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There's hope that older Macs will be able to run macOS Ventura

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Older Macs not able to upgrade to macOS Ventura may be given a second lease on life, with a hack.

Expected to arrive this fall, macOS Ventura will provide Apple Silicon Macs with new features, while still providing services to Intel-based Macs. While a selection of Mac models cannot upgrade to macOS Ventura, there is a possibility that they could be upgraded in unofficial ways.

In a tweet posted on Monday, OpenCore Legacy Patcher project lead Mykola Grymalyuk revealed that there is hope for older Macs. After months of work, the team behind the project had managed to get macOS Ventura running on Macs with "legacy Metal GPUs."

A selection of screenshots posted by the developer show a beta of the operating system seemingly running on a 2008 Mac Pro, a 2012 Mac mini, a 2014 Mac mini, and a 2014 5K iMac.

OpenCore is a bootloader that is primarily used by enthusiasts to create their own Hackintoshes, namely PCs that run macOS. OpenCore Legacy Patcher follows the same logic, but applies it to allow older and officially unsupported Macs to run newer releases of macOS.

Achieving support for macOS Ventura on older systems could be a good sign for owners of legacy Apple hardware who want to continue using the newest versions of the operating system.

However, Grymalyuk warns that there is no time estimate for when mainline support for the demonstrated features will be introduced in the mainline version of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher.



27 Comments

sbdude 6 Years · 300 comments

I've got a MacBook Pro Retina Mid-2012 running 12.5.1 right now thanks to OpenCore. Pretty smooth as long as it's not using the intel graphics chip. Here's hoping for Ventura.

1 Like · 0 Dislikes
bobolicious 11 Years · 1188 comments

Does the EULA allow this ?  If not should it ?

I understand Apple may not be able to justify support + parts beyond 4 + 9 years, however would it be helpful if such could be possible via the 'community' given the shortened macOS cycles since 2011...?

And please slotted RAM, storage & GPU where possible, sigh...

1 Like · 0 Dislikes
zimmermann 10 Years · 350 comments

I’m running MacOS Catalina on my Mac Mini early 2009 thanks to The Dos Dude1. Slow but stable as hell. The little thing is 13 years old.

2 Likes · 0 Dislikes
bakerzdosen 17 Years · 186 comments

I debated putting an i7 in my 2015 27" iMac while it was open for an HDD->NVMe SSD swap, but decided against it because it was no longer supported beyond Monterey.

I'm starting to wonder if I should have just gone for it and used this - even if the jump to an i7-6700 really only gives you hyperthreading and *slightly* faster cores...

1 Like · 0 Dislikes
Pdybman 9 Years · 15 comments

JP234 said:
Mystifies me why anyone would want to do this. Running newer MacOS systems on Macs Apple classifies as "vintage" or "obsolete." They ALWAYS, and I mean always, run poorly, sometimes terribly. I worked for an Apple VAR as a service writer (what Apple calls a genius, but no way I'd make that claim), and we got many people who wanted us to restore their old OS, which Apple does not make easy for consumers. (We had the means, and we charged $129 for it.)

If you can't afford a new Mac, or iOS device, just keep the last authorized OS. If there's a feature you just must have, then bite the bullet and get a new model that can use it. Just a cautionary tale from someone who has seen what these hacks can do.

You are obviously unaware of the huge number of owners of the classical Mac Pro (last model mid-2012) that are able to run Monterey and Big Sur these days thanks to such enthusiasts and their workarounds!

4 Likes · 0 Dislikes