Apple may not be merging macOS and iPadOS, but the two version 26 operating systems share a lot of similarities. Still, the quest to actually port the Mac operating system to the iPad continues.
As Steve Troughton-Smith suggests Mastodon, “hackintosh” may soon refer to an iPad running macOS and not a homegrown Mac clone.
“Apple may not bring macOS to iPad, but it looks like we’re getting to a point where people can hackintosh it together on a jailbroken device anyway,” he writes.
In a series of posts on X, Duy Tran attaches images showing very broken but somewhat functional instances of Terminal, Disk Utility, Activity Monitor, and even Xcode running on iPhone hardware.
The work-in-progress documentation for the effort is hosted on Duy Tran’s GitHub page under the project name MacWSBootingGuide. The state of the project is very much in early development, however, so you’ll want to know what you’re doing to a certain degree before trying this at home.
This kind of experiment is only possible because of modern jailbreak tools, which are becoming increasingly rare.
Tools like palera1n, which supports up to iOS 18.3.2, and Dopamine can still unlock certain iPhones and iPads, but compatibility depends on the device’s chip and OS version. Older models with A11 or earlier processors benefit from the unpatchable checkm8 exploit, while newer devices can only be jailbroken on specific older firmware.
Meanwhile, you can see all the Mac-like changes coming to the iPad operating system in iPadOS 26 here. The software is currently available as a developer or public beta. Apple will likely release the update as a finished 1.0 version in September.
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