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.
- Here is the step by step method to run Mojave on unsupported Macs. The whole process can be divided into four parts. Getting all the required things; Part 2. Downloading the macOS Mojave Installer App; Part 3. Making a bootable Mojave USB drive; Part 4. Installing and Patching Mojave OS on the unsupported computer.
- Download the Mojave 10.14.6 Update or Combo Update in Post #1 or the update from Apple's Mac App Store and run it - the updater will reboot upon completion. Note: Update will reboot twice; each time Clover picks the correct boot partition.
The video below demonstrates a tutorial walking through the process of using the DosDude Catalina patcher tool to install the macOS 10.15 system software on an unsupported Mac. If you’re going to attempt to install MacOS Catalina on an unsupported Mac, do so at your own risk, and let us know how it goes in the comments below. Install macOS Catalina on Unsupported Mac. Now, follow the steps shown below carefully to load the installer, erase your local disk, and install macOS Catalina from USB drive you created in above step. Step 1: Boot Mac from USB Installer. To do this, insert the installer and hold down the Option key as you restart your Mac.
Install Mojave On Unsupported Mac Dosdude1
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.
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.
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.
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)
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. 🙂
Install Mojave On Unsupported Macbook Pro
Two updates to this (and probably some more to come later):
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.
Dosdude1 Mojave
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. 🙂