Installing macOS on a Microsoft laptop 

Imagine having so little confidence to not be able to recognize that BigSurface is an S-tier name for their project. The developers gotta own that name.

This is great. You’ve combined two of our least favourite tech companies into one big bad bundle of… horror

IIRC, the reason for Russian as the default language in OpenCore's sample config is that it forces the user to actually read the Dortania guide in order to learn how to set it to English (and then, perhaps, the user will read the rest as well, thereby being able to solve 90% of problems)

Minor correction: while force touch was discontinued on iPhones and Apple Watches, they still exist on modern Mac trackpads. You can click down with a normal amount of pressure, and then click harder for a further click which is what your clicks were being read as at first.

I love how Matt just is realistic I feel his frustration and the method he uses to tackle the issue is fascinating

I've been in this scene for over a decade. These days, I have MacOS running on a Dell XPS 15 with full touchscreen working on MacOS, along with a Dell T1700 PC that runs an iMessage AirMessage server so I can get iMessage and Facetime on Android. It's a fun yet challenging hobby.

getting macOS to run on a PC is like almost drowning but then being pulled onto a small island made entirely of fireants

I used to love using hackintoshes as a kid, but then I actually got into the tech industry... After fixing bugs all day, the last thing I want is a kernel panic on my personal laptop, so stock macbook it is for me. I still have spare computers I sometimes play around with crazy software setups on, but it's nice having the ability to just walk away from that when I am not in the mood.

The no sleeping issue may be linked to how Microsoft pushes Modern Standby (S0ix) over traditional sleep (S1-S3) in the ACPI power configurations. If I recall correctly, macOS has no support for S0ix.

Oh my god, I have never had a surface before, so that boot screen at 13:06 when you're booting into Ubuntu caught me off guard LOL

i love how your video perfectly captures the essence of computer tinkering, especially on the software side: "yes, this is tedious, there's no real reason to do it, and there is a clearly superior alternative to doing so, but it's fun, so who cares?"

I love this channel because it makes me feel like when I do it myself, with all the problems, try and error and the success emotion

Apple: "HE CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS"

This is literally what happened with me. I made a hackintosh in my gaming pc and had a dedicated gpu for it. But broke it when I tried to get handoff to work. Then I bought an m1 Mac mini and I love it

Following Dortania's guide was honestly a blast, set up my Monterrey rig on first try, but I think this will be my last Hackintosh PC as well. Planning on moving to Linux and the FOSS world next time around.

I appreciate the effort and research you have done to make this finally work 👍

Now we need Windows on an iPhone/Android device, would be cool if possible.

HE CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS

I've also built a ton of hackintoshes over the years. Like a lot of people, I did so for music production. If you run a home studio, you likely know how expensive music gear can be. A common scenario you can get into with music gear like audio interfaces or control surfaces is that many years after purchasing it the hardware likely still functions perfectly, but whatever company made it has stopped making drivers for newer operating systems. Usually newer audio interfaces and control surfaces don't even really offer much of a benefit over older models aside from a more up to date USB connector and current drivers. As far as audio quality or what the control surface can do, it's likely exactly the same or very close. Running a hackintosh means you have real full x16 PCIe slots, which a lot of this older hardware needs. You can also use hacked / patched drivers to get older hardware to work properly in newer versions of mac OS, saving you a ton of money from having to needlessly replace gear that still actually physically functions. It's also a common scenario to stay 1 or 2 full OS versions behind with a studio computer because music software companies can be slow to update. If you have a ton of plugins / virtual instruments / etc. installed it can be a bit of a choreographed dance to keep it all running properly on the same system. Running a hackintosh allows you the flexibility of getting the best possible hardware for your particular situation without Apple's business choices they make to appeal to consumers holding you back. I'm both sad and happy to see the hackintosh coming to an end. Sad because, while frustrating, finally getting a hack up and running exactly the way you want it is satisfying and I learned a lot in the process about how mac OS works internally. However, once I truly have no choice I'll be happy that I'm not spending as much time tinkering and maybe more time actually creating. I'll likely need to get a 2011 mac mini on ebay or something to run some of my older MIDI hardware that requires mac os 10.11 and then use the network MIDI functionality to share it with a newer mac. That will likely be the only viable solution, because purchasing replacements for some of this older gear that physically still functions properly but only has old drivers would cost far more than a new mac.

