As things stand I predict the latest macOS should continue to be available on Intel through 2026 to support MacPros Apple was selling through 2022.
A given release of macOS tends to be viable for about 3 years past its release year, so that gets hackintosh survivalists to about 2030.
Modern builds already prefer the MacPro7,1. SMBIOS so there's a proven viable trajectory of a hack based on the last intel system Apple offered.
Notwithstanding some epic move on Apple's part to cancel hacks—and on the contrary I have sometimes mused that Apple hedges bets by secretly supporting the hack+legacy community—I like to think that by the time a modern hack is no longer effective for the basics of macOS, the consumer tech world will have shifted in other amazing ways, making the like irrelevant. Everything goes, eventually.
Shifting gears to bloviate too looong about looming change...
As to the Big Future that's coming, I feel the personal computer market is monumentally overdue for a shift in what "personal" means to regular joes WRT a data appliance.
The core approach of grabbing minds and ckickbaiting them into oblivion is as unsustainable as the petro-based growth economy. Minds, like the Earth, seem to be at carrying capacity.
Mindstorms are already coalescing, seeded by AI as whole sectors of the modern creative class fear they will be replaced by automata.
I predict an eventual backlash against today's core colonizers of the mind.
What's needed is a catalyst, a Jobsian figure to re-imagine and re-implement a SW stack towards what it means to be in personal control of one's identity and data; to carve away a lot of irrelevant detail and anachronistic compatibility bloating today's SW stacks.
So many say they are worried about losing their Precious, but I find this disingenuous because everyone here bought goofy stuff when it was on a way more expensive and way less powerful point on the curve— And it's common for nerds to re-re-buy stuff just for the enjoyment of nerding out.
At this point, HW is close to free.
What anyone who thinks about personal computing wants is control of their own creativity and its products. This is a funny state of affairs, because today thought is so totally occupied by mass-media that creativity is meaningless if it doesn't include the personal capability to work with published data as the clay of a continuously evolving artistic and economic regime. Prior art is the necessity of all art, and no one is fit to judge the value of art than the artist— which today is anyone and everyone.
Everyone has the right to their own thoughts and their own realm of mind (data) and to access to tools un-beholden to big companies for more than a basic cost of production and as individuals deem necessary to form affinities and federations with the others of their preference.
Big tech is a direct consequence of state welfare and always has been.
For 30 years we have been stuck in a paradigm of centralization because exporting and subordinating hoards to the purpose of telling them what to think, strip mining their contacts, monitoring everything they do and reselling their behaviors has been so lucrative. Quite literally, every service idea today begins with "First create an account on our systems and we keep all your data".
In a sane world this will eventually give way to a more individualist architecture, but what's the incentive? Everyone who approaches the space thinks "First we create a central service and everyone makes an account."
This mentality is a logjam in the river of progress of personal computing.
The big tech companies all want a their platforms to be the everyday standard for ordinary existence, IOW to be regarded as pure commonwealth, and they want arbitrary rent and control over the disposition of their platforms.
I give Apple some credit for self-awareness that there is an open contradiction in being the tyrannical overlord of a "free" realm. I think hackintoshers have an innate sense of this contradiction-which-is-not-a-paradox and give Apple the benefit of the doubt. Where the rubber hits the road, Apple always has been about the "art of the deal." Apple, as one of the world's richest companies can afford to be wildly more accommodating of individual liberty than it is.
I wish to avoid digressing into the laments of industry over its "rights" to IP and protected-profits except to say that corporate PR is always first to appeal to threat to the livelihoods of day-laborers when its profits are at stake, and first to discard those same workers to increase profits. Such is an iron-clad rule of the executive.
Since the bank crisis of 2008, it has been openly claimed and publicly demonstrated at the highest levels of business and state that money is completely free, with the only constraint being peculiar rules about who has the privilege to access it.
Now that corporations design the entire landscapes of our lives, including the most basic and intimate patterns of our thoughts, it's time for a new liberty. The big companies will never give this away, but we can extricate ourselves from their domination by changing the core function of data appliances to return control to individuals over their own data and therefore their thought.
Which brings me to appreciation of hackintoshers, who as a group ride a funny line separating myopic conformity to corporate doctrine from a real on-the-ground effort to protect their liberty to make use of common tools as they see fit. "Oh please Apple allow me to consume your centrally planned and organized app suites on the PC of my choice!" It's pretty weird when a community is so in love with a landlord that they will supply their own property by which to be charged rent! Especially when way more accommodating SW stacks are available. This either means Apple offers SW of insane value, or the users have no idea what they're doing nor why.
I'll close with the reflection that while I employ the 2nd and 3rd person in this diatribe, I guess I'm mostly talking about myself.
Carry on!
