Macos Mojave Unsupported Mac

So, it was the end of the line for my 27″ 2011 iMac. After 7 years of service, the new OS (MacOS 10.14 “Mojave”) wasn’t going to be able to be installed on the old faithful. There’s some tech reasons for that – Apple moved to minimum standard for graphics cards for their system (they have to support Metal). While there’s external GPU’s for my iMac, I haven’t seen one that supports Mojave. And, even if it did, I probably can’t afford it.

My test Mac for this project is a late 2008 MacBook Pro with 8 GB of ram and an SSD in place of the spinner hard drive. I don't boot the MacBook Pro more often because I find using two different versions of the macOS on two diffent machines annoying. The perfect reason to try a hack I'd seen which allows running Mojave on some unsupported. Click “Tools” and then click “Download macOS Mojave” in the dropdown menu when it appears. Click continue, and then select where you will save the installer. Once the Mojave installer has finished downloading, select the Mojave icon in the macOS Mojave Patcher window. Select your Mojave installer and click open. Insert your desired USB drive, open Disk Utility, and format it as OS X Extended (Journaled). Open the 'macOS Mojave Patcher' tool, and browse for your copy of the macOS Mojave Installer App.Ensure that the tool successfully verifies the app. Next, select your USB drive in the Target Volume list, and click 'Start Operation.'

And I certainly can’t afford a new Mac at the moment.

The is a bit of an issue, since I’ve got to be able to compile a project for release very soon. Well… shit.

Fortunately, there’s always someone somewhere that wants to get just a little more life out of their machine – in this case, the Mojave Patcher will do some trickery to load MacOS on a machine that’s not supposed to have it. Nice. Though, reading the notes, it mentions machines with a Radeon 5xxx or 6xxx series GPU had weird colors. Well, how bad could it be.

Macos Mojave Unsupported Mac Os

The answer is very. But, there’s a simple fix (for me, at least). Typically, I run dual screen. When starting the process, I turned off the second screen and went about installing, getting everything working, and back to developing software. It would be unusable with the “weird colors” if I wanted to do any graphics work.

I turned the second screen back on, which is attached via Thunderbolt to HDMI. Boom – suddenly all of my colors were correct again!

That didn’t solve the other problems, though – hardware acceleration is disabled, which means my fairly snappy iMac runs like a dog. For doing something like writing this blog, it’s fine (I’m using Chrome, though results appear the same in Safari.) I would have said YouTube would be worthless, but actually it seems to run YouTube videos just fine. Same goes for NetFlix, though there’s some issues with the animations for launching a show.

Install Macos Mojave Unsupported Mac

I’m dreading seeing what performance is like running the Android or iOS emulators (if they launch at all.) . I’ll find out what the damage is there tomorrow.

Macos Mojave Unsupported Mac

So is Mojave usable on my old machine? Yes. Is the machine still usable? Yeeeaaahhhh… for the most part. I think it’s gonna take me a bit to get used to the laggy interface. Since I have to compile stuff and sign it for the App Stores, I HAVE to run Mojave, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered with the upgrade. Should you bother with it? Up to you if you’re on an old, unsupported Mac. (Obviously if you’re on a supported Mac, by all means upgrade)

Upgrade Unsupported Mac

Run into the color issue? Try plugging in a second monitor and see if that does the trick. Honestly, I have no idea why it worked, but it does. 🙂

MacMacos Mojave Unsupported Mac

Two updates to this (and probably some more to come later):

Mac Mini 2011 Mojave

First, scrolling in Safari was laggy and choppy. Dragging windows around was choppy. Quick fix – lower the resolution from the maximum (2560 x 1440) to one step top (1920 x 1080) pretty much eliminated it. Not butter smooth, but a huge improvement on all of them. It’s much more usable.

Now for the “wow, that gets weird” part: the “weird colors” issue reappeared on my main monitor, but the secondary display has the right colors. Reverting back to the previous resolution doesn’t fix it. Definitely a WTF item. 🙂