I am so glad I've discovered this channel. My compliments!

I2C is inter-integrated-circuit interface :) it’s a nice master-slave bus that lets you communicate with other chips in a standard way. I use it all the time at work!

Always enjoy your videos man, such a learning process! I've got a bitlockered laptop I'm trying to salvage, can you do a similar video someday? It would be interesting to see how it all works

If you're curious I2C is basically the USB of internal connections. It's super common for multiple circuit boards inside a device to be using I2C to talk to eachother. One cool thing is that it's daisy-chainable, so you can connect a bunch of devices to the same wire and they'll all work. But that comes with the major drawback that disconecting anything while the system is running breaks it (that's why you never see it anywhere besides buried in places you're not meant to see).

i was expexcting something else, but this was infinitely better and more informative, i loved how informative this video is

It's almost 3am and I've been trying to find SOMETHING on youtube to keep me awake, suddenly a MattKC video?! Bless you Australia, your weird time difference has actually saved me several times in both mindless video watching and in my job due to deadlines being in your time lol.

Nice video ! I had the same issues on my laptop haha 14:20 : Force touch isn't discontinued on current MacBooks (and it works quite well with the haptic feedback)

Nice to see your videos are still good after all this time.

Subscribed - great video - watching it on my Ryzentosh running Ventura with everything working (bar sleep, sidecar and the internal microphone, all known issues with ryzentoshes).

thank you so much matt. i've been trying to do hackintosh for a while now but could never figure it out for myself without that guide

been a long time since i watched an yt video from start to the end without skipping and getting bored

Watching this video makes me miss my hackintosh days a couple years back. El Capitan was my last hackintosh I installed and Leopard was my first in around 2009. Now I don't even have time for the hassle because most of my time is used for work.

I hackintoshed this exact laptop a few months ago and after like a week of troubleshoting and with the help of big surface it finally worked! cool to see you hackintosh the same laptop at the same time hehe, I installed macOS Ventura tho and it worked great!!

I admire your perseverance. The most I've done is Hackintosh actual Macs: I hacked El Capitan onto a 2006 Mac Pro (their official latest OS is Lion, due to the 32-bit EFI), installed High Sierra and then Mojave onto a 2008 Mac Pro using DosDude patching tools (official latest OS is El Capitan), installed High Sierra on a 2008 first-gen MacBook Pro, and Tiger on a Lombard PowerBook G3 (official latest OS is Panther).

Cool, thanks for the video and the link to a guide. I might actually give it a try now.

purely lovely commentary about the whole process, I've been through a similar experience with both a big old desktop and a smaller unit (minis forum U820). the first one was a disaster, couldn't get the hang of setting up an older nvidia gtx 660 that kept having artefacts on the screen, via the guide I realised that i had a model of that particular GPU that was unsupported by apple :( (apparently they have had some sort of beef with nvidia throughout the years), but the second attempt with the mini pc (did it almost 1 year after the first attempt) was for the most part a big success. if you have time checking out, minis forum U820 is advertised in the chinese market as "hackintosh friendly", had a lot of resources and already compatible software to work with (the pc is intel based for the most part), and I even managed to put ventura directly on it. but afterwards I realised that some things weren't as expected, bluetooth always had issues and I was supposed to reconnect the devices at each boot, no possibility of sleeping the device etc. > got back to linux which is more stable for an overall experience. great video overall, congrats!

Instead of using the display resolution changing helper, you could've tried holding ALT while clicking the "scaled" option in the system settings. This usually shows some resolutions to select of instead of the 5 settings with "bigger text" or "more space". Otherwise: great video :D Had a Hackintosh running High Sierra (since my Geforce graphics card wasn't supported on Mojave anymore) 4 years ago and I loved it so much, I bought a real Mac then (yeah, you said that :D ). Now I am fully on Apple products....

As someone who stopped Hackintoshing around Mavericks (and used to mainly do it on laptops), this video was a really unexpected surprise! Glad to see that this community is still going on stronger than ever 😊

My amd hackintosh builds ten years ago were legendary! Used to have so much fun going through the countless trials and error just to get them installed!

