Apple macOS Sierra: how about that compatibility list?
Owners of pre-2009 MacBooks and iMacs, as well as pre-2010 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro computers won’t be able to install Apple’s next generation Mac operating system, macOS Sierra, at least officially.
With that said, according to reports from hackintosh-based communities, there may be a chance to install Sierra on older Macs, granted a committed attitude, and a few tricks of the trade.
The primary reason for older Macs to be left out of the official upgrade is obvious: older Macs lack the hardware specs to guarantee an optimal user experience, with a number of them where certain features won’t work at all, as we will be exploring further down this article.
Another reason why older Macs didn’t make the list, is due to the fact that Sierra will not run on CPUs older than Intel Penryn Core 2 Duo, which is a class of processors produced between 2007 and 2008, built on the same 45nm architecture as Celeron, Pentium and Xeon. Any Penryn CPU prior to Core 2 Duo will not allow Sierra to perform a straightforward install.
Aside from CPU requirements, Sierra needs at least 4GB of RAM to run properly, but more is recommended to ensure smooth operations.
Mac developer Colin Mistr (AKA DosDude1), has reportedly developed a patch that allows macOS Sierra to install and run on a wider array of Macs than the one published by Apple, which includes (as quoted from DosDude1’s website):
- Early-2008 or newer Mac Pro, iMac, or MacBook Pro
- Late-2008 or newer MacBook Air or Aluminum Unibody MacBook
- Early-2009 or newer Mac Mini or white MacBook
As previously mentioned, the patch will work on all older systems listed above, with some caveats, such as macOS Sierra’s lack of support for older chips. This means that some hardware will not work, including WiFi connectivity, on the following Macs:
- Late 2008 MacBook Air
- Mid 2009 MacBook Air
- Early 2008 MacBook Pro
- Mid 2008 MacBook Pro
- Early 2008 iMac
- Early 2008 Mac Pro
It goes without saying that features like automatic unlock when in proximity with an Apple Watch is not guaranteed to work on Macs that fall outside of Apple’s official compatibility list.