Why building a Hackintosh in 2023 is a bad idea

Apple’s ecosystem and reliable software suite have enticed users worldwide, leading to the development of Hackintosh systems. Simply put, a Hackintosh is a computer capable of running Apple’s proprietary macOS operating system on unsupported hardware. For all intents and purposes, these are absolutely not authorized by Apple and exist in a legally grey area.

Regardless, this has not stopped modders from creating some of the most powerful macOS systems. However, recent trends may result in a gradual decline of these systems, ultimately making them undesirable and/or irrelevant.

Read on to learn why Hackintoshes are slowly becoming obsolete as a result of hardware transitions. We have also listed an alternative method that delivers a complete macOS experience without depending on the hardware in question.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the author’s opinions.

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Most people should stray away from building a Hackintosh

Building a Hackintosh is no easy endeavor. It requires intricate knowledge of building PCs as well as an understanding of the macOS operating system. Furthermore, with modern methods such as the OpenCore bootloader, this build requires a robust library of skills and patience, which is simply too demanding for the average user.

To make matters worse, macOS is very specific about the type of hardware it supports - with most PC components being largely unsupported out of the box. While workarounds such as Kexts (kernel extensions) exist, they require expertise that can be considered too high-level for entry-level users.

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Apple’s shift toward Arm-based architecture will be a major obstacle for future builds

Starting with the M1 chip, Apple has gradually moved on to discontinue the x86_64 CPU architecture in favor of arm-based builds. The news was a major blow to the community, who are now simply surviving on borrowed time (given most builds utilize x86_64 builds).

Due to the difference in architecture, macOS builds in the future will not support Hackintoshes, making building such a machine largely a waste of time and effort. While older versions such as Big Sur are still used, newer version updates (and consequently, newer versions of software) will remain locked outside of official Apple silicon.

Finally, Apple’s recent updates have entirely dropped support for a wide range of previously supported hardware. A notorious example of this would be the complete lack of driver support for Nvidia cards, making them unusable on modern macOS builds. Building a Hackintosh requires a very specific set of hardware and that list is expected to become smaller with time.

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Virtual Machines are the future

All is not lost, and there is a way to run macOS on any system. Virtual machines utilizing the QEMU backend under Linux will most likely be our best bet against the decline of Hackintoshes.

While being relatively difficult to set up and create, QEMU-based macOS VMs can reach near-native performance, especially with gpu-passthrough. These systems work like any normal macOS system would - except for running in a virtual environment under a Linux operating system of choice.

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If anything, the community has shown time and time again its brilliance under pressure, and I firmly believe that there will be a way to circumvent these issues.