Hackintosh is (kind of) dead.
Why use Hackintosh? Or rather, why use macOS?
Macbook and iPhone are prisons, yet users willingly accept Apple’s cage. It has even become fashionable, with people proudly identifying as Apple fans and forming commodity fetishism.
Borrowing what Richard Stallman said on RT, ordinary people were persuaded by Steve Jobs’s rhetoric. They feel Macbook is trendy and cool, and voluntarily run to the Apple Store saying, please put handcuffs on me!
Richard Stallman Talks About Free Software RT News (at 10:58)
Here we can add one sentence: engineers think Unix-based systems are convenient, so sacrificing freedom is fine. Give me a pair of handcuffs too! Look, I spent a lot of money buying overpriced handcuffs with my name engraved on them!
Worshiping Apple’s physical products is already exaggerated, but worshiping an OS is even more exaggerated. The Hackintosh community, formed to install macOS on hardware not officially sold by Apple, is a typical example.
In 2020, Apple began migrating toward the ARM architecture and gradually abandoned support for x86 Mac computers.
Combining Apple’s official information and media reports, macOS 26 should be the last macOS version to support the x86_64 architecture. In the future, even the highest-end iMac Pro, as long as it uses an Intel processor, will be unable to upgrade. From now on, only ARM-based Macs can be used.
So ordinary x86 computers will no longer have Hackintosh to play with. Hackintosh is (almost) dead. At least you cannot install the latest macOS. Although older macOS versions can still be installed on x86 hardware compatible with Hackintosh, mainstream software will slowly abandon support. At the current stage, the open source community’s effort to crack Apple Silicon has produced Asahi Linux, but macOS still cannot be installed on ARM devices not produced by Apple.
Actually, I think this is fine. Let people completely give up on Hackintosh. For more than 20 years, those running Hackintosh were essentially engaging in big-company bootlicking.
Let me tell a Hackintosh cold fact everyone knows: when installing Hackintosh, you usually need to add the following string to the bootloader to successfully decrypt the kernel and boot:
ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)applecomputerinc
This string is Dont Steal Mac OS.kext. Look how well they protect their own OS intellectual property! Running macOS on non-Apple-certified hardware is theft! And you actually want to cater to this company’s face?
The bootlickers here exclude those great people enthusiastic about making open source boot solutions, such as OpenCore and Clover. They have contributed a lot, studying the structure of macOS, writing piles of plist and kext files, making drivers not officially recognized by Apple run. Maybe they can truly help the open source community reverse engineer a completely free macOS someday. For example, ravynOS is a macOS-like system mixing the Darwin kernel with FreeBSD open source components. Its existence is somewhat similar to ReactOS, which reverse engineers Windows. Only using Hackintosh for this kind of research purpose is beneficial.
But I am mainly talking about the mentality of Hackintosh users. It is bootlicking, or perhaps calling them “apple” polishers is better? They satisfy their own vanity by cracking the things of a large company. But macOS remains closed source software, evil capital stealing the fruits of the BSD revolution. This is also BSD’s fault. Who told FreeBSD to use BSD license terms that make it easy to get cucked instead of the GPL? Pathetic.
On macOS, user freedom is controlled everywhere by Apple. Users are forced to use a crippled package manager like Homebrew, and also have to accept Apple’s planned obsolescence. When the time comes, the system can no longer be upgraded, even if the company claims, we have already supported it long enough.
If you crave macOS design aesthetics, clearly you can install the GNOME or KDE Plasma desktop on Linux and add some themes to achieve 80% of a similar graphical experience (see the White-Sur project). Yet you insist on making Hackintosh and willingly lock yourself in prison. It is truly baffling. If you have time to study this, you might as well think about how to run Linux on a toaster.
Taking a step back, even if you want to use commercial software, is installing the more broadly compatible Windows not better than Hackintosh? Although Windows is evil, at least it is still willing to give users the basic freedom to choose hardware, rather than having everything firmly controlled by one big-headed company.
What we should study more is installing Linux on unfree hardware, reverse engineering its drivers, and liberating users’ computers, not trying to spread an unfree system like macOS to more devices.
Even if macOS is Unix-based, it is still not worth recommending. It lost the hacker spirit of the 1980s long ago.
Therefore, porting Hackintosh and Windows on ARM is less valuable than Linux on everything, right? As for those awful companies that heavily modify Linux into Android-like walled-garden systems, they do not count.
Macbook and iPhone are prisons, yet users willingly accept Apple’s cage. It has even become fashionable, with people proudly identifying as Apple fans and forming commodity fetishism.
In 2011, after Apple’s Steve Jobs died, people from all walks of life published condolences, but Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman commented: “Good that he died.”
His original words on his personal blog were:
" Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. …… I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone. …Nobody deserves to have to die …… not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing. "
Rough translation:
“Steve Jobs, the personal computer pioneer who specialized in creating cool prisons for foolish users and stripping people of freedom, has died. ….. I am not happy about his death, but I am very glad he is gone. …… Nobody deserves to die…… even if the evil he did could not be repaid over several lifetimes. But in the end, we are all affected by Jobs’s malicious design for personal computers.”
There are many ways to interpret this sentence. One is that Richard Stallman deeply disapproved of the influence caused by Apple products, because Apple promotes proprietary software tied to Mac hardware, affecting the public’s preferences in choosing computer products. In addition, Apple products borrowed part of the achievements of BSD open source projects, yet turned the system into unfree software. This can be called an “enemy of free software.” Apple is no kinder than Microsoft, so it is not strange that Richard Stallman hates Apple so much. He is someone who insists on his beliefs to the end.
Now that Jobs has passed away, his influence has disappeared.
Then we saw the even greedier Tim Cook.
Apple’s control over users, like Microsoft and Google, only increases and never decreases. It is euphemistically called the Apple ecosystem, but in reality it traps users in an even deeper cage from which they cannot escape.
If you already have relatively free hardware (x86 has better compatibility than ARM), and also have free Linux and BSD operating systems to choose from, why lock yourself in the macOS prison?
