Deckintosh has Apple’s latest macOS Sequoia running on the Steam Deck

The subsequent big Hackintosh distribution may end up being for Valve’s Steam Deck for all devices—at least according to an October 3 tweet from whatdahopper on Twitter, which showcased a very early version of a Hackintosh macOS X Sequoia recovery dialog displayed on Steam Deck. 

While the recovery dialog works, it’s not quite aligned with the Deck’s screen properly, and this Hackintosh’d Steam Deck is so barebones that it doesn’t even have GPU acceleration intact yet. However, it is still able to boot!

For those unfamiliar, “Hackintosh” refers to the practice of running macOS on devices other than an Apple iMac or corresponding Apple laptops, such as the MacBook Air. For select users who want the offerings of macOS but don’t want to make a full-time commitment to that ecosystem with a Mac purchase, it often makes sense to use a hacked-together Hackintosh distribution with a custom-built PC rather than paying Apple’s (usually) much higher entry fee for playing around with macOS.

As @whatdahopper notes in the original thread, this exercise is mostly pointless besides its utility to educate and/or prove a point. However, it’s believed that the Steam Deck could actually end up being an ideal fit for Hackintosh since RDNA2 is already supported by MacOS and “akin to NootRX, the hardware in the Steam Deck is practically perfect.” According to its GitHub page, NootRX is “an unsupported AMD RDNA2 dedicated GPU kext” to enable improved RDNA 2 support on Mac OS X.

This version of Steam Deck Hackintosh— or Deckintosh, if you will— definitely isn’t meant as a serious replacement for SteamOS 3 or anything like that. However, its development continues, and on October 4, we got an update Tweet showcasing the Steam Deck, which is now fully booted into Mac OS X while reading as an iMac Pro to the operating system. Full booting compared to a recovery screen is impressive, but until GPU acceleration is added, any remotely mainstream use of Deckintosh will likely remain a pipe dream.

It’s still a pretty cool technical achievement on this modder’s part, though, so we’ll be keeping an eye on the development of Steam Deck Hackintosh as it progresses if it should progress significantly past this point. Deckintosh may end up being just a proof of concept, at the end of the day— but in the long run, it could prove one of the most tantalizingly price-accessible ways to play around with macOS.