macOS Sequoia 15.0 beta 1: early feedback and findings

Hervé · June 13

List of dropped platforms only extends to Intel 8th gen. Amber Lake MacBookAir8,1 this year, all other platforms officially supported by Sonoma remaining supported in Sequoia.

Good news for Skylake platforms: since KBL graphics drivers are retained, SKL graphics remain supported through the same patches used for Ventura and Sonoma. On the wireless front, OCLP patcher will need to be updated for Sequoia so that legacy Broadcom cards are supported again.

Other than that, nothing much to report after just a brief spell with Sequoia 1st beta other than it feels a little more responsive than Sonoma and there are odd bugs (for example, an empty white window that may pop up at startup and cannot be closed or occasional mouse selection trailings).

Installation on my Skylake Latitude E7270 was very straightforward and totally painless: from Sonoma, I updated Clover to r5159 (revised to boot Sequoia), changed my Clover config's SMBIOS to MBP15,2 (necessary), disabled the BlockSkywalk kernel & kext patch (necessary) and added boot arg -lilubetaall (also necessary). I then rebooted Sonoma, downloaded the Sequoia beta installation package and launched the installation targeting a dedicated Sequoia volume (previously created in Disk Utility). That was it, after a couple of reboots, I was offered the Sequoia setup screens and was presented with the Sequoia desktop.

Resources:

Sequoia beta 1 installation package can be downloaded here.
Clover_r5159.pkg.zip
E7270_Clover_pack_Seq_15.0.b1.zip

Working:

graphics acceleration with same KBL settings as in Ventura/Sonoma
brightness control
HDMI output
mini-DP output
touchscreen
touchpad (after replacing VoodooPS2Controller's PlugIn "VoodooInput" by 1Revenger1's version v1.1.5 due to changes in Sequoia as explained here. 1Revenger1_VoodooInput_v1.1.5.zip)
audio (incl. DP/HDMI audio)
LAN
Apple (Broadcom) BCM94360CS2 Bluetooth
USB ports
SD card reader
full CPU power management
sleep & wake (having disabled hibernation)

Not working:

Apple (Broadcom) BCM94360CS2 wireless, as per Sonoma. We'll have to wait for the OCLP patcher to be updated for Sequoia. Meantime, it's important not to boot with the BlockSkywalk kernel & kext patch and/or with AMFI prevention or Sequoia will KP/fail to boot.