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.

Sorry if this isn’t the right place for this. I’ve just purchased the top end late ‘09 Mac Mini (needed Mac OS, didn’t want to hackintosh and couldn’t really afford a newer Mac, the price was too good to turn down) with the 2.5 ghz Core 2 Duo, and 4gb of RAM, although I have read it will support up to 8 unofficially. Mojave Patcher allows you to create a custom Mojave installer disk for installing Mojave on a unsupported Mac. It is available here. There is also a list of Macs that it works with, so check that out first. It includes a list of known bugs, which is not necessarily complete (see below regarding my own experience). But, if you're now wondering where it gets Mojave from, you've spotted a potential hang-up in the process. To get a copy of macOS Mojave to install on an unsupported Mac, you have to be in the Apple Beta program but more importantly than that, you have to download it on a supported Mac.

• 10.14 late 2011 macos mojave unsupported unsupported mac Sort by reaction score; Forums. MacOS Mojave (10.14). Status The first post of this thread is a.
• It is possible, thanks to a little tool called the macOS Mojave Patcher 1 created by a fellow that goes by dosdude1. I have an iMac 2011 that I use (it’s not my primary or even my secondary machine, but one I use mainly for Quora) and so I thoug.

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.

Install Mojave On Unsupported Macbook Pro

Macos Mojave On Unsupported Mac

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.

Install Mojave On Unsupported Mac Without Usb

Install Mojave On Unsupported Mac Mini

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. 🙂

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

Mojave Unsupported Mac Forum

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.

How To Install Mojave On Unsupported Mac

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. 🙂