macOS Installation Guide

My laptop was slow. The kind of slow where opening a second app is a decision you think about first.

Then a relative lent me a MacBook for one day and told me to do whatever I wanted with it. I spent the whole day just using it. What stuck with me was not any particular feature. Apps opened with no delay at all, and moving between them cost nothing. After a year of waiting for windows to finish drawing themselves, it felt like a different category of machine.

I gave it back the next morning and started wondering whether I could get macOS running on my own hardware, either in a VM or straight on the metal.

Everything failed in the same place

Most guides I found did not work. Different steps, different tools, same ending: bootloop. The installer starts, the Apple logo shows up, the machine restarts. Again and again.

So I stopped working through tutorials one at a time and lined all of them up next to each other instead, along with whatever else I could dig up, looking for what they had in common.

It came down to the CPU. Mine is an AMD Ryzen. Macs run Intel, and macOS is built expecting Intel. The two are different enough that the kernel gives up early.

Lying to the kernel

That changed the question. Instead of "how do I install macOS on AMD", it became "how do I make macOS believe this is not an AMD chip".

That is what the CPUID spoof does. A script rewrites the CPU identity the kernel reads at boot, so macOS sees an Intel i7 instead of a Ryzen. Once that was in place the bootloop stopped and the installer ran all the way through.

Everything after that was ordinary. Partitioning, install, first boot, signing in with an Apple account. No tricks needed, it just worked.

It was also unbelievably slow, because my laptop was still my laptop.

What's in the guide

The requirements section does most of the work. Before anything else it tells you what your machine needs:

• A CPU with AVX2, because macOS 13 and up require it
• Virtualization turned on in BIOS, AMD-V or Intel VT-x
• 8 GB of RAM minimum, 16 GB if you want a good time
• 70 GB of disk minimum, 200 GB recommended

It also notes that VMware Workstation Pro went free for personal and commercial use in May 2024, which makes a lot of the licensing advice still floating around outdated.

The AMD warning is the part most guides bury: turn off Hyper-V and Windows Memory Integrity first. If you don't, the VM fails in a way that gives you no hint about why.

After that it walks through pulling VMware Workstation Pro from the Broadcom portal, finding a macOS Sequoia 15 image on Olarila, and running the DrDonk unlocker that makes macOS show up as a guest option at all, then the install itself and a troubleshooting section for when it still refuses to boot.

What I still haven't fixed

3D acceleration. The VM has no GPU acceleration, so the entire desktop is drawn on the CPU. It stays heavy even on a Windows laptop with a dedicated GPU, because the GPU is not the part doing the work.

I have not found a fix, and I am not convinced a clean one exists. So the guide gets you a working macOS, just not a fast one.