Installing macOS on a Microsoft laptop

foreign for years the only way to get Mac OS on powerful Hardware without selling a kidney if you're not familiar with them when Apple transitioned to using Intel CPUs there was immediate interest in whether this would make it possible to run Mac OS on a generic x86 PC as it turns out Intel Max did indeed have a lot in common with them and it didn't take long for the community to smooth over the remaining differences while Apple did take measures towards preventing Mac OS from running on generic Hardware they weren't particularly tough measures and for the most part they kept a pretty hands-off approach to the whole thing and to be honest it's not hard to see why hackintoshes were hardly the it just works experience that people usually want when they buy a Mac it's not I'm not kidding Mac OS might run beautifully on the few bits of Hardware apple offers but the moment you step outside that it's essentially the wild west hackintoshes are Infamous for braking over time usually through software updates but also sometimes seemingly at random making them a generally unwise choice for any kind of daily driver that you need to do real work on Apple recognized that as long as no one was selling and supporting easy pre-built computers and they do make sure no one does a couple of nerds hacking together their own as a hobby hardly threaten their business in fact it could even promote it as I know a lot of former Hackintosh users ended up liking it so much they eventually just bought a real max so they wouldn't have to deal with any more issues however with the right Hardware obviously the closer it is to a Mac the better and with patience care and a little bit of luck you can have an experience more or less identical to a real Mac for a fraction of the cost often this does require you to build the PC yourself with parts hand-picked that are known to work well with Mac OS this also requires you to accept the fact that you've probably built a pretty decent gaming PC as a result that can't play games because it's running Mac OS but apart from that it is very much doable except not for much longer with apple now transitioning away from Intel CPUs and towards their own hackintosh's days are very much numbered even if arm processors gain more popularity in the PC World since Apple designs their own chips in-house and they're already known to have extra undocumented instructions it's basically guaranteed that Mac OS won't be compatible with just any armed CPU now this isn't necessarily a bad thing like I said a lot of people Hackintosh just to get better performance for the money and the Apple silicon has been a lot better in that regard so the move I think makes a lot of sense for them and I'm sure killing hackettosh is a nice cherry on the top now I've been on and off hackintoshes for about 15 years now my first one was in 2007. it looked like this and ran Good Old Mac OS 10 tiger and Laser leopard I still miss this era of the mac and yes I listened to many Emo songs and iTunes on it [Music] it was 2007 what can I say but while we still can I've wanted to Showcase some of the more interesting things that we can only do because the Mac used Intel processors last year I installed quite possibly the greatest version of Windows ever made on an iMac this year I'm doing the opposite now that Microsoft makes their own Hardware in the form of the surface I figured it was only fair some people do in fact call these the MacBooks of the PC World both in a positive and negative sense they are often not very repairable the ram is soldered to the board but they have a great screen great touch pad and look sleek and stylish if that's what you're into Apple might have been perfectly fine helping Windows run on the Mac but I don't think they'll be quite so happy with what I'm going to do today that's right we're installing Mac OS on a Microsoft laptop just to make Steve Jobs rolling his grave once more who the hell is Steve Jobs lick my balls here's our subject the surface laptop 3. currently this has Windows 11 installed on it but nobody wants that let's get that off of there once again hackintoshing is a very your mileage will vary sort of thing even variations of the same computer can produce wildly different results this very surface laptop also comes in a ryzen configuration that will absolutely not run Hackintosh as such you shouldn't follow this as a tutorial because chances are you'll need to do very different things on your end to figure out what those things are I recommend dortania's open core and store guide which I'll link in the description it's extremely long and detailed and it has to be because it's trying to cover an effectively infinite amount of Hardware configurations but it's by far the most helpful resource I've found in my years of hackintoshing but even with that this will be a long trial and error process expect to spend a while setting it up just for it to not work just to go back and make some changes just for it to throw some kind of cryptic error that no one else has ever seen before now I'm using big surf for this and you might be wondering why when as of this video it's already over two years old well at the time I started this video Monterey was and I think to an extent still is considered riskier since it introduced a lot of new issues and the brand new Ventura was still very much in beta so Big Sur seemed like the least problematic Choice eventually I had the installer booting everything was super small because this is a high DPI screen but we can force a retina resolution later on otherwise it looks pretty good some pretty common trouble spots like full resolution and Wi-Fi were working first try which was particularly cool in the case of the Wi-Fi this computer has an Intel Wi-Fi chip which for years has been a sore spot of hackadosh because despite how common they are in PCS no Mac has ever shipped with Intel