Im currently going through a variety of Operating Systems to see which would suit me best as I have been using Windows my entire life. I have tested out a few linuxes but I was interested to test out MacOS. I’ve seen videos of people booting MacOS on non-apple devices so I was interested in attempting to boot that OS onto here. My question was would it work or would the framework laptop run into any issues?
The problem with running macOS on an Intel computer is eventually you won’t get any more updates. Apple is using their M1 CPU now, so they won’t be doing much more than maintaining the current versions of macOS that run on Macbooks that are still supported.
For the price, you might as well just buy a Macbook if you want to run macOS.
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Short answer, no
Long answer, maybe, but not in a usable way. Making it work somewhat decently would probably take more work than just customizing linux from scratch.
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Shamelessly linking my own comment:
https://community.frame.work/t/hakintosh-big-sur-opencore/3029/2?u=cowpod
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Real short answer
yes, but it will be unusably slow without an eGPU
Real long answer
There are already a pair examples of hackintoshes installed on Tiger Lake cpus (spoofing coffee lake cpus). None of them feature working video acceleration and as others have stated, there is unlikely to be any video acceleration until Apple releases a machine w/ an Iris XE graphics chipset (this is increasingly unlikely as they push forward with M1).
Assuming thunderbolt works, it should still be possible to use the laptop with an eGPU, AMD video card, and a newer version of OSX (11.4+) to achieve an experince with video acceleration, however this be an expensive non-portable solution and you’d likely want to dual boot into Windows or Linux on the go.
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Do xeons have iGPU’s? Because the Mac Pro is supposed to receive an update to Tiger Lake cpus
the xeon models ending in “5” appear to have an igpu; I think the Mac Pro has had models ending in “0”.
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Install Linux. Preferably Ubuntu. Then install a snap called Sosumi. That will automate install and setting up Mac OS Catanlina in a VM . That is about the easiest, and as mentioned, that is the last update you will get.
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Mac Pros wouldn’t get Tiger Lake’s they’d get a desktop class CPU without the power constraints (speed limits) of a mobile chip.
Only Mac Books and Mac Minis would be canidates, Mac Minis won’t ever get one, your best bet is maybe a Mac Book Pro refresh for business / developers or something, but if it doesn’t come with this falls update, which is unlikely, it ain’t coming at all.
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Hi there!
I am courently running my MacBook Air, and my new laptop will be the frame.work. In a matter of interest and nerdness I wanted to ask you, the community if you think we could do an Hacintosh out of the framework.
I now the advantage of Linux but I am so used to the Mac!
(Its Probably just 10.15 with Catalina but woud be nice to).
Greetings and have nice day!
Johannes T.
Edit: spelling (I no there are more mistakes XD)
This question has been asked a few times. Basically the easiest way for you to run Mac OS on it is to install Ubuntu and then install a snap called sosumi. You’ll get Catalina I think. That works and works well.
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Tanks for the answer!
I thought there are some difficulties with some Wifi-cards an so on!
If I ever get a frame.work, I will try it out 
Greetings and thx!
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From the looks of it Sosumi installs it inside of a VM, not bare metal, which is why things like the WiFi would likely work.
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@speckledsea
But that woud mean that you lose a far bit of performance. I would think like 5-15% if you VM it…
But Thanks buddy!
You’ve already lost 20% or more of your battery life running macOS on non certified hardware, not sure why the minimal VM overhead concerns you?
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@Ethan_Spoelstra
Thanks for the reply, didn’t now, that it would lower the battery life that much!
Have a nice day!
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To run native you need to swap the wireless card at the very least.
Another thing that would be challenging is I don’t know if Apple has released any Thunderbolt 4 devices so there probably isn’t a kext available for those, I’m around it you might get charging via USB-C I’m not sure what else would work.
That’s why running in a KVM/VMware virtual machine is pretty much required at this point.
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I was able to get it running in qemu successfully. The install of Catalina was actually faster than I expected and it worked acceptably for browsing, etc.
Unfortunately, the two graphics apps I really wanted to use do not because they require Metal graphics which was not supported by the virtual graphics card. I’m by no means a qemu expert so if anyone has some magic up their sleeve for getting the graphics aspect to work, I’m all ears.
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Whilst ostensibly about MacOS, the OP apparently is open to recommendations as to different OS they can try. Whilst MacOS may not be an option at present, others to consider might be:
- Haiku. Successor to BeOS. Unlike GNU/Linux, it is being built as an integrated whole (like commercial OS) so provides a more consistent user experience. Many are already using it as their quotidian OS, although the browser offering is still weak. I also doubt it works yet with the thunderbolt expansion ports on Framework. Interestingly, their RISC-V port is going very well (as is ARM), so may be one of the first out the blocks when Framework offer motherboards based on these instruction sets.
- BSD (various sorts). Another type of Unix, so not too different to Linux, although many people now prefer it.
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I’d also look at https://elementary.io/. It bills itself as a “Windows and MacOS replacement”, based on Ubuntu. If you’re looking for the feel of MacOS, this would be a good place to start. It may not be new enough to come with drivers for the wireless card, though, so it may require a bit of additional work. YMMV.
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