macOS Sonoma is now available for developers to have a fresh bite of its new features, you may want to keep up with the latest advantages and get ready to upgrade your Mac, but only to find your Mac doesn’t support.
macOS Sonoma has strict system requirements, only Macs in following models can upgrade to Sonoma.
But luckily, there is a way around this strict requirement, using the open source tool OpenCore Legacy Patcher, which is also the only way to install macOS on an unsupported Mac so far. And before the installation, let’s be clear: if your Mac is already not in good condition, we recommend against updating your macOS to Sonoma to make it worse.
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3 items are needed to install Sonoma on an unsupported Mac, and each has specification requirements as follows. Upgrading to Sonoma on an unsupported Mac is a long and complicated process, we should make sure these equipment in good behavior to avoid bugs or any negative consequences.
For the reason that we need to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher for the installation, which supports Metal GPU Mac 2012 and later, any Mac in the model 2012 or later with 8 GB Ram will be good to use. In addition, we need to make sure there is enough space to install Sonoma on our Mac, at least 40 GB left. It is never a good idea to force install Sonoma on a Mac that runs very slow or works improperly.
When your Mac doesn’t comply with the hardware requirement for installing Sonoma, the safest way to force install is to create a macOS installer on a USB drive. By doing so, even if some of Sonoma’s features cannot work normally, or the system gets corrupted after installation, you can still revert to the previous macOS easily.
You will need a 16-GB USB drive or larger, the newer version it is, the better, let’s say USB 4.0 and plus, USB 3.0 and plus.
It is recommended to use a spared USB drive that you don’t use to backup file very often, since we need to format the USB to create a clean macOS installer.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher is the indispensable tool, and the only tool helping us install Sonoma on an unsupported Mac.
According to the official, OpenCore is a sophisticated boot loader used to inject and patch data in memor. Instead of modifying macOS directly, it loads an OS, scans the system and adds support for unsupported hardware, while the legacy patcher is a utility tool to configure and install OpenCore, using a template for users to automate installing OpenCore on Mac.
The latest version of OpenCore Legacy Patcher is 0.6.8, which is released on July 27th, 2023. According to its official release page, 0.6.8 only supports macOS Big Sur through Ventura, but basing on test, it indeed supports macOS Sonoma.
macOS Sonoma is still under development, and forcing installing macOS on an unsupported Mac won’t guarantee the system’s stability and compatibility, therefore, we cannot anticipate the problems that we are going to encounter in this process, but some preliminary work will help us to bypass glitches and prevent data loss as much as possible.
The most secure way to minimize negative consequences of upgrading Sonoma on unsupported Mac is to back up all your important data at the very beginning. You can directly copy some of files to an external storage device, or use Time Machine to back up the data as following:
Formatting a drive can erase all the data to have full space available, also can scan and repair the drive for bad sectors, it is the best way to troubleshoot if there is anything wrong about this drive. To create macOS installer via USB and install Sonoma without failure, we recommend to using a clean and formatted USB drive with Mac-exclusive allocation system.
You should download the latest version of OpenCore Legacy Patcher, it is 450MB and can be downloaded from this page: https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases
To open the program after downloading, click Open when seeing following message.
Now, let’s check how to install Sonoma on an unsupported Mac, please follow our guide step by step to avoid any possible error.
macOS update brings new features and performance improvement, but sometimes, it causes troubles as well. It is reported that some files on Mac have been deleted or lost for unknown reasons after installing new macOS, this may be even common to install macOS on an unsupported Mac.
Luckily, there is an easy way to recover lost files in the event of Sonoma installation deleting your files, using Cisdem Data Recovery.
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By installing Sonoma on your unsupported Mac, you will be able to experience all of its new features and give your Mac a boost to work better. But it is a challenging job, success or failure, it depends on a lot of factors, those preliminary work in the preparation guidelines are very important to avoid possible problems. And no matter how complicated it is to install Sonoma on your Mac would be, you should always back up your data before any action.
Connie has been writing for Mac productivity and utility apps since 2009. Each review and solution is based on her practical tests, she is aways energetic and trustworthy in this field.
Kathryn Rider
Unbelievable, i just followed the guide step by step and it worked, i never thought i would succeed. I get a new Mac and just run a testing to install Sonoma on my old iMac, now all my Macs can work on the latest system, that's great.