What do you think Hackintosh will be like in the future?

[SevenTheAppleKitty]

20 years after Apple switched to Intel (and almost 5 years after the switch to Apple Silicon!), Apple has confirmed that MacOS 26 Tahoe will be the last version of MacOS to support Intel Macs. This will impact Hackintoshing as this means intel Macs (or hacks) will no longer receive major OS releases, and older OS releases don't get updates forever!).

I keep seeing differing opinions on what the future of Hackintoshing may entail, some more enthusiastic than others. I'd actually like to see what people think, so here's both opinions I've seen a lot, as well as my own.

 

1. Hackintoshing will just die off

This isn't particularly enthusiastic, but I can see why. Silicon Macs are ARM, and unless there's some ARM revolution on the PC side, x86 will remain the top. Unless some people want to decompile OS X and port it, which might be too much work just to keep a niche hobby working, on a (to be honest, inferior) architecture.

 

2. Hackintoshing will live, via emulation

Assuming people bother working on it, they could get a working emulation layer for Silicon MacOS. This could mean that while the OS is no longer running natively, It's still MacOS on a PC, so a Hackintosh is a Hackintosh, regardless of how it's set up.

 

3. Hackintoshing will live, as a retro hobby

Every architecture on old Macs has a group of people dedicated to keeping it usable, regardless if it's 68k or PowerPC, so why can't the same apply to intel? Intel Macs could receive their own group of dedicated people, and Hackintosh computers are intel, so any software developed for Intel Macs will most likely help Hackintoshes too!

 

I personally believe hackintoshing will live, regardless of which option happens. feel free to discuss in the replies.

[verdazil]

1. No

2. No

3. Yes

[surenmunoo]

I think some will just use a VM software to emulate macOS in their windows machines once support stops for Intel Macs completely.