i use drop support. I love my iMac, but in future, I think i shall need to got he Mac Mini + Monitor route, Mac minis are reasonably cheap and i wouldn't feel so annoyed ditching my machine when it still works well.
- rafaelturk 4y ago
  That's exactly my step, beautiful iMac, however I'm stuck with some GPU issues #108 how did you managed to get it to work?
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  I mean, you have an 8-year old computer. What did you realistically expect would happen here? For Apple to support your computer until the end of time even if you’re the only person using that model? In the tech world, 8 years is already practically a lifetime. At a certain point, it’s no longer profitable for a company to continue supporting old systems. And that rarely has to do with power and almost entirely due to it being 8-year old devices with practically no remaining user base.
  - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
    It's a computer I paid over £3,000 for, that got cut off 7 years after release for no valid reason as a customer. Yes I understand what you are saying, but there is no need for it, Operating systems didn't require suddenly more powerful computers, years ago it made sense because the machine just couldn't handle it, but today my machine handles everything just fine and is higher spec than machines Apple has determined can run it. You make it sound like it's some crazy high cost for Apple to do this, yet this small open source project seems to be able to do it and for them it would be much more difficult. In terms of Apple's support, it's been awful, they provided one set of bootcamp drivers for the graphics card a year after release and even that was out of date when it was released, therefore I have to get the gfx card drivers from a third party.
rafaelturk 4y ago
This is amazing! however for my iMac there are still some issues like the GPU Acceleration in Public Beta, see current issue #108. Hopefully someone will finish this issue, I have no ideia how to code this GPU issue.
pcdoodle 4y ago
Awesome! This keeps macs out the trash and people with less means to buy their first mac.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  Someone buying their first Mac is probably not aware of OCLP. Depending on the hardware, OCLP might not provide a stable or a good experience. Better to buy a newer and still supported Windows PC.
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    It's usually someone you know that does this for you. I've put 10.14 on some 27" iMacs from 2009 that have been rock solid for those I gave them too.
hdudbdiebsu 4y ago
this almost fell like a twilight zone episode. if in the 90s you've told me that pocket computers would have the os locked by company G and a rag-tag team of 14yr olds would work on forums to extract binary blobs and manually patch syscalls addresses so the old drivers work on newer phones, just so you can install the later version of a still closed OS... and that the practice would eventually move to the computers of the competing company... i would have laughed but not in a funny haha way, like you do on most good twilight zone episodes. sad times we live in.
newman314 4y ago
Has anyone figured out how to move a system previously using dosdude1's patcher to OpenCore without having to reinstall? Faced with having to do this with a MBP 2009
josephcsible 4y ago
Given that it's possible for this tool to work, doesn't that mean Apple's choice to not officially allow the installation of new operating systems on these old computers had zero technical merit? What reason other than greed did Apple have for making that decision then? And how does "we're arbitrarily restricting what your old but still functional computer can do, so that you'll throw it away and buy a new one" square with caring about the environment?
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Because Engineeering is about trade offs from a business level, not just about technical ones. The support costs with older systems go up because the number of users decreases because you have to keep spare parts around for those old machines. That’s what Apple support is. If it’s not a supported model, they’re not going to do any hardware repairs for you period. Tying software and hardware that way isn’t a terrible decision to make from Apple’s perspective. Customer’s also have to pick - do I want to continue in the ecosystem or so I get out. Apple doesn’t want users getting disgruntled because their QA is no longer testing software running on older hardware. Also Apple doesn’t deprecate things by dropping support suddenly. That wouldn’t be great UX. They wait for that to happen naturally over time and, when the number of users is sufficiently small enough past some point AND they want to make a technical break, they start stopping to support a model. I think it’s valuable to compare alternatives. Apple supports their software and hardware much much better than any competitor AFAIK. For example, iPhones have a guaranteed support level of five years iirc and often it can go even older despite engineers on the ground wanting to deprecate things faster because of the maintenance costs (eg dropping 32-bit macOS support went on longer than line engineers were happy with). Competitors? Google does 3 years of upgrades on their flagship phones and laptops and 5 years of security updates if I recall correctly. That’s why I’d say the framing is