Hackintosh Is Dead, and That Is Fine. Using macOS Is Itself an Act of Promoting an Unfree System

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0800

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.

Hackintosh on Ivon's Blog

Hackintosh Is Dead, and That Is Fine. Using macOS Is Itself an Act of Promoting an Unfree System