I2C is a relatively simple protocol to use and understand. Basically all micro controllers suport it and SBCs and is commonly used in many component such as sensors, screens etc.

Oh man, amazing video. My first attempts at Hackintosh were back in 2008 when I installed Leopard on my Dell Inspiron 1501 with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 and 512MB RAM. It was a beautiful laptop, especially for its time, and really reminded me of the MacBook Pros at the time. I really wanted one, but they were far too expensive and I was a kid. So I installed Leopard and not gonna lie, it took me a few days, but it was well worth it. This was my first hands on experience with OS X and I loved it. Fast forward 1-2 years, I built myself a budget desktop PC and installed Snow Leopard, which I used for almost 2 years.. Then switched to another Windows laptop for a while, before buying a second hand MacBook Pro 13" 2011, which I loved. Years later I could finally buy a brand new Mac, and went for a 2017 MacBook Pro 13", which I had for 2 years. Then I sold it, bought my current desktop PC with a Haswell i5 and GTX 1060, on which I've installed and daily drive High Sierra with full GPU acceleration, and it runs awesome. And I'm now writing this on my recently bought, refurbished mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15", with only 42 cycles on its battery, in literally "like new" condition, which I got for 500 USD. I have no idea why I wrote all of this, but I guess I'm quite attached to Macs and MacOS/OS X, and I really find something special in them, even on a non-Apple PC. Hackintosh really brought me into the Mac world, and Apple would be fools to actively work against it.

It's always a good day when Matt uploads!

your problem solving skill immpresed me very much

Dance Floor Anthem is a killer song that still holds up.

"It's not about the money, It's about sending a message" - MattKC, 2022

Loved the video and the voice over especially. What software do u use to edit it? Which adjustments do you add onto your audio?

I miss force touch on the iPhone. My old 6 & 6S had it, I loved it. Switched to an XR and had to re-learn a lot of the UI thanks to the removal.

14:05 Force click is necessary to open Exposé for a dock app, without opening the app itself. QuickTime allows you to rewind a video on a higher speed using force click. If you force click a date, you can quickly add it to your calendar. If you’re learning a language, you can find the meaning of a word and it’s pronunciation by force clicking it. Other than that, Force click is mostly useless but still, I’d rather have it. At least for the language learning reason. It makes learning new words so convenient.

God you inspired me about that WhateverGreen troubleshooting. My desktop Hackintosh also goes black for several seconds before showing the locks screen when booting. I’ll try it too, thank you.

You make this a very entertaining learning experience !

Love this intro card. Such a pretty sound

Can you do a benchmark? It would be interesting to see how the components run on stress knowing they weren’t made for that operating system. Would love to see it and I enjoyed the video

I've ran hackingotsh from 2016 to 2019 on my old thinkpad T420, surprisingly everything worked pretty much perfectly, with only needing to use Broadcomm network card instead of the Intel one. Then Apple dropped support for Sandy Bridge's integrated GPU and newer versions became pain to use, so back to Linux I went.

This video was both nostalgic and informative to me. I'm a veteran Hackintosher since 2009, and all that was said in this video brought back many memories. I've never really hackintoshed a laptop before, but Matt's right in saying that it's not easy... Laptop hardware (as stated in the video) is very specific and almost impossible to swap out for something that works if you run into issues. With that said, I've hack'd both Intel and AMD based custom desktop systems, and let me tell you... it was frustrating as all hell to get working (more so on the AMD side than the Intel side, but still). Once you have it working though can indeed have a near identical experience to a real Mac, even with features like HandOff and Continuity and other stuff working like a charm. Also Big Surface... so bad. lmao Great video Matt! I'm sad Hackintoshing was murdered with the advent of the M1 family of SoCs, but it's the end of an era and this video is a good send off! Cheers!

really fun to watch, keep it up

13:40 The sensation of the thing finally working when the surfaces make the charging sound… I know exactly that feeling LOL still I daily drive my Lenovo Laptop with Ventura and it’s super good. Never had a issue with monterey on the latest updates but Ventura is still a kinda buggy mess. I used to have the beta and it’s a lot better, but still not enough.

