Hackintosh may have a way forward after macOS 27 Golden Gate. A developer has macOS on screen on a laptop with a Snapdragon X2 chip, a Windows on Arm machine that Apple never designed the operating system for.
Miguel Cruz, who posts as @Acelogic_, showed the desktop on X, with System Settings and Calendar open and the dock in place. He is calling the effort Snapintosh. He has not said which version of macOS it is or how it boots, and there is no download yet.
macOS 27 Golden Gate Left x86 Hackintosh Builds Without a Newer macOS
Intel Macs cannot run macOS Golden Gate, and Apple’s compatibility page for macOS 27 lists none of them. That leaves x86 Hackintosh builds with no newer macOS to move to, and any PC that wants to run it has to be Arm hardware. Snapdragon X2 laptops run Windows on Arm, which puts them on the right architecture.
Apple’s macOS license limits the software to Apple-branded computers, so any of this sits outside the license terms, a point that came up when a company launched a Hackintosh built on OpenCore. The x86 side is still moving too, with a free NVIDIA driver for macOS Sequoia for OpenCore PCs.
q1n1 Already Runs Code at EL2 on the ASUS Zenbook A16
Cruz’s q1n1 project on GitHub is a fork of m1n1, the bootloader Asahi Linux uses on Apple silicon Macs. It targets the ASUS Zenbook A16 with the Snapdragon X2E-96-100 and runs as a UEFI application that takes over at EL2, the Arm level hypervisors run at, after the firmware hands off.
On real hardware it drives a framebuffer console and runs its own USB stack, and it can swap in new code in about 0.3 seconds without a reboot. Restarts from q1n1 skip Windows entirely. A direct USB-C cable to a Mac gives a network link at about 4.6 MB/s for writes and 8.5 MB/s for reads, so a Mac can drive the laptop.
It does not yet have a guest hypervisor, multi-core support or Apple-specific drivers. The code is MIT licensed, inherited from m1n1.
Another Developer Has Booted XNU on Snapdragon X Hardware
Ibrahim Mammmedov replied that he is working on the same idea for the original Snapdragon X rather than the X2. He says he has booted XNU, Apple’s kernel, on real hardware, mounted an HFS+ root filesystem and run ARM64 userspace processes with fork, exec and wait. His remaining blocker is ARM64E and pointer authentication, an Arm security feature.
