iATKOS | United Kingdom

I used to mess around with hackintosh using clover and later opencore, and have some experiences with installing mac os on incompatible system.

This macbook pro 2010 that I am tried to update holds a special place in my heart as it is the first mac computer that I have owned.

I still have skype installed on it, and have patients who are younger than it, that is how old it is.

All the other macs that came after do not appeal to me, whether it be the lack of connectivity: no 3.5mm, really? and now the ugly receeding hairline notch on the new ones.

The last OS available for this MBP is 10.13.6.

I usually only use it for data logging whilst roasting coffee, and very light word processing tasks so that has not really bothered me.

But with more and more programmes dropping support for 10.13.6, I needed to upgrade to maintain even basic functionality.

Following the very well written guide on the opencore legacy patcher github, I managed to install sequoia with opencore.

Problems I encountered during the installation:

• The first usb installer stick I created did not work. USB boot did work, and I could use the disk utility and safari whilst in the installer. However, when I press install, it says something along the lines of the installer does not work and please try again later. I downloaded the installer again, and recreated the USB installer and for some reason it worked. I guess computers work in mysterious ways, and it is totally reasonale to try the same thing and expect different outcomes.
• The first time the installer rebooted, the default booted my original high sierra desktop, which caused some confusion.
• The installation took a long............................. time. In the order of 6-7 hours. Thankfully much of that I need not be there, it was just the progress bar slowly crawling across the screen.

Things that work:

• All the root patches are installed automatically because I created the installer using the opencore patcher.
• Wifi, the built in touch pad and keyboard works.
• Both USB ports work.
• Built in speaker and microphone works.
• Screen brightness control works.
• Keyboard backlight controll works.
• Charging works is slower than before the upgrade, but I think that is from the increased power consumption of running the new OS, and I no longer have a original magsafe charger to test.
• I have only used it for less than an hour now, but not discovered any show stopping problems. Admittedly I am not fully in the apple ecosystem, and do not have an iphone to test mirroring, imessage, facetime etc. But so far Everything just works!

Things that do not work:

• After the first boot after the installation, my little 2 core CPU was pinned at 100% for hours, but eventually it finished what it needed to do. Now every little thing I do would peak the CPU to 100%, but I guess that is just the way it is.

• GPU acceleration in neither chrome nor safari. I kind of expected that, because it never worked in 10.13.6 neither due to nvidia and apple falling out.

• parsec, crashes on launch and just displays a blank window. Not done any research on getting it working yet.

Thanks again to the developers of opencore for breathing new life into my little macbook pro!