Love your videos they're all so interesting to me

man do i love coming home from school to see a mattkc hackintosh video

I recall installing macOS snow leopard back in 2010 on a Dell laptop. It was quite challenging getting the right drivers to work but I was able to get it running somewhat okay.. The OSX86 forums were super helpful. However, it was buggy and any little update would break it. Eventually I ended up getting a Mac mini. Today I use both windows and macos. I have a PC that I built myself primarily for gaming and a macbook pro for work

A friend of mine had the opposite in college (circa 2016 ish) - because Macbooks were trendy and cool, but we were computer science students who thought that Macs weren't good for coding (I know this is wrong now obvs), he got a Macbook and installed Windows on it

I run a Hackintosh desktop at home and love it! 😄 its pretty stable. And also dualboot Windows whenever I need it.

My first hackintosh was an Atari 520 STFM in 1989. Installing fonts and such prior to system7 was a hassle, but it was fantastic.

Hackintosh will stop being 'usable' when the last compatible version for x86 is straigh up not working for anything, kinda like XP. There is people doing a High Sierra hackintosh just for the NVIDIA compatibility, and a lot of x86 Macs still receive new software updates. When the last compatible version doesn't allow you to publish apps for the latest iPhone, Catalina doesn't for example, then you will not be able to get the most out of it as you said, but still usable for everything else.

It's cool that now in today's world, windows users can use mac on a windows laptop. Kind of sweet! Might try it sometime. Thanks for showing this!! I love your tech content!

I love your videos. I am not usually interested in technology and such, but you manage to make everything sound so interesting. I've definitely learnt a lot from you. Also your videos are awesome to listen to while I work on school work :)

Having a Macbook that supports Force Touch myself, I totally forgot about it and tried it after you mentioned it :D Never used that function in the 5 years I had this Macbook. And I can tell, it still works in the latest macOS Ventura, although I only tested it with the Trash Bin like you did in the video, I guess its just not supported everywhere.

Matt, you never fail to amaze me. Maybe because I know NOTHING about this, but still.

Apple actually flirted with x86 way back when with the Star Trek project where they experimented with porting System 7 into an operating environment a la Windows 3.x on top of DOS. It was done so that both Apple and Novell could compete against Windows on the IBM compatible space, but no one agreed on how to best go forward with the project. Ryzen processors will run macOS, but you have to fiddle more with the bootloader to get the necessary patches working iirc. At least it wasn't like back when you had to install a custom kernel which may or may not work with the software you're using.

The smoothest hackintosh experience I ever had was with the QUO motherboard that got kickstarted a while back, and even then it wasn't nearly as simple as doing what you're supposed to do and install windows 😝

I am watching this on my Lenovo ThinkPad T440s running macOS 12.6.1 Monterey and everything works. Update: I just upgraded to a Lenovo ThinkPad T480 running macOS 13.4 Ventura and it runs flawlessly.

10:42 “If this laptop was literally any newer, this project wouldn’t be possible at all” Me, having one model newer of that surface:

Theoretically, it might be possible to patch the error handler in the macOS kernel to catch the instruction set errors that came up on non-Apple ARM processors and emulating what was supposed to happen at the error handler, cleaning up the CPU error registers and returning control to the program, effectively "uncrashing" it. This is how modern virtual machines handle emulated peripherals.

its kinda funny that when the ad break screen appeared, i got an ad btw great video

Aah. Good old Hackintosh. Once I had to make one for one of my school projects (Swift programming) and because I only had a PC with an FX-8350 it was “great” fun for 2-3 days of scanning through the internet and trying out every version I’ve found in VMware and VirtualBox

10:49 The reverse is also true for BootCamp Macs. The final Intel-based Macs Apple seems to have shipped come with 8th Gen Intel Core CPUs (Coffee Lake). This is the bare minimum for full Windows 11 compatibility but because Apple never exposed the onboard TPM 2.0 module in the firmware you have to resort to tricking the OS into installing just as you would if you were trying to install it on older hardware (which comes with the potential caveat of being unsupported should MS dictate it, as they've warned). Despite having technically compatible hardware, Apple and Windows have formally ceased interaction with the most recent revision of the OS. Also did you bother figuring out the iMessage NVRAM thing? I remember getting that working on my old Hackintosh.