wrong. If anything Apple is a leader in figuring out how to provide the best support I’m the industry by vertically integrating everything (other SW vendors often can have one of forks for every product which makes it quicker to launch something but economically limits how long those support operations can last. Google tried several architectural efforts to stabilize this situation for Android but as I said they still haven’t managed this for their own hardware - they maybe solved it at the OS level but firmware still has security flaws so if a vendor (often the chip vendor, not the oem) stops making updates (they do frequently and definitely don’t go out of their way to unify their software stack - they want planned obsolescence more than OEMs), you’re SOL. Apple is a tad bit better insulated from this since they have a stronger negotiating hand with partners / have vertically integrated a lot of components in house which lowers support costs / complexity. Still, they’re not fully immune to it because those pressures are multifaceted and complex. So to answer your question, sure it’s not strict technical merit write now but that’s too myopic. It’s a signaling mechanism to customers that “we are not doing any work to validate software we write works on old machines”. Lots of things to criticize Apple about, but best in class support in the commercial space doesn’t feel like the best place. I could be wrong though.
sheepscreek 4y ago
This is fantastic! I am thrilled this initiative exists. Just yesterday I was on my MacBook Pro 13 from 2013 when it hit me. My laptop was 10 years old and running no different as it did back then.
gigel82 4y ago
I have 3 high-specced trashcans (Mac Pro 2013 with 12/24 cores and 32Gb RAM) that we were using as build agents at work and they were decommissioned after Ventura dropped support. Frankly, they struggle in desktop use with Monterey so I was considering just installing Linux on them and using them as servers (but they're not great as always-on machines for home since the power usage never drops below 130W even when completely idle).
sarojmoh1 4y ago
My 2012 Air is still my main computer. Started regressing around 2018. Was slow for a while until I patched it with Monterey. Ventura is running even better. Still tough for dev (especially iOS dev)..but it's certainly salvageable. Hoping to buy a new pro within next year
mjsweet 4y ago
I possess a 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro, which I handed down to my son for his use. Regrettably, he is unable to participate in the shared photo library, as it is exclusively supported by the Ventura version of Photos. The laptop presently operates on Monterey, its final supported version. Consequently, we plan to upgrade later today with the assistance of OpenCore. This is a fantastic project that will allow us to maintain the use of shared features in macOS across all our family's devices, regardless of the age of the machines and Apple support for them.
ivraatiems 4y ago
I'm typing this from a 2011 iMac (3.4ghz, 4-core i7, 8GB RAM, AMD 6700 series GPU) on which I've just installed Mac OS Ventura using OpenCore. It's working great. Performance is not distinguishable from the performance of the same system on High Sierra, so far. The process was also pretty easy, it walked me through every step. Just highlights how absurd it is that these systems aren't still supported.
- cglong 4y ago
  Does your iMac have an SSD? Mine doesn't, and I'm wondering if that would cause more issues.
  - ivraatiems 4y ago
    It has one, which I installed aftermarket, but I think you'd be fine with an HDD once things got going.
villgax 4y ago
Happily using Ventura on 2015 MacBook Air, just need a battery replacement & this is good as new with upgraded 1TB Samsung 970 PRO SSD as well
frereubu 4y ago
I know this has been posted before, but I just managed to use this on my daughter's inherited MacBook air from 2014, and was able to get MacOS Ventura working seamlessly on it. This was important for me because the previous version of MacOS she was stuck on didn't allow the use of shared iCloud storage, so I couldn't sync her Photos library with the Optimize Storage option and free up disk space (it "only" has a 120GB hard drive). Once I'd updated I was able to do that and lengthen the life of her laptop by quite a bit - it's getting on for ten years old now.
- flatiron 4y ago
  How well does it perform? I have a MacBook Air 2013 that I run Arch on but I miss all the apple ecosystem stuff. I can’t imagine it runs as well as Linux which runs great.
  - maxxam 4y ago
    Works pretty well for me on a 2012 Mac mini. It’s maxed out though with i7 and 16GB. I don’t feel performances are worst than with the latest official macOS version.
  - frereubu 4y ago
    It's pretty seamless. There are occasional small lags when starting apps, and the fans do spin up when playing Minecraft Java edition and there are lots of creatures nearby (we also had to kill off a bunch to stop it lagging really badly when there were something like 200 creatures of a type that follow you about), but it feels like it's got a good few years in it yet. Apple apps like Photos and Mail etc feel pretty responsive. For reference the Air has a 1.4GHz Dul-Core Intel Core i5, 4GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM and Intel HD Graphics 5000 1536MB. I've got an M1 Max Macbook Pro with 64GB of memory, so it's up against some tough competition!

