How to Install macOS Sonoma on Unsupported Macs (Quick and Easy)

I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro that is technically unsupported for upgrading to somoma but that doesn't stop me I'm going to quickly upgrade this old friend to somoma and take you along for the ride we actually need to create our own installer so I'm going to grab a USB drive that is at least 15 GB and I'm just going to plug that into the side for now and then I'm going to open up um I'm going to open up Google Chrome but you could use Safari whatever browser you want and then we're just going to go and do a Google Search and we're going to search for open core Legacy Patcher and this is the right website but I will put a link in the description so from here we're just going to click on getting started and there's a few things that you can look at on this website if you'd like if you want to see if your system is supported you can click on this Mac OS Sonoma support link and it will talk about the versioning and kind of go through everything but you should be safe if your computer is a 2008 Mac computer or later but definitely if you're worried take a look here but once we're ready we're actually going to go over here to the download and build Mac OS installers and again there's a whole bunch of information here that you can read about how to do this but I'm showing you how to do it so we're just going to click on open core Legacy Patcher release apps and we're going to install the latest version you can see right now it's 1.0.1 but you can install whichever one is the latest for you so we're going to scroll down and if we go all the way to the bottom you'll notice that we have a group of assets and this is where we're going to find the package that we want to install so what the one that we want to grab is the open core Patcher GUI so we're just going to click on that and we'll go ahead and we will just save it to our desktop now we're going to double click to unzip it and now we'll double click to run the app we want to open it it's going to verify for security we might have to go into our settings and allow this app to open you know how you have to do on Mac a lot now we want to do a couple of different things here the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a Mac OS installer so let's click on create Mac OS installer and we're going to download a new one so we'll click on download now obviously we want n so here it is right here so let's go ahead and click on download now this might take a little bit of time so I'll go ahead and fast forward now you can see it's just validating the installer that will also take a little bit of time the download took about 4 minutes okay we need to go ahead and enter our administrator password now it's extracting the installer so now it's asking us if we want to create a Mac OS installer and yes we do we're going to select the installer it's the one we just downloaded it needs to have access we'll give it access we need to select our disk this is my USB drive the SanDisk Ultra we want to select our USB drive so if you have multiple drives plugged in just make sure you're selecting your USB and not like your time machine backup it wants to confirm letting us know that all data will be lost so definitely confirm now it's creating the installer administrator password again and this will take a few minutes we'll be back and I'll let you know how long it took okay so it finished and in the beginning it actually looked like it wasn't even progressing so just be patient it took about 15 minutes now we get a popup saying that it successfully created the installer and asking if we want to install open core to this disc and yes we do so we're going to click yes and it's going to go ahead and it's going to install it to our dis we can go ahead and hit install again now it's going to inst open cord this is what allows us to actually install an unsupported version of Mac OS so in this step you actually want to be careful we want to install the open core to our USB flash drive that we just installed somoma to the Sonoma installer so we click on that and then we can verify and it will go ahead and install open core we have to enter our password okay so it has finished installing open core and it's asking us to reboot and we do want to do that but before I do that I want to show you one thing when I reboot I'm going going to hold the option key so that is this key right here um once it restarts I'm going to click and I'm going to hold that key so I'm just going to hit reboot this is the option key again we're going to hit restart and then once it actually shuts down I'm just going to hold the option key until it comes back up with the bootable drives now I'm going to choose EFI Boot and then from here I'm going to choose install Mac OS somoma if we had chosen the initial install somoma option without choosing EFI boot it would have given us an error and then restarted our computer so we need to choose that EFI boot first that's an important step okay so you can see that we're presented with a few different options here on this screen sorry about the camera angle it's just so small now if you want to install somoma and retain all of your files you can choose that option that I have selected install Mac OS Sonoma now you should still have a backup in case something goes wrong but it should install somoma and you'll have all of your files left over but I actually want to erase my computer so I get an absolutely fresh install of somoma so I'm going to go into dis utility and from here