Hackintool can t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software

I started hackintoshing damn near at the beginning, way back in 2007. My first hack was a distro install of Tiger on a garbage eMachines PC with a P4. Back then, I was fed up with Windows because a virus nuked my XP install, I ended up losing some irreplaceable photos from my son's first year. After getting my PC back into working order, I decided that there had to be something out there that was better than Windows. A quick Google search of "alternative to Windows" led me in two distinct directions; Linux and Hackintosh. The former ultimately became my career. The latter became a hobby/obsession for the last decade+.

Since 2007, I have hackintoshed pretty much every single computer I've owned. Starting out with janky distro installs and manually patching PCI device IDs, then moving to Chameleon, then to Clover. Using OS X Tiger, it was love at first sight, and with the next two iterations of the OS, 10.5 "Leopard" and ultimately Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", I had no way of knowing at the time but those were the good old days of hackintoshing/Mac OS X. In my opinion, Snow Leopard is the best consumer operating system there has ever been. PERIOD. And it was supported FOREVER compared to the new rolling releases that everyone has moved too. Snow Leopard was rock solid, had virtually zero bugs, was lightning fast and had TONS of functionality that later got stripped out of the OS.

Every single version of Mac OS X/macOS that came after Snow Leopard has not lived up to 10.6's legacy. 10.7 'Lion' was by all accounts the "Vista" of Mac OS X, full of bugs, unstable and dropped support for lots of hardware (both real Apple hardware and hackintoshes). Mountain Lion was more or less just a service pack to Lion. Mavericks wasn't even a footnote, the most notable changes to the OS in 10.9 were under the hood and really should have just been included as bug fixes in 10.8. then came the UI redesign to look more like iOS 7 - flat, boring pastel colored icons. no more skeuomorphic design. no more depth to the OS. just a flat, touch screen friendly appearance on an OS that wouldn't get touch screen support for several more years (in the form of the iPad Pro + sidecar on Catalina).

Then in the convening years since the release of 10.10 "Yosemite", apple moved to a yearly release cycle. Every single release has been more unstable than the last, removed more functionality than the last, replaced more of the UNIX like parts of the OS with proprietary, undocumented frameworks and APIs. Apple got into pissing matches with various hardware vendors, notably nVidia, leaving Mac users who had invested in expensive nVidia GPUs out in the cold after High Sierra.

And now, with the move to macOS 11 marks a huge departure from pretty much everything that I used to love about hackintoshing. It's no longer fun for me. Big Sur breaks way too many things, and it's going to be a while before the community can catch back up. at this point, you're basically stuck building a new PC with known good components in order to run Big Sur. You're not just going to be able to upgrade your existing hack - I've had a zero percent success rate thus far, and honestly I'm too busy these days to even want to invest the time into learning the ins and outs of OpenCore. And why should I? Apple silicon is here to stay. The current generation of Macs are the very last that will ever receive x86 CPUs. when these go EOL in a couple years, that will be that. Apple will have effectively killed off the Hackintosh scene in one fell swoop.

But I ask - why would anyone actually WANT to run Big Sur? the fact that it's an enormous pain in the ass to install aside... From a privacy and security standpoint, I'm immediately turned off by all of the shady shit that Apple has shoehorned into this OS. The creepy call home stuff that you can't turn off or bypass, not even on VPN or with little snitch. I've hated SIP since it first came out, and Apple have really doubled down on it in Big Sur. Now it's gotten to the point where Apple can literally deny your computer the ability to run arbitrary code if they so choose. no thanks. I'm done. I'm out. Catalina was the last stop for me. After 10.15 goes EOL, I'm migrating my servers over to Linux and I'll probably just switch to using Windows 10 for my desktop (not that Windows 10 is any better from a security and privacy standpoint, but at least you can turn off and rip out most of the worst things like Cortana and Security Center). Unfortunately, I rely on Office 365 apps for work, so I need to have a platform that supports them. Otherwise I'd switch to Linux everywhere and not look back.

Hackintoshing aside, now let's talk about the native Mac experience these days. I have a 2019 MacBook Pro for work and to be honest, it's one of the worst devices I've ever used. It overheats ALL the time, gets absolutely terrible battery life, apps freeze on it constantly (I'm pretty used to looking at beach balls when doing normal tasks like checking my email or opening a spreadsheet in Excel). There's a bug that neither Apple nor Cisco seem interested in fixing which prevents me from being on my company's VPN and using bluetooth (so... just my keyboard, mouse, trackpad and AirPods... no big deal... Just literally every single way I interact with my computer). I have the model with the Touch Bar and no escape key - which, as I mentioned before, I'm a Linux engineer (or was until I became a director). Using vim without a physical escape key is infuriating to say the least. Dongles everywhere... There are exactly 4 ports on this "Pro" device, and I need a goddamn dongle to plug ANYTHING into it. absolutely ridiculous for a device that costs thousands of dollars. It has an 8 core i9, 32 GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and still... I'm constantly looking at beach balls and waiting for apps to load. It's sad really... Hackintoshing is the thing that eventually convinced me to be a paying Apple customer, and then after owning several Macs, this garbage OS has convinced me to switch back to PC. Besides, I have to have Microsoft Project for my job, and using the web version on macOS is just not good enough. I'm probably going to switch over to Android soon too (flash AOSP without GAPPS over privacy concerns). iMessage was really the only thing keeping me on macOS + iPhoneOS. and now that I'm more or less forced to use a PC for work, I have pretty much no incentive to stay with Apple anymore. I'll miss my Apple Watch, but Fitbit makes a better fitness tracker at a fraction of the cost. At least my AirPods kinda work on Android.

so I guess this is my way of saying "So long and thanks for all the fish".

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