Developers make strides to get macOS Ventura to work on unsupported decade-old Macs

Enlarge / OpenCore Legacy Patcher maintainer Mykola Grymalyuk has macOS Ventura running on Macs as old as the 2008 Mac Pro tower. Mykola Grymalyuk

Bypassing official macOS system requirements to run new versions of the software on older, unsupported Macs has a rich history. Tools like XPostFacto and LeopardAssist could help older PowerPC Macs run newer versions of Mac OS X, a tradition kept alive in the modern age by dosdude1's patches for Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina.

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For Big Sur and Monterey, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP for short) is the best way to run new versions of macOS on older Macs. It's an offshoot of the OpenCore Hackintosh bootloader, and it's updated fairly frequently with new features and fixes and compatibility for new versions of macOS. The developers at OCLP have admitted that supporting macOS Ventura will be difficult, but they've made progress in some crucial areas that should keep some older Macs running a little longer.

How is Ventura different?

For the past few years, the hardware differences between "supported" and "unsupported" Macs could be so small that the only thing you had to do to boot new versions of macOS was trick the bootloader into tricking it into thinking it was running on a slightly newer Mac. But this approach has become more difficult as Apple increasingly removes Intel Mac support from macOS.

OCLP and dosdude1 patches can usually rely on some older but officially supported models to extend support to unsupported Macs with similar hardware. In macOS Monterey, for example, Apple officially dropped support for many Mac models from 2012, 2013, and 2014 that used Intel's 3rd generation (Ivy Bridge) and 4th generation (Haswell) processors. But because Monterey continued to support the Ivy Bridge-powered 2013 Mac Pro and the Haswell-powered 2014 Mac mini, the operating system retained some level of base support for those processors (and the hardware GPU and accompanying chipset) which made it easier to get Monterey. running on other Macs with the same chips.

Ventura is different. It doesn't officially support any Intel processors older than 7th Gen ("Kaby Lake"), and Apple actually did a lot of cleanup behind the scenes to remove drivers and other OS components that Macs with older processors relied. This includes GPU drivers for older Intel and AMD GPUs, the last vestiges of native Nvidia GPU driver support from macOS, USB support for many older models, support for non-Force trackpads Touch, drivers for Intel Ethernet controllers, etc.

And the changes go beyond the drivers. Apple also removed support for older x86 processors that do not support the AVX2 instruction set, preventing the operating system from booting at all on processors without these instructions. AVX2 was introduced in Haswell processors, which adds another hurdle for anyone hoping to run Ventura on something older.

Apple has also changed the Metal render stack in a way that makes it incompatible with Monterey-era drivers for older GPU hardware (this apparently has nothing to do with Metal 3 updates; Ventura officially supports many Macs that are only compatible with Metal 2). If you add the old drivers back, you get basic display output without graphics acceleration. The full list of hurdles developers will need to overcome to run Ventura on unsupported Macs is listed in the OpenCore Legacy Patcher Github repository.

Signs of progress

After several months of work, we finally managed to run macOS Ventura...