205 points by frereubu 4y ago

I highly appreciate the effort that goes into this! The only pity is that I need VMware Fusion and it seems to be broken in the patched Ventura with no fix in sight. Stuck on Catalina for now on my 2012 rMBP.

andyjohnson0 4y ago

Datapoint: I upgraded a min-2012 MacBook Pro to Monterey using this approach and it performs reasonably well for basic use. I also swapped the hdd for an ssd and maxed the memory to 16gb.

alexott 4y ago
Did you reinstall OS, or it works as upgrade?
- jray 4y ago
  I upgraded from Catalina to Big Sur (without formatting), and then used Onyx to clear all the caches on my Mac. It works perfectly. Mac mini 2012, 16gb ram, 512 ssd. https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  > Did you reinstall OS, or it works as upgrade? I reinstalled thr os from clean when I swapped-out the storage, so unfortunately I can't comment on the upgrade path. The machine periodically prompts me to upgrade to Ventura - which I keep declining as Monterrey is fine for my purposes[1] at the moment - so it's obviously happy to do an upgrade. [1] Running Visual Studio for Mac to build .net apps for MacOS
TMWNN 4y ago
I did the same (upgrade from Catalina) and had no problems. I only bought an Apple Silicon MacBook because the mid-2012's hinge got too loose to keep the display upright. Yes, the new computer is significantly faster, but I could have lived with the older one. So, three cheers for OCLP! PS - the mid-2012 is now a backup, so is still useful.

hs86 4y ago

Catalina was the last supported OS for my 2012 MBA, and the following Big Sur upgrade worked well with OCLP because it only had to patch in WiFi support during the boot process. After that, macOS Monterey also dropped support for my Ivy Bridge GPU, and OCLP had to rely on persistent patches to my system volume to enable 3D acceleration again. These root patches caused some weird issues with 3D acceleration in certain apps, and driver-related regressions introducted by some later Catalina patches took longer to be fixed in OCLP than in the still supported Catalina release. I think macOS Ventura is the end of the road for macOS on my Mac. The OS now relies on AVX2 binaries, and the OCLP devs made some magic hacks to circumvent that requirement. Still, the OS now feels unreliable, and while I did not see hard crashes or errors, subtile breakage only disappeared, when I rebooted the system every few hours. The macOS 13.3 update also broke my GPU driver again for a few weeks, and I finally gave up on it. This old Mac now runs Ubuntu LTS without any issues. The battery life is at least equal, it boots faster, and the OS does not immdiately use half of my 8 GiB RAM for itself. There is also less swapping, and while not perfect, it feels more reliable than Ventura or Monterey. While I was not happy with these issues on macOS, it was still amazing to see how this group of volunteers enabled newer macOS releases on my device. macOS on Intel is dying, but if you have a pre-T2 Mac, you might be surprised by how well Linux might work on it.

dividedbyzero 4y ago
Does the T2 break Linux somehow?
- hs86 4y ago
  https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/ https://wiki.t2linux.org/state/ Before these T2 chips, Intel Macs were very close to regular PC hardware. That's why I suspected better Linux support on those older models. The list of still open issues on that wiki seems to confirm this.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  Yes. The T2 is in charge of a lot, keyboard/trackpad input on laptops, the SSD, etc. To get keyboard/trackpad input working you need a custom kernel as drivers still aren't in the mainline kernel.

