Have you ever wished for the day when you’d be able to run macOS on your iPhone or iPad? This is certainly a pipe dream for many users, and something Apple never plans to implement, but one hacker has managed to get things working – at least partially.
Duy Tran (@khanhduytran0), known for their contributions to the jailbreak community and various iPhone hack projects, shared a photograph on social media platform 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) over the weekend that appears to show a notched iPhone running macOS.
According to Tran, the macOS applications Activity Monitor and Xcode are running on the device in the image, and a separate image shown is an actual screenshot rather than just a camera image:
Tran also took to /r/jailbreak on Monday to share more information, including mentioning help from zhuowei and discussing how this originated from “exploring ways to provide Metal acceleration.” More details below:
I wasted a week trying to make M1 driver working, but it ended up only panicking my phone a lot…
Luckily, I found out iOS simulator provides an interestingly convenient way to do so: streaming Metal via XPC. It only took me 2 days to get it working.
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 (Window Server, Control Center, Dock, and even Xcode 15b8).
This shows how much potential jailbreak can do other than just customizations. If this ends up being a one-click project, it would benefit iPad users a lot. Unfortunately, there are some graphical glitches and simulator’s Metal limitations when doing this way, so it would only work best on M iPads having native GPU drivers.
Tran has since published a work-in-progress repository on their GitHub page for those interested to check out, but they warn that it’s highly technical and that most users would not be able to utilize this yet.
It will be interesting to see how the project progresses as Tran continues to research it further. But at this point, it looks like a very early alpha if anything.
