“Hackintosh is (almost) dead,” proclaims a new blog post from Aleksandar Vacić, who lays at least some of the blame at the feet of Apple’s transitioning its Mac lineup from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon System on a Chip.
Vacić says Apple has “completely removed all traces of driver support” for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, which is key to Hackintosh support.
In Sonoma, Apple has completely removed all traces of driver support for their oldest WiFi/Bt cards, namely various Broadcom cards that they last used in 2012/13 iMac / MacBook models. Those Mac models are not supported by macOS for few years now thus it’s not surprising the drivers are being removed. Most likely reason is that Apple is moving drivers away from .kext (Kernel Extensions) to .dext (DriverKit) thus cleaning up obsolete and unused code from macOS. They did the same with Ethernet drivers in Ventura.
Vacić says the cards were “the key ingredient to many fully functional Hackintosh builds,” since they worked “out of the box” with iMessage, AirDrop, Continuity, FaceTime, and more.
So, “Hackintosh is on its deathbed” for many people:
Hence — Hackintosh is on its death bed. Some things will work for few more months or maybe even years, depending on what you use it for and wether lack of WiFi bothers you or not. But not for me. I can live without AirDrop, Continuity and Handoff but Messages and FaceTime must work. There’re also some other things Sonoma brings that are important to me thus I want to update to it. Coupled with described lack of reliability and fretting if next minor or major update would leave me dry — nah, not worth it.
The full blog post from Vacić is a worthwhile read.
(Via 9to5Mac)