Wi-Fi so no driver has ever been approved by Apple in true Apple fashion they also never publicly documented the Wi-Fi driver apis making it extremely challenging for the community to Port one from Linux or FreeBSD but about two years ago someone finally managed to get one working yes it made its first stable release just after Apple announced they were killing Hackintosh altogether but it still made a huge difference in the world of Hackintosh laptops now the more observant among you may notice that the installer is in Russian Russian happens to be where the config is set to by default and the guide does explain clearly how to change it but in my haste I just missed it despite having done this several times before but there were some much bigger issues that needed to be dealt with okay so trackpad doesn't work kind of expected that no keyboard kind of expected that yeah I was so excited about the Wi-Fi working that I forgot to mention we can't even use this thing yet why did I kind of expect this well with a desktop computer everything is usually pretty standard your peripherals are probably all regular USB if you have Intel Wi-Fi it's probably not a big deal to replace it or at least add in an extra card and if there's some custom component on the motherboard that doesn't quite work it's probably not the end of the world on laptops it's a very different story a lot more critical elements are often controlled by custom Hardware whether it's relatively non-critical things like detecting the lid closing or reporting how much battery life is left to absolutely crucial infrastructure like what protocol it uses to connect the keyboard and mouse this is where the long process of trial and error begins figuring out what Hardware is in your computer what community drivers you might need or if they even exist in the first place is a let's say Adventure sometimes Mac OS might actually support the hardware natively but you need to spoof its ID or provide some other connective tissue to get it to pick it up and for the most part you don't know exactly what you're in for until you've already gotten started if it sounds tedious that's because it is and if you want to get into hackintoshing it's something you'll need to get used to I tried plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse just so I could try continuing the installer but they didn't work either after some tweaking I managed to surprisingly get Bluetooth to pick up but when I tried to pair it with a Microsoft ergonomic Bluetooth mouse yeah we're going all Microsoft Hardware today it didn't seem to pick up I should mention that it's common for laptops to connect their keyboard and trackpads through Ye Old PS2 which is significant because Apple never supported PS2 there is a text and I did try it but this laptop is using something else something called i2c which I have no real familiarity with but thankfully I didn't have to because I soon discovered something very interesting a community made text called Big surface it's an all-in-one kicks designed to get several things working when using Mac OS on a Microsoft Surface how convenient the pun is explained in the readme Big Sur the then most recent version of Mac OS and Sir first oh brother this guy stinks fall indeed PS if you have a better name please let me know well I don't see how that's possible how can you improve on Perfection lack of naming confidence aside it actually helped a lot just adding that got the keyboard and mouse working meaning we could finally proceed with the installation as advertised it also got the battery indicator working which is always nice and it probably fixed several other things that I didn't even notice were broken before and so we were off and running installing Mac OS on a Microsoft laptop dogs and cats living together Mass hysteria enough I get the point [Music] the Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for creating a beautiful and professional looking website with no hassle if you're looking to start a business blog online store or really any kind of web presence 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text made specifically for this computer that's almost never the case and this process could have easily been more challenging than it was when you think about it it actually kind of makes sense why Apple never severely cracked down on Hackintosh if you're in their Target demographic I.E creative professionals or people who want something that just works the last thing you want to do is any of this despite how technically close their computers were to PCS Apple maintained enough control over their ecosystem that even though anyone could build their own Mac most average users still prefer to pay the premium it could be said that Mac OS has the worst Hardware compatibility of any desktop OS in the world but it could also be said that that's kind of Apple's whole business strategy even this laptop is teetering on the edge of Hackintosh compatibility it has a 10th Generation Intel CPU which coincidentally is the last generation Apple has and probably will ever ship if you have an 11th gen Intel CPU it can work if you spoof the CPU IDs but if you're stuck with the integrated graphics on that CPU there is nothing that you can do no one has ever ridden a driver for Intel 11th gen graphics and without Apple's explicit permission no one ever will so if this laptop was literally any newer this project wouldn't be possible at all Hackintosh is already dying even while apple is still selling Intel based products anyway the installer managed to finish with no problems but when I tried the boot into the OS it kernel panics cool actually I just missed another part of the tutorial I had to set some kernel parameters to set some things related to Intel Graphics they're specific to this generation of Intel GPU so I guess I accidentally glossed over them but hey now it's working sort of always sort of when