Most active commenters

    ←back to thread

    M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS

    (eclecticlight.co)
    176 points Brajeshwar | 15 comments | 16 Nov 24 16:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.982s | source | bottom
    1. roopepal ◴[16 Nov 24 16:56 UTC] No.42157400[source]▶
    > It seems that M4 chips can’t virtualise any version of macOS before 13.4 Ventura

    13.4 was released on May 18, 2023. That's actually not very far into the past.

    Anyway, what would be the most common use cases for this? And how common are those?

    replies(4): >>42157432 #>>42157435 #>>42157446 #>>42159502 #
    2. trws ◴[16 Nov 24 17:02 UTC] No.42157432[source]▶
    CI is the big one, or similar testing against older versions for backwards compatibility. Usually good enough to just compile for it on MacOS, but sometimes we get a surprise in a third party library or something that only shows up on an older release.
    3. deathhand ◴[16 Nov 24 17:02 UTC] No.42157435[source]▶
    Dev environments, and testing.

    Macs are the best at virtualizing macs.(look up hackintosh to see how many hoops must be jumped through on non mac hardware)

    replies(1): >>42158246 #
    4. grishka ◴[16 Nov 24 17:04 UTC] No.42157446[source]▶
    If you're building macOS apps, it's common to want to test them on all system versions you support. Especially so considering Apple's attitude towards backwards compatibility.
    replies(3): >>42157550 #>>42157619 #>>42159931 #
    5. JumpCrisscross ◴[16 Nov 24 17:22 UTC] No.42157550[source]▶
    Are there any Macs that can run 13.4 but can't run 13.5?
    replies(1): >>42157812 #
    6. ◴[16 Nov 24 17:32 UTC] No.42157619[source]▶
    7. fwip ◴[16 Nov 24 18:00 UTC] No.42157812{3}[source]▶
    I don't think so, but no Mac before 2016 can run 13.x: https://everymac.com/systems/by_capability/maximum-macos-sup...
    replies(1): >>42158123 #
    8. wtallis ◴[16 Nov 24 18:31 UTC] No.42158123{4}[source]▶
    Virtualizing an older ARM version of macOS was never going to be sufficient to QA x86 applications running on older Intel Macs. For that, you'll always want real x86 hardware.
    9. talldayo ◴[16 Nov 24 18:46 UTC] No.42158246[source]▶
    You don't need a Hackintosh to virtualize a Mac - you can actually download the MacOS image directly from Apple and boot it right into QEMU with the proper configuration. I've used a few scripts over the years that could have an OSX image running on Linux in less than 15 minutes.
    replies(1): >>42158739 #
    10. kelvinjps10 ◴[16 Nov 24 19:51 UTC] No.42158739{3}[source]▶
    Any tutorial?
    replies(1): >>42159017 #
    11. mmerlin ◴[16 Nov 24 20:26 UTC] No.42159017{4}[source]▶
    https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

    https://github.com/Coopydood/ultimate-macOS-KVM

    https://github.com/notAperson535/OneClick-macOS-Simple-KVM

    https://github.com/topics/osx-kvm

    12. cnst ◴[16 Nov 24 21:26 UTC] No.42159502[source]▶
    I once used an old Mac OS X in order to extract a Cisco AnyConnect certificate from Keychain that wasn't possible to extract in any other way.

    https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6043/...

    I've first tried recompiling the Keychain app, but it had too many dependencies that were not trivial to build, so, using an older Mac, in that case, was the easiest way to get the private key from my own keychain.

    13. alanfranz ◴[16 Nov 24 22:26 UTC] No.42159931[source]▶
    And yet Monterey is EOL. Very few apps still support it. I wonder if it's just something that wasn't tested exactly for that reason.
    replies(2): >>42160369 #>>42162073 #
    14. grishka ◴[16 Nov 24 23:13 UTC] No.42160369{3}[source]▶
    EOL or no, there are many people who still use older OSes because they own older computers, can't afford an upgrade or don't want one (it works just fine!), and can't be bothered with figuring out running a newer OS on officially unsupported hardware.

    Case in point: I built a macOS app that implements Google's Nearby/Quick Share (an AirDrop-style file sharing thing on Android). Multiple people tried running it on Catalina and were disappointed that it wanted a newer OS. So I did end up backporting it to Catalina.

    15. 1over137 ◴[17 Nov 24 04:57 UTC] No.42162073{3}[source]▶
    >Very few apps still support it

    Citation? I use Monterey at work and every app I need works on it still.