But because Monterey continued to support the Ivy Bridge-powered 2013 Mac Pro and the Haswell-powered 2014 Mac mini, the OS still retained some baseline level of support for those processors (and accompanying GPU and chipset hardware) that made it easier to get Monterey running on other Macs with the same chips.Īfter many months of work, we’ve finally gotten macOS Ventura running on legacy Metal GPUs! In macOS Monterey, for example, Apple had officially dropped support for a whole lot of 2012, 2013, and 2014-era Mac models that used Intel's 3rd-generation (Ivy Bridge) and 4th-generation (Haswell) CPUs. OCLP and the dosdude1 patchers could usually lean on some older-but-officially-supported models to extend support to unsupported Macs with similar hardware. But this approach has gotten more difficult as Apple removes more and more Intel Mac support from macOS. In some past years, the hardware differences between 'supported' and 'unsupported' Macs could be so small that the only thing you'd need to do to boot new macOS versions is trick the bootloader into thinking it was running on a slightly newer Mac. The OCLP developers have admitted that macOS Ventura support will be tough, but they've made progress in some crucial areas that should keep some older Macs kicking for a little bit longer. It's an offshoot of the OpenCore Hackintosh bootloader, and it's updated fairly frequently with new features and fixes and compatibility for newer macOS versions. Tools like XPostFacto and LeopardAssist could help old PowerPC Macs run newer versions of Mac OS X, a tradition kept alive in the modern era by dosdude1's patchers for Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina.įor Big Sur and Monterey, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP for short) is the best way to get new macOS versions running on old Macs. Skirting the official macOS system requirements to run new versions of the software on old, unsupported Macs has a rich history.

Big sur for unsupported macs