it comes to setting up a Hackintosh the mouse no longer seemed to be working but then I realized it was I just couldn't see it very well it was glitched to hell but as it turns out this is a fairly common issue with Intel gpus on Hackintosh you have to patch the frame buffer using the whatever green patching guide I'll be honest I read through a sizable chunk of this and never figured out exactly what it was doing but it did get the cursor to appear so I call that a win but I noticed pretty quickly some other graphical issues every now and then the whole screen would flicker or parts of it would glitch out it's minor ish it's not like it prevents me from using it but I definitely want to try to fix that but let's handle some more important things first like the tiny DPI actually I guess the issue is there's too much DPI but you know what I mean thankfully there are plenty of tools out there designed just for this purpose they create a fake profile of your display where you can specify whatever resolutions you want and use it to override the os's built-in one but now if I open system preferences I have a new set of resolutions ready to go including this monitor's native resolution at 2x DPI just like I retina display look at that that is absolutely beautiful I actually really like the surface's 3x2 aspect ratio screen there's so much more room for productivity than a standard 16x9 and while MacBooks are a little bigger at 16x10 3x2 just feels right to me then again the MacBook screen is a 10 bit which is also nice anyways one issue down several more to go firstly there's no sound which is not uncommon in Hackintosh thankfully Apple wasn't nearly as stingy about their audio driver documentation so there are plenty of community drivers out there it's just a matter of finding the right one this laptop uses a very common real Tech ALC sound card which has had a text for several years now all we have to do is figure out what layout ID to use there are a lot of them but you can narrow them down if you know exactly what model you have for this I ended up booting into Linux which told me it was an ALC 274 as you can see that gives us a short list of IDs it could be so off I went trying them all interestingly the first two I tried the microphone worked but while it thought it had an output nothing was actually coming out however the third one I tried for reference ID number 35 worked like a charm as soon as I heard the sound of an Apple device being charged on boot I knew the sound was good to go issue with the trackpad for the most part it was working really well Mac OS had picked it up with full gesture and multi-touch support I'm guessing thanks to Big Surfers again and in many ways it felt like a genuine MacBook touchpad at least before they moved to haptic clicking but there was something kind of odd if I tried to do a hard click tapping was fine but hard clicking seemed to right click and it didn't matter where or how I did it it always seemed to happen but guess what turns out this isn't a right click at all it's a force click I barely remember this was even a thing for those who don't know Apple briefly had a feature where if you pressed harder on a touchable surface it would perform a different action this first started on the Apple watch but soon permeated to the iPhones and MacBooks where no one really used them and they were eventually quietly discontinued turns out this trackpad was so convincing that Mac OS assumed it did support Force touch and when it got a binary on off click signal it assumed on meant pushed as hard as possible so it did a force click while there's probably an elegant way to tell Mac OS that this trackpad doesn't support Force touch I decided it would be much simpler to just turn it off in the settings after all it's not like I'd be using Force touch even if this trackpad did support it that left us with two issues that I've mentioned already the USB that I tried to get working in the installer still doesn't work and the screen is still glitching out and flickering every now and then USB is another common Hackintosh issue since Mac OS doesn't have to deal with a wide variety of USB controllers or many USB ports at all as a matter of fact it turns out it's not very good at it so when hackintoshing it's generally recommended to test and declare every USB port on your computer by plugging a device into each one and seeing what number it comes up as in fact you kind of have to do it twice because Mac osc's USB 2 and USB 3 ports as wholly separate even if they're the same physical Port so you need to test the USB 2 and 3 device in each one ironically the surface laptop 3 in a very MacBook fashion only has a couple of USB ports so it doesn't seem like a lot could go wrong regardless I went ahead trying to detect and declare each port only to find that neither Port would show any devices whatsoever the only things that did show up were the webcam and Bluetooth which were obviously connected internally this was very strange I felt like I was following the instructions to the letter so why wasn't it actually working well it's because there were other instructions I had not followed to the letter this this part of the initial open core setup guide that mentions setting a flag to True which I did but it also says don't set it to true if you're installing Mac OS 11.3 or higher apparently that version really broke something with the USB but I'd managed to miss that note entirely after turning that flag off the USB finally worked just as expected yeah that's another thing you need to contend with on Hackintosh due to the various complexities of its setup there's a lot of room for human error as we've seen throughout this video finally we come to those graphical glitches my God was this a pain in the ass to solve I couldn't find any information about this no one seemed to know what might be causing these glitches I sat there for hours trying a ton