Apple Silicon is a completely different ISA than x86. Creating a hackintosh with a Ryzen and Intel is straight forward because both support the x86 ISA. For it to happen you would need the following:
Somebody to create a Motherboard that holds an ARM CPU that is a perfect clone of Apple Silicon. While Apple started out with an ARM design they have moved away from a strict ARM implementation putting their own secret stuff into the processor. So unless you some how "acquire" the design for Apple Silicon, then have someone mass produce it onto a motherboard with all of that infrastructure that is needed, no, nothing ".. will come...".
Hackintoshing is dead at the point where Apple stops supporting x86 for a release of Mac OS. That does not mean your machine all of a sudden stops working. It will certainly continue to work. The choice *you* have to make is at what point do you migrate to an Apple Silicon system or a Windows or Linux system. If you don't care about updates or security patches you could in theory stay on your current macOS system for ever. There are people still compiling FireFox to PPC.
My guess is that we have about 5 solid years of macOS releases. Add a few years of direct apple support through security updates and you have 7 years. Of course as intel releases new CPUs *after* Apple stops releasing macOS Intel versions then create a hackintosh based on that new hardware is going to get trickier and trickier.
There may be a few other possibilities in the future but they all involve reverse engineering Apple Silicon ISA and creating an emulator. There are legal issues with that.
I mused on this topic a few pages back (post
144), and though I agree with you 100%, there are some questions about just how different, or just how much "secret stuff" Apple is putting into these ARM based CPUs. Do we know? Do we know how different the architectures are?
I think the idea of having a chip manufacturer(s) creating ARM-based PC CPUs for retail or for "DIY PC Builders" is going to happen. We will have ARM architecture options in the near future and that's exciting, not just for our community, but also more generally for those of us who want to build and manage our own hardware.
But I think one of the topics on this thread--what we're talking about--is not just about building our own ARM PCs, we want to be able to manipulate MacOS XI to run on a PC just as we were able to do with OSX. All we can do right now is speculate, right? But I think some of us are holding out hope that our community can investigate and figure out a way to successfully get MacOS XI to run on an (admittedly as-yet un-engineered, un-developed, not-yet-for-sale!) retail ARM chip. I think that should be a goal.
If we end up with DYI ARM hardware, we will have to figure out the gap between what retail chipmakers create with ARM and what Apple creates in its proprietary gear. Then it's a matter of manipulating the OS to fit the "other" ARM processor.
But I laugh as I spell this out because it's all so remote and so far off and so in the realm of fantasy -- we just don't know if it'll be something we can try to manipulate, yet.
But at this point in time, I do think we can muse as to whether it's possible. Will it be possible? Or will the Apple Silicon be so far off of what will eventually be used in retail/DYI ARM chips that we will not/never be able to do what we're doing now?
If it's the latter, then, well, that's kind of depressing. But maybe it won't be, maybe we will figure out solutions.
Do you all remember back in the 90s, a chipmaker called
Sonnet made legit G3 and G4 cards that you could use to upgrade your old PPC macs to get OSX working on them? Times have changed, no doubt, and I don't think any of us are holding out hope that some company like this one is the solution to getting macOS XI to work on PC hardware. But the mere thought of going back to the days like this is a bit depressing.
But again, without jumping to conclusions, I think it should be a goal to investigate whether its possible. I've been hackintoshing since 2008, it's a very fun hobby, I created an album of music and a movie on hackintoshes, I'm one who certainly benefited from having Mac Pro level hardware on a hackintosh. I would hate to say goodbye to it all in a couple of years.
Maybe fakenews or did anyone here saw this code live?