badkitty99 4y ago

[dead]

thangngoc89 4y ago

I've recently upgraded MBP mid-2012 to Monterey and it works really well. Except for the permission to use Automation/Microphone/Webcam in TCC. The app installation process doesn't add itself to the TCC database so I have to add it manually via SQLite cli. However, I wasn't able to add permission for Google Chrome to use Microphone and Webcam despite the same process works for Skype/Zoom and other applications.

j1elo 4y ago

The fact that simply patching the O.S. can be enough to make it work on older hardware is a testament on how Apple could make it work on it too, if they wanted, and without much effort. Which in my book reads as an artificial way to cut support for otherwise perfectly working machines. Forcing people to upgrade, buy more hardware, and discard the older one, even when they wouldn't otherwise have needed to do it (like when it isn't really crawling and too slow for your needs). Doesn't matter the years, if your 10-12 years old computer still works fine for you, and the needed changes for them are just a couple of driver adjustments, I don't buy the justification for not doing so. This doesn't feel like "well the gap between how our new software and old hardware work is so big that it isn't even remotely practical to keep them together any more". But more like "well we toggled a boolean and now your're out". So long for reducing the amount of e-waste in our polluted world!

goosedragons 4y ago
They've been doing this for a while. MacOS Tiger included "Built-in FireWire ports" as a system requirement which led to some weird things like the 2000 366MHz iBook and the 1999 B&W 300MHz PowerMac G3 being supported but not the 2000 350MHz iMac G3.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  The frustrating part was that the requirement was only checked by the installer, so you could put the drive in a supported machine[0] to install, then swap it back and it would run fine. I think there was a similar thing with a processor speed check on Leopard[1]. There were also third-party workarounds if you didn't have access to a supported Mac. I had a friend who always had the latest and greatest, so I borrowed his machines to upgrade my last-year's-models. 0: https://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20051211074138859 https://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200512110741388... 1: https://lowendmac.com/2007/unsupported-os-x-10-5-leopard-installation/ https://lowendmac.com/2007/unsupported-os-x-10-5-leopard-ins...
jeroenhd 4y ago
Supporting old hardware costs money because you need to write more tests. Of course there aren't technical limitations for any but the lowest specced Macs. Things have changed the past few years but for a while upgrades to CPU performance weren't that meaningful between generations. A CPU that's over ten years old will still perform fine for light desktop use, because that's honestly all you need in most cases. All you need is a RAM upgrade and an SSD! There are some specific Mac downsides for using older models (the insufficient cooling solution in some laptop models, for example) that will impact long term usability, but the hardware still has a ways to go. With how much performance you can get out of an older laptop that cost a third of a Mac from the same era by installing an OS like Linux, it's a shame that Apple is abandoning these devices. The same is true for many smartphones; all the modern advancements are nice to haves, very different from the turbulent smartphone era around the late 00s. Apple needs to sell hardware to make the money needed to fund development but they exclusively focus on very expensive high-end devices, which naturally have a very long life span if it weren't for the software. I wouldn't be surprised if the higher end M1 Macs still be perfectly usable around the time when the 2k38 bug will wreak havoc across the world.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

I have a 2015 iMac, that I spec'ed up as a custom build from Apple, so annoying they don't reconize the power of these machines still and cut support. I have an 4ghz i7, 32gb ram and a Radeon 395x graphics card, but support is cut. The machine still runs beautifully on Monterey, so I am hesitant to use the OpenCore legacy patcher, but may have to one day if apps i use drop support. I love my iMac, but in future, I think i shall need to got he Mac Mini + Monitor route, Mac minis are reasonably cheap and i wouldn't feel so annoyed ditching my machine when it still works well.