of different frame buffer IDs different values for the stolen memory and all that but nothing seemed to work sometimes things would just break harder or the cursor would disappear again but nothing got any closer to actually fixing anything I noticed that it only occurred during times when the GPU was under more heavy usage if it was sitting idle of the desktop you'd never see it but if I was scrolling quickly through a web page or minimizing something with that Genie effect or worst case scrolling through Apple Maps then it would happen pretty much without fail sadly this information didn't really help me find a solution but I did include it in a Reddit thread I posted on R Hackintosh which promptly got no reply but funnily enough only two hours after posting it I did end up finding the solution the whatever green patching guide has a troubleshooting section where it lists a bunch of common issues and ways to solve them I was reading through them in vain trying to find anything that might help when I started reading one that at first didn't seem relevant at all it mentioned the display saying garbled for 7 to 15 seconds after Boot and adds some delay to resolve it well I wasn't seeing any of that but I kept reading and it mentioned sort of offhand that a delay of zero caused flickering in some laptops and that the default was later changed to 1 to fix that so I thought let's try turning that on if a delay of zero might cause flickering then it being disabled entirely might cause that too well holy that actually fixed it I later remembered the OS would sort of pause on a black screen for a few seconds before showing the login screen but I never really thought much of it that might actually be the 7 to 50 second gobbled display that the guide was talking about indeed it is gone now so that must be it and now after using it for some time I can safely say this laptop finally works perfectly sort of always sort of while for the most part it really is working great now there are a few things that still don't work that I'm probably not going to fix while the touchscreen is kind of the surface's trademark I've never been super interested in using a touchscreen or a laptop apparently big surface does fix this you just have to install an ssdt patch I'm just not going to I'm also not super interested in the ambient light sensors that automatically control the backlight big surface does claim to fix that but it still seems to be broken on my end and honestly I prefer manually setting it anyway so I'm not really bothered the worst remaining issue I do have is that it doesn't seem to be able to wake from sleep big surface says it's a known issue that neither the keyboard nor Mouse can wake the system but I found that even external peripherals or trying to use the power button didn't work either this can be yet another sore spot for Hackintosh in fact it's a sore spot for this laptop in general some people working on getting Linux on the Microsoft Surface have said that Microsoft actually messed something up in the hardware of the surface laptop 3 and then had to patch it manually in Windows I can't say if that's exactly what's happening here but whatever it is I probably don't have the time or expertise to really figure it out so I just disabled sleep entirely not ideal but better than having to hard reset anytime the lid is closed or it's left idle for a few minutes so yeah that's Mac OS on a Microsoft laptop surprisingly functional I don't want to say it's just like a Macbook I mean you've already seen how much effort goes into just setting one up and that doesn't count whatever maintenance might be necessary long term as I've said there are a lot of ways things can go wrong so you may not want to trust it as a daily driver for any critical work it's like having a hobby project car it can be a lot of fun solving all the problems and really exciting getting something to work but it's not usually a reliable thing to get you to work every morning while people can and do rely on hackintosh's for real day-to-day productivity tasks it's likely that this is through a combination of Highly compatible Hardware good maintenance practices and luck in fact while I was working on this video a Microsoft Surface firmware update that was automatically installed by windows on a separate partition broke the keyboard and mouse again requiring a new version of big surface to fix it so as careful as you might be there are always things like that that could come up out of nowhere plus a lot of people like MacBooks for the status symbol are people going to see you as part of the club just because you're running Mac OS probably not they just want to see that Apple logo on the lid it could be running Windows for all they care in fact they'll probably think you're poorer because you have to fake a Macbook we also can't forget that Apple has pulled the plug on Hackintosh it took Apple four years from announcing the Intel switch to releasing the first version of Mac OS that didn't support powerpc and we're already two years from the announcement that they were switching to arm basically if you set one of these up now you probably only have a few more years to get the most out of it but putting all of that aside I honestly argue this is the closest thing to a non-macbook Macbook that you can get there are probably easier Hackintosh Hardware configurations out there but as far as the overall look and feel goes I think it's super close and in some ways honestly better so yeah if you're interested in doing this and you keep all of that in mind I think you actually end up with a pretty decent computer at the end or at least an interesting hobby project anyways thank you so much for watching and I'll see you all in the next one bye guys [Applause] foreign [Music]

Channel: MattKC

Views: 1,041,313

Keywords: mattkc, kc, matt kc

Id: S15FVwbHEqo

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022