Old Macs can still get macOS Sonoma with a tool available in October

The OpenCore Legacy Patcher won't be offering day-one support for macOS Sonoma on older Macs, with support now expected to arrive on October 2.

Apple released macOS Sonoma on Tuesday, introducing a plethora of new features to Apple Silicon Mac and MacBook models. Users with older Macs expecting to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher will have a bit of a wait on their hands.

OpenCore Legacy Patcher is a bootloader that enables newer macOS releases to work on older Mac models that are not supported by the operating system. It allows unsupported Macs to enjoy the benefits and features of newer macOS releases, by injecting and patching data in memory instead of disk for a near-native user experience.

In a post on X on Monday, OpenCore Legacy Patcher project lead Mykola Grymalyuk gave the OpenCore community an update on the project. There wouldn't be a day-one release of the project that would support, and coincide with, Apple's release of macOS Sonoma.

Patch notes explains that the project now aims for an October 2 release instead. "Due to logistical challenges with receiving hardware for some of our developers, we don't want to rush a release to meet Sonoma," the note states.

"Instead we want to hold out and let them work at a less stressed pace."

Part of the reason is due to planning for Apple to release macOS Sonoma in October, with the note mentioning "Apple has set release a month early compared to the past few releases."

As part of the update, the project will be switching to a "proper major, minor, and bug fix system" for versioning. The October 2 release will be version 1.0.0.