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    The end: macOS Tahoe unveiled

    WWDC Keynote, June 9th, 2025.
    Apple unveiled macOS 26 Tahoe.
    As usual, 1st beta version was immediately made available to developers and 1st public beta will be available in July with a final release in the fall.
     

     
    The major novelty is Liquid Glass that replaces Aqua. And the version numbering, of course, which Apple will now unify across the board (macOS, iOS, etc.).
     

     
    As expected, this is the very last macOS version to support Intel platforms; it will therefore put the final nail in the coffin of Hackintoshing on Intel platforms; after nearly 20 years, it will have been a good run!
     
    Tahoe drops support for all systems older than 9th gen. Coffee Lake, 10th gen. Comet Lake/Ice Lake and Cascade Lake platforms, i.e. those 8th gen. Coffee Lake MacMini8,1/MacBookPro15,x/iMac19,x and Skylake iMacPro1,1 that had remained supported in Sequoia. Surprisingly, 10th gen. Ice Lake MacBookAir9,1 laptops appear dropped too but, given that 2020 ICL-based MBP16,2 remain supported, those last Intel MBA should nevertheless be able to run Tahoe too -to be confirmed-.
     
    Minimum Intel platform requirements are therefore:
    iMac20,x (10th gen. Comet Lake) MacBookPro16,1 (9th gen. Coffee Lake) MacBookPro16,2 (10th gen. Ice Lake) MacPro7,1 (Cascade Lake)
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    Support for Broadcom wireless cards in Sonoma & later (Clover and Opencore)

    As stated when 1st beta was released and confirmed when it was officially released, Sonoma dropped support for Broadcom cards that were supported up to Ventura. A solution based on OpenCore bootloader and the OCLP Patcher has been available since mid-summer of 2023.
     
    Nothing new on the matter as I post this article in January 2024, except that, good news for Clover users (yes, we still exist!), the solution now works with Clover too and is no longer limited to OpenCore.
     
    The issue for Clover users was that there was no readily available solution to block vanilla IOSkywalkFamily kext from being loaded at startup, even when trying to do this through patching the Info.plist file of the kext in the Clover config. No matter what, as long as the vanilla kext loaded/was cached, injecting the replacing kext would result in immediate Kernel Panic.
     
    This was finally resolved in Clover r5157 which integrates a kext patch in the form of a flag that can be enabled in the Clover config: BlockSkywalk (NB: it does not work with version r5155 or r5156).
     
    With this patch enabled, the abandoned IO80211FamilyLegacy from previous macOS version can be loaded/injected and so can the older/replacement version of the IOSkywalkFamily kext that is required. This being put in place, the OCLP patcher can then be used to apply the wireless root patch (whether Modern wireless or Legacy wireless) to finalise the Sonoma wireless fix.
     
    Broadcom cards that we all previously used up to Ventura, whether DW1560 (BCM5352 chipset), DW1820A (BCM4350 chipset) or Apple's own BCM94360xxx (BCM4360 and related chipsets) can now be used in macOS Sonoma exactly as they could in Ventura and earlier macOS versions.
     

     
    See our dedicated thread on the matter for full details.
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    New driver for Realtek PCIe card readers!

    There's renewed interest on the development of drivers for Realtek PCIe card readers and it's fantastics news!
     
    Last year, we reported here on Cholonam's work that, building on the original work of developper Sinetek, gave a new life to some of our Realtek card readers. It was pretty good stuff and allowed many of us with, say RTS525a card readers, to finally be able to use SD cards under macOS. Performance was however pretty limited.
     
    This year, Austere.J (aka Firewolf) has embarked on writing a brand new driver and, my God, is it good! The driver is under active development as we write but Austere.J has started on the RTS525a with super results and he's adding support for other Realtek RTS models too.
     
    2 x major improvements compared to Cholonam's driver:
    the card reader is now reported as built-in in SysInfo the card's full performance is being achieved  

     
     

     
    You can follow the on-going R&D here at Insanelymac and drivers are posted here on FireWolf's GitHub repo.
     
    Please join me in helping Austere.J in the testing and give him the support and thanks he deserves.
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