If you dream of being able to install Mac OS X on a Chromebook it is time to open your eyes. Someone has done it.
In another case of “because why not?”, developer ‘Coolstar’ has managed to squeeze Mac OS X 10.9.1 ‘Mavericks’ on to his (upgraded) Acer C720 Chromebook.
Yes, natively.
yup, at the desktop of OS X 10.9.1… On a chromebook, lol pic.twitter.com/lYpqMzFOGG
— CoolStar (@coolstarorg) June 2, 2015
Installing OS X on hardware that is not sold by Apple is difficult but not super difficult.
An entire ‘hackintosh‘ community has grown up around the concept and is dedicated to providing the tools, custom drivers and kernel patches needed to run the OS on devices Apple would rather it didn’t.
For this Acer C720 Chromebook Coolstar says he needed to use a ‘custom coreboot and fake CPU via clover EFI’.
Mavericks doesn’t run smoothly on the notebook, neither figuratively or literally. A lack of graphics acceleration means Safari is “sluggish”. Many of the core interface animations and workflows will also be affected.
Is this real?
I know what some of you may be thinking: that this isn’t real. It must be Mac OS X 10.9 running in a virtual machine, right?
Maybe. But given the developer behind this effort that is highly unlikely.
Coolstar is not an unknown. He has form for tinkering, fudging and hacking, from iOS to Chrome OS.
Last month he detailed his on-going effort to get Windows 8.1 running on this exact same Chromebook — even going as far as to port Linux drivers to Windows by hand.
Now that’s dedication!
The question of whether the effort it takes to install alternative OSes on a Chromebook, often with wildly varying degrees of success, is worth it.
But I think that question misses the core point of why people like Coolstar do this. They do it because they can.