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What if you could run the full macOS on your iPhone or iPad? Quite a few people have made the case to run macOS especially on the latter, and it seems this isn’t as much of an unobtainable pipe dream as you might think. Duy Tran has been working on getting macOS to run on jailbroken iPhones and iPads, and it seems he’s making some headway.
Eventually, I managed to boot somewhat macOS 13.4 natively on my iPhone XS Max on iOS 16.5; keyboard & mouse input is currently done via VNC. After some manual patching, many apps and daemons running (WindowServer, ControlCenter, Dock, and even Xcode 15b8).
↫ Duy Tran on Reddit
It should go without saying this is incredibly limited so far, and there’s immense amounts of work required to bring this to a point where anyone could use this in any serious manner. Still, it’s very impressive so far, and it shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that macOS can, indeed, run on iPads if Apple wanted it to. This initial code is on GitHub, but it’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
This is quite an achievement.
Obviously not very useful. But reminded me of the time my (back then) Samsung Galaxy had a full Linux desktop under DeX .
(they later dropped that feature)
Awesome experiment.
Desktop vs. Phone: For some time there had been the dream of taking your PC inside a phone and merging the two worlds. Having a smartphone that you can interact with the finger, and connecting the smartphone to a Monitor, Mouse and Keyboard and work it as a PC. The idea is not new, but it never took off.
Is it something dumb? or it was not good with the past technology and it’s worth trying it again?
I live this reality today with my Librem 5. And there’s the upcoming https://liberux.net/ that should be even better.
I’ve worked from 10.000km away only with my Librem 5 connected to a USB-C monitor and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Azure sysadmin. Also sending and receiving emails, teams calls (audio only), and Signal and Web Banking via Waydroid.
Apple would never do that because it would cannibalize Mac sales (why sell only an iphone if you can sell an iphone and a mac).
Microsoft doesn’t sell phones or makes a phone OS.
Google is too dysfunctional for that. Samsung was not strong and persistent enough.
The Librem 5 has been my only smartphone for 2 years now.
I wouldn’t be suprised if Apple had internal builds of MacOS/iOS for iPhone, iPad and regular PCs, as well as full QEMU based stack for testing. Debugging on hardware is annoying and integrating QEMU into CI workflow is doable. Multi-architecture builds allow catching weird bugs easier.
Apple certainly had MacOS builds on iPhone/iPad hardware (even if it was a custom form factor) on the run up to ARM Macs. The Apple developer transition kit was basically an iPad in a Mac Mini case. I’m sure they probably had working builds on retail hardware as well, probably with custom virtual keyboard software and everything.