rafaelturk 4y ago
That's exactly my step, beautiful iMac, however I'm stuck with some GPU issues #108 how did you managed to get it to work?
mynameisvlad 4y ago
I mean, you have an 8-year old computer. What did you realistically expect would happen here? For Apple to support your computer until the end of time even if you’re the only person using that model? In the tech world, 8 years is already practically a lifetime. At a certain point, it’s no longer profitable for a company to continue supporting old systems. And that rarely has to do with power and almost entirely due to it being 8-year old devices with practically no remaining user base.
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  It's a computer I paid over £3,000 for, that got cut off 7 years after release for no valid reason as a customer. Yes I understand what you are saying, but there is no need for it, Operating systems didn't require suddenly more powerful computers, years ago it made sense because the machine just couldn't handle it, but today my machine handles everything just fine and is higher spec than machines Apple has determined can run it. You make it sound like it's some crazy high cost for Apple to do this, yet this small open source project seems to be able to do it and for them it would be much more difficult. In terms of Apple's support, it's been awful, they provided one set of bootcamp drivers for the graphics card a year after release and even that was out of date when it was released, therefore I have to get the gfx card drivers from a third party.

rafaelturk 4y ago

This is amazing! however for my iMac there are still some issues like the GPU Acceleration in Public Beta, see current issue #108. Hopefully someone will finish this issue, I have no ideia how to code this GPU issue.

pcdoodle 4y ago

Awesome! This keeps macs out the trash and people with less means to buy their first mac.

Kwpolska 4y ago
Someone buying their first Mac is probably not aware of OCLP. Depending on the hardware, OCLP might not provide a stable or a good experience. Better to buy a newer and still supported Windows PC.
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  It's usually someone you know that does this for you. I've put 10.14 on some 27" iMacs from 2009 that have been rock solid for those I gave them too.

hdudbdiebsu 4y ago

this almost fell like a twilight zone episode. if in the 90s you've told me that pocket computers would have the os locked by company G and a rag-tag team of 14yr olds would work on forums to extract binary blobs and manually patch syscalls addresses so the old drivers work on newer phones, just so you can install the later version of a still closed OS... and that the practice would eventually move to the computers of the competing company... i would have laughed but not in a funny haha way, like you do on most good twilight zone episodes. sad times we live in.

newman314 4y ago

Has anyone figured out how to move a system previously using dosdude1's patcher to OpenCore without having to reinstall? Faced with having to do this with a MBP 2009

josephcsible 4y ago

Given that it's possible for this tool to work, doesn't that mean Apple's choice to not officially allow the installation of new operating systems on these old computers had zero technical merit? What reason other than greed did Apple have for making that decision then? And how does "we're arbitrarily restricting what your old but still functional computer can do, so that you'll throw it away and buy a new one" square with caring about the environment?

vlovich123 4y ago
Because Engineeering is about trade offs from a business level, not just about technical ones. The support costs with older systems go up because the number of users decreases because you have to keep spare parts around for those old machines. That’s what Apple support is. If it’s not a supported model, they’re not going to do any hardware repairs for you period. Tying software and hardware that way isn’t a terrible decision to make from Apple’s perspective. Customer’s also have to pick - do I want to continue in the ecosystem or so I get out. Apple doesn’t want users getting disgruntled because their QA is no longer testing software running on older hardware. Also Apple doesn’t deprecate things by dropping support suddenly. That wouldn’t be great UX. They wait for that to happen naturally over time and, when the number of users is sufficiently small enough past some point AND they want to make a technical break, they start stopping to support a model. I think it’s valuable to compare alternatives. Apple supports their software and hardware much much better than any competitor AFAIK. For example, iPhones have a guaranteed support level of five years iirc and often it can go even older despite engineers on the ground wanting to deprecate things faster because of the maintenance costs (eg dropping 32-bit macOS support went on longer than line engineers were happy with). Competitors? Google does 3 years of upgrades on their flagship phones and laptops and 5 years of security updates if I recall correctly. That’s why I’d say the framing is wrong. If anything Apple is a leader in figuring out how to provide the best support I’m the industry by vertically integrating everything (other SW vendors often can have one of forks for every product which makes it quicker to launch something but economically limits how long those support operations can last. Google tried several architectural efforts to stabilize this situation for Android but as I said they still haven’t managed this for their own hardware - they maybe solved it at the OS level but firmware still has security flaws so if a vendor (often the chip vendor, not the oem) stops making updates (they do frequently and definitely don’t go out of their way to unify their software stack - they want planned obsolescence more than OEMs), you’re SOL. Apple is a tad bit better insulated from this since they have a stronger negotiating hand with partners / have vertically integrated a lot of components in house which lowers support costs / complexity. Still, they’re not fully immune to it because those pressures are multifaceted and complex. So to answer your question, sure it’s not strict technical merit write now but that’s too myopic. It’s a signaling mechanism to customers that “we are not doing any work to validate software we write works on old machines”. Lots of things to criticize Apple about, but best in class support in the commercial space doesn’t feel like the best place. I could be wrong though.

