Don’t fiddle with your MacOS

There’s a lot of talk these days online about installing the latest MacOSes on older Macs. 

I bet you’d even had the odd ‘techie’ friend at the pub or dinner party that reckons they did it and it works a treat. 

It sounds great, making your old 2012 iMac run the latest OS thus saving thousands…you might even be wondering why your friendly neighbourhood technician hasn’t mentioned it before?

Well there are a few things that the dinner party guest didn’t mention while they were regaling you with their latest update adventures whilst sipping Chardonnay and eating all the salted nuts. 

So lets now. 

Years ago that concept of installing an unsupported OS on a Mac was truely the stuff of nightmares. Booting into firmware, applying pages and pages of long and incomprehensible lines of code. It was a nerds playground… paradise of the friendless.

In the last few years this has been streamlined into a single free download called OpenCore Legacy Patcher that will, after a few very clearly defined steps, create a patched installer that will indeed upgrade your 2012 iMac with an OS that was not designed for it. But there is a catch and it is a catch that stopped me from offering it as a service only a few short months ago.

One stormy night, with the craziest expression I could muster, I did upgrade an old Mac Mini with the latest MacOS and it worked like a charm. Overly enthusiastic about life in general I then tried it on an old Macbook and again it worked like magic. Fiddly yes, but magic nevertheless.

But then Apple released a software update, as they do, and it all went the way of Brexit, the US political system and my apple and cheese pie. 

With a supported Mac running a supported OS, all you need to do it run the updater and it makes the necessary adjustments to the kernel, the drivers, ect. But, when it comes across what ‘looks’ like MacOS14 but has odd drivers it wasn’t expecting it will, understandably, throw a fit and crash… possibly taking the whole system to the bit bucket while it is at it.

With the unsupported OS installed you cannot just run the offical update from Apple. Instead you have to compile yet another installer (the fiddly bit I mentioned earlier) and then run that to update your Mac. It’s a 45 min job as opposed to the three second option Apple offers.  Your nerdy friend will love it!

The truth is most people are nervous about Apple updates (and this is one of the reasons why people have regular health checks) and these are tested and approved… not to mention quick.

An unsupported OS, while it will allow your old Mac to continue for years and years, is often not worth the risk of losing data, time to compile or to have services like iCloud locked out due to security.

Unless of course, you like that kind of thing.