This video truly captures the Hackintosh feeling the best. A mixture of excitement, frustration and focused trial&error. I definitely became fed up with the issues and just bought a real Mac instead, like you also explained at the start of the video. After ~10 years of fiddling with the basics time and time again, I just wanted it to end :D

Man, you are a hero. I admit, I've done many next to useless things just because my clients paid me for them, such as upgrading Windows 8 to 10 on a Surface Pro, using heat gun on its screen in order to remove it and upgrade its SSD to something which actually had enough space for photos and videos, downgrading laptops to Windows 7 so that some very old and incompatible with 10 accounting software could be run, and then having to change the WIFI card because no Windows 7 driver existed for it and so on, and even hackintoshing older desktops in 2007 and 2010. But what you did in this video, - I honestly have no idea what fee I would charge in order to repeat this heroic feat of yours, but it would probably be in the 10s of thousands of $.

i had mac os many moons ago on my 2001 dell with pentium 4. run really well.

It's a little ironic that I'm watching this on a MacBook running Linux

this was a great video matt. keep it up i love ur vids man

Wait, that's illegal

wow，it's such a LONG journey. Remarkable~

Love your videos. If you have a Microsoft Surface RT lying around collecting dust, I would be interested in seeing what you can do with it. I have heard of some people getting Windows 10 IoT on it.

Very impressive. You should share the EFI folder somewhere so other people with this laptop can try it for themselves without all the troubleshooting.

The part where you mention it not waking up from sleep. I had the same issue on Ubuntu on my Lenovo Ideapad 5. I was never able to fix it, but if anyone does know a solution. I'd love to hear it.

13:07 as an Ubuntu contributor/dev I love seeing you use it!

This vidéo is an actual FUN thank you !

I've been daily driving desktop hackintoshes for almost 5 years, and those are a lot easier to get fully working. I don't know why, but macOS has always been more stable on my build than Windows. I did buy an M1 MacBook for computing on the go though.

I never liked Apple products, but I was curious about how it is MacOS. So, when I bought a laptop that I found it was compatible with OSX (core i3 first gen CPU - Arrandale platform) I upgraded the CPU to a core i5 and tried my luck with the OS. I managed to install it after reading many how-to and tutorials online and I was successful (partially). I do not remember what exactly went wrong or what was not quite ok (maybe it was the integrated Intel HD graphics), but after few weeks I wiped out the HDD and installed FreeBSD. I kept using FreeBSD for few years before switching back to the original Windows 7 Pro HDD that come with the laptop originally. I might say that FreeBSD was the best OS for that machine and now is what I run on that computer.

keep what the great work MATTKC

This is soo a good and entertaining video, I watched it like 5 times!

LOL when I was a child I tried installing macOS on my Windows Vista laptop. I remember the struggle to make it barely work and I ultimately ended up formatting important data lmao... Now I have an M1 Macbook Air and I am very happy 😄

For a lot of reasons i'd suggest you to install a linux distro and customize to look like mac, it gets pretty close, has a lot more of a stability and it is WAAAAAAAY easier to get to work. Depending of how you use it, you maybe exchanging one problem to another.

I own huawei matebook 13 2020. It's perfect hackintosh laptop. It has only usb-c port and everything works perfectly. The only exception is a camera. You can find many ready to go configurations on github.

I had a Hackintosh back in end of 2011 early 2012 on an old laptop with just WiFi not working. After that I bought my first MacBook Pro. Now I use both Windows and macOS and enjoy both.

Who is watching on a surface other than me?

I still have nightmares of being a gamer 10 years ago while owning a MacBook. When i bought my own PC i smashed that thing to bits 😁

Microsoft disliked that.

Been doing this since 2008 it's easy and straightforward runs better than a Mac and much more powerful, lots not newbie mistakes in this video which makes it good for people who are new to this

oh snap, New MattKC video!

Me, a seasoned Linux user who's installed almost everything from Arch to Void: "I fear no setup, but that..thing, it scares me."