sheepscreek 4y ago

This is fantastic! I am thrilled this initiative exists. Just yesterday I was on my MacBook Pro 13 from 2013 when it hit me. My laptop was 10 years old and running no different as it did back then.

gigel82 4y ago

I have 3 high-specced trashcans (Mac Pro 2013 with 12/24 cores and 32Gb RAM) that we were using as build agents at work and they were decommissioned after Ventura dropped support. Frankly, they struggle in desktop use with Monterey so I was considering just installing Linux on them and using them as servers (but they're not great as always-on machines for home since the power usage never drops below 130W even when completely idle).

sarojmoh1 4y ago

My 2012 Air is still my main computer. Started regressing around 2018. Was slow for a while until I patched it with Monterey. Ventura is running even better. Still tough for dev (especially iOS dev)..but it's certainly salvageable. Hoping to buy a new pro within next year

mjsweet 4y ago

I possess a 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro, which I handed down to my son for his use. Regrettably, he is unable to participate in the shared photo library, as it is exclusively supported by the Ventura version of Photos. The laptop presently operates on Monterey, its final supported version. Consequently, we plan to upgrade later today with the assistance of OpenCore. This is a fantastic project that will allow us to maintain the use of shared features in macOS across all our family's devices, regardless of the age of the machines and Apple support for them.

ivraatiems 4y ago

I'm typing this from a 2011 iMac (3.4ghz, 4-core i7, 8GB RAM, AMD 6700 series GPU) on which I've just installed Mac OS Ventura using OpenCore. It's working great. Performance is not distinguishable from the performance of the same system on High Sierra, so far. The process was also pretty easy, it walked me through every step. Just highlights how absurd it is that these systems aren't still supported.

cglong 4y ago
Does your iMac have an SSD? Mine doesn't, and I'm wondering if that would cause more issues.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  It has one, which I installed aftermarket, but I think you'd be fine with an HDD once things got going.

villgax 4y ago

Happily using Ventura on 2015 MacBook Air, just need a battery replacement & this is good as new with upgraded 1TB Samsung 970 PRO SSD as well

frereubu 4y ago

I know this has been posted before, but I just managed to use this on my daughter's inherited MacBook air from 2014, and was able to get MacOS Ventura working seamlessly on it. This was important for me because the previous version of MacOS she was stuck on didn't allow the use of shared iCloud storage, so I couldn't sync her Photos library with the Optimize Storage option and free up disk space (it "only" has a 120GB hard drive). Once I'd updated I was able to do that and lengthen the life of her laptop by quite a bit - it's getting on for ten years old now.

flatiron 4y ago
How well does it perform? I have a MacBook Air 2013 that I run Arch on but I miss all the apple ecosystem stuff. I can’t imagine it runs as well as Linux which runs great.
- maxxam 4y ago
  Works pretty well for me on a 2012 Mac mini. It’s maxed out though with i7 and 16GB. I don’t feel performances are worst than with the latest official macOS version.
- frereubu 4y ago
  It's pretty seamless. There are occasional small lags when starting apps, and the fans do spin up when playing Minecraft Java edition and there are lots of creatures nearby (we also had to kill off a bunch to stop it lagging really badly when there were something like 200 creatures of a type that follow you about), but it feels like it's got a good few years in it yet. Apple apps like Photos and Mail etc feel pretty responsive. For reference the Air has a 1.4GHz Dul-Core Intel Core i5, 4GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM and Intel HD Graphics 5000 1536MB. I've got an M1 Max Macbook Pro with 64GB of memory, so it's up against some tough competition!