Hackintosh
[1] This is due to the software license for macOS only permitting its use on in-house hardware built by Apple itself, in this case the Mac line.
From that transition to the early 2020s transition to Apple silicon, Mac computers used the same x86 computer architecture as many other desktop PCs, laptops, and servers, meaning that in principle, the code making up macOS systems and software can be run on alternative platforms with minimal compatibility issues.
[3] Commercial circumvention of the methods Apple uses to prevent macOS from being installed on non-Apple hardware is restricted in the United States under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),[4] but specific changes to the law regarding the concept of jailbreaking[5] have placed circumvention methods like these into a legal grey area.
Benefits of "Hackintoshing" can include cost (older, cheaper or commodity hardware), ease of repair and piecemeal upgrade, and freedom to use customized choices of components that are not available (or not available together) in the branded Apple products.
[14] In 1989 an emulator called A-Max was released for the Amiga that allowed users to run Mac OS on that platform.
To solve this problem, hackers from the community released kernels where those instructions were emulated with SSE2 equivalents, although this produced a performance penalty.
A prominent member of the community, JaS, released many distros of Mac OS X Tiger containing patched kernels.
[citation needed] As early as Mac OS X v10.5 build 9A466 the community has maintained a version of Leopard that can run on non-Apple hardware.
The OSx86 community has been quick to make the necessary modifications to enable Apple's latest releases to run on non-Apple hardware.
Within hours of Leopard's release, an AMD/Intel SSE2/3 Kernel Patcher was created that removed the HPET requirement from an original untouched mach_kernel file, a core component of the Mac OS.
As soon as possible modbin and dmitrik released test versions of kernel that allow to boot Snow Leopard on AMD machines.
The method consists of deploying Mac OS X v10.7 image on a flash drive, and booting from it via XPC UEFI Bootloader (See DUET below).
Since the retail release of Mountain Lion several users have reported successful setups using installers purchased from the Mac App Store, along with updated versions of Chameleon and other tools including distros.
Some time later, Niresh (an independent OSx86 developer) released a standalone tool known as Yosemite Zone, based on Tora Chi, Bronya and DeeKay's AMD Kernel, which would automatically install the new OS and other various features on a non-Apple device with minimal input.
This method consisted of torrenting an OS X 10.10 DMG onto a USB flash drive with MacPwn Vanilla Installation.
[12] Some new features of macOS Monterey, such as a 3D globe of Earth in Maps and text-to-speech in additional languages, work only on Apple silicon processors.
After announcing its switch to Intel's chips, the company used technical means (although not the Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, as has been widely misreported[60]) to tie macOS to the systems it distributed to developers.
"[64] The legal brief revealed that Apple considers the methods that it uses to prevent macOS from being installed on non-Apple hardware to be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
[4][65] On January 14, 2009, the Gadget Lab site of Wired Magazine posted a video tutorial for installing Mac OS X on an MSI Wind netbook, but removed it following a complaint from Apple.
The court ruled that Psystar had "violated Apple's exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works",[68] putting an end to the case.
Rosetta, a binary translator that made it possible to run PowerPC programs on Intel processors (and later the kernel itself), required the support of the SSE3 instruction set.
To circumvent this, programmers in the community released patched kernels, which included support for emulating SSE3 instructions using SSE2 equivalents.
When Mac OS X Leopard released on October 26, 2007, patches were created to remove the HPET requirement from the kernel.
[73] In practical terms, this meant that regular PCs meeting a set of hardware requirements could now be "seen" as real Macintosh computers by the OS, allowing the use of unmodified, "stock" Apple kernels (as long as the CPU supports it) and thus giving more transparent and reliable operation.
Previous efforts based upon Apple's open source Darwin Project and Hackintosh gurus allowed users to use macOS on normal PCs, with patched kernels/kernel modules that simply bypassed EFI.
This method also circumvents one aspect of Apple's End User License Agreement, which states that the modification of non-Open Source components of the OS is forbidden.
As of 2011, EFI-based computers have entered the market, however none can natively boot Mac OS X due to the lack of a HFS+ driver in the EFI implementation.
[80] Clover is a GUI bootloader for multiple operating systems that supports either UEFI or the legacy BIOS mode.
One more step was needed to load macOS systems: an EFI application to rectify these problems and bridge the gap.
It offers to run macOS through the motherboard's UEFI rom, and doesn't need additional drive space for the bootloader.
