Dedicated and enthusiastic, the hackers in the Hackintosh community may soon find themselves with their mouths in water. The developments made on macOS make the use of the system almost impossible on unofficial machines.
If you were at all interested in the world of computing at the turn of the 2000s/2010s, there is a chance that you have heard of Hackintoshes, these hacked machines with components recovered from left to right to run macOS on computers not designed for that. You may have even built one using a screwdriver and a command line. Unfortunately, this era is coming to an end.
Pilots who fall stranded
As noted by the specialized site 9to5Mac, Aleksandar Vacić (long-time Hackintosh community expert) published a blog post announcing the very likely death of the Hackintosh movement in the coming years. Since the switch of Macs to an ARM architecture rather than Intel, more and more components necessary for the proper functioning of Hackintoshes are being retired by Apple.
In the latest version of its OS, macOS 14 “Sonoma”, Apple has stopped supporting drivers for many Wifi and Bluetooth network cards. Result, unless you embark on miles of tutorial which will in the process weaken the security of your machine, it becomes more and more difficult to take advantage of a Hackintosh with a functional wireless network connection. A shelving of the drivers necessary to support Ethernet connections has also been implemented since macOS Ventura.
iMessage, Facetime and others are HS
Even while cobbling together a shaky solution to connect his machine to the Internet, Aleksandar Vacić explains that many of Apple’s services (iMessage, FaceTime, Airdrop) no longer work, or work poorly, on the latest versions of macOS installed on Hackintoshes. One more difficulty for the survival of these machines in the long term. Maintaining such a machine has never exactly been advised to the general public, but now even the most die-hard Internet users seem to spend more time debugging their machines than using them.
A state of affairs which pushes Aleksandar Vacić to affirm that “the Hackintoshes are on their deathbeds» due to the “lack of reliability and the impossibility of knowing with each update if the system is not going to collapse“. The machines running macOS Ventura should continue to work for a few more years, but ultimately it seems that the Hackintosh adventure is coming to an end and that the best way to run macOS is now, quite simply, to buy a Mac. The most DIY enthusiasts can always try to install Linux on it.
1599€
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- More power, “improved” SSD and ray-tracing supported
- Heating better controlled than before
- Support for two external displays now
Without showing it much, the MacBook Air 15 is making progress. The installation on board of the new M3 chip allows both a substantial performance gain, but also and above all reduced heating compared to last year’s model.
Apple has also improved the transfer speeds of its SSD on the base configuration, while now allowing us to support two external displays instead of just one previously. Small steps, certainly, but which go in the right direction and which we would be wrong not to appreciate, even if we would have liked to find them, last year, directly on the initial model.
Overall, the MacBook Air 15 remains one of the best 15-inch laptops to date. It combines excellent display quality, solid performance, and still impressive battery life… and all in complete silence.
We regret, however, that Apple did not take advantage of this new version to increase the amount of RAM and storage offered by the most “affordable” configuration of the product. At 1,600 euros starting price, we have the right to want more.
Without showing it much, the MacBook Air 15 is making progress. The installation on board of the new M3 chip allows both a substantial performance gain, but also and above all reduced heating compared to last year’s model.
Apple has also improved the transfer speeds of its SSD on the base configuration, while now allowing us to support two external displays instead of just one previously. Small steps, certainly, but which go in the right direction and which we would be wrong not to appreciate, even if we would have liked to find them, last year, directly on the initial model.
Overall, the MacBook Air 15 remains one of the best 15-inch laptops to date. It combines excellent display quality, solid performance, and still impressive battery life… and all in complete silence.
We regret, however, that Apple did not take advantage of this new version to increase the amount of RAM and storage offered by the most “affordable” configuration of the product. At 1,600 euros starting price, we have the right to want more.
Source: aplus.rs via 9to5Mac
Apple MacBook Air M3 15 inch
laptop
release date: first quarter 2024
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