I'm just going to select my Macintosh hard drive and I'm actually just going to go up here to erase and I can just call it the same thing I want to keep it as apfs that's the Apple file system so I'll just click erase now this might take a few minutes we'll be back okay so our file system has been erased so I'm just going to click on done and now I'm just going to hit the X here to back out of dis utility and now I'm going to click on install Mac OS Sonoma I should note if you are going to upgrade without wiping your computer you are going to need at least about I think 30 to 40 gab of space to install it initially so I'm going to click continue going to click continue again we need to agree to the software license agreement and now we need to select where we want to install Mac OS now we want to select our actual disk you can see I have you know 350 Gigs available but like I said you need about 30 to 40 to actually install it so now now we'll click continue and we've started the installation process it says about 21 minutes remaining I will be back when it's finished okay so it looks like the computer is now restarting that part was actually really fast it only took about 10 minutes maybe not even that it does say 29 minutes now in the meantime let's clean up this screen because all of this dust is really bothering me whoa that one also surprised me looked like it was going to take a really long time but it actually only took about 10 minutes and it's now restarting again so we'll see how long this takes this actually seems like it's going fast so let's see all right it restarted again and uh looks like I am now at the bootable drives oh it is selecting it for me we have another Apple logo that only took a few minutes that last load took about 2 to 3 minutes expecting this one to maybe be a quick just boot up but we'll see I now have a mouse in the top right left corner it's been about 30 seconds we've got yet another restart I'm not going to select a drive I'm going to see if it wants to Auto Select one for me there so there we go and now it looks like I have uh an progress bar it says 1% completed and we've got a very small apple loading bar I'm actually not used to seeing this loading bar maybe this is a Sonoma bar so we're already at about 6 7% so I'll be back when it finishes okay that particular restart took about 2 minutes with the progress bar let's go and see if it yep it's Auto booting again and I'm showing you all of this so that when you're doing this on your own you don't get nervous when you see it continuously restarting and loading it's going to do it multiple times we're installing a whole new operating system and we're doing it in a bit of an unconventional way so let's wait until it boots up again oo actually I'm back already because this one is moving fast and I think that we might get to some sort of setup screen bada bing bada boom that is a setup screen if if I have ever seen one let's go ahead and let's get it set up just getting it connected to my Wi-Fi we're going to set up a new computer account since I did an erase before installing this woohoo we're at a desktop and let's check it out we're going to have to wait a few minutes when you in install an OS um in this way it takes a little bit of time and we're going to wait for a popup to come up from the Patcher that we used so we're just going to hang tight for a minute but this is a great sign we are in Sonoma on my 2013 MacBook Pro we've now waited a minute here and we got a popup saying that instead of having to use this USB drive every time we can install open core right on the computer which is exactly what we'd like to do so you'll notice that it kind of starts unpacking it and we can now select install to disk and so we actually want to select our hard drive so not the USB drive and so on our main hard drive we want to install it into the EFI this dis zero so we'll select that one go ahead and enter our password notice that we need to reboot to apply the settings let's go ahead and do it and see how fast it reboots restart okay didn't take too long but we weren't installing some things so let's go ahead and log in all right we are in so now let's click on the Apple menu here go to about this Mac and how awesome is this you can see that I am now running somoma 14.0 if I click on more info and this is actually popping up for us again because we still have our USB drive uh connected to the computer so if I hit cancel here and I just take out this flash drive then that won't pop up again for us but again you you can see that uh here I am on my MacBook Pro you can tell by looking at the processor specs right there and so there you have it that's how you can upgrade an unsupported Mac to Mac OS Sonoma if I had chosen to just do the upgrade and not actually erase my entire hard drive all of my files and folders would still be available on my computer speaking of files and folders if you want to know the absolute most efficient ways to find files and folders on your Mac computer don't forget to check out this video right here if you found the video that you're watching helpful I would really appreciate a thumbs up here on YouTube if you want to see more content like this don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel I hope you enjoy using somoma that's all I have for you for today I'm Anson Alexander and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Anson Alexander

Views: 48,799

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Id: D8djeFJ1czU

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 19 2023