Simon is a Computer Science BSc graduate who has been writing about technology since 2014, and using Windows machines since 3.1. After working for an indie game studio and acting as the family's go-to technician for all computer issues, he found his passion for writing and decided to use his skill set to write about all things tech.
Since beginning his writing career, he has written for many different publications such as WorldStart, Listverse, and MakeTechEasier. However, after finding his home at MakeUseOf in February 2019, he would eventually move on to its sister site, XDA, to bring the latest and greatest in Windows, Linux, and DIY electronics.
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Summary
- Snapintosh runs macOS 27 on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite (Asus Zenbook A16).
- It's glitchy now — Wi‑Fi, GPU, and performance need work, but it boots Apple's kernel.
- Repo shows EL2 hypervisor, platform hooks; gitignore hints the dev used Anthropic's Claude.
The newest trend in AI is getting software running on hardware where it really shouldn't be. People have been having a blast porting games to other consoles and PCs, but one person is on a mission: to get macOS 27 running on a Snapdragon X2. And the best part is, it seems surprisingly doable.
Snapintosh aims to get macOS 27 onto a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite
It's working well so far
As spotted by Windows Central, Miguel Cruz on X is currently working on getting macOS 27 on an Asus Zenbook A16 laptop running a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite. You can see their progress in the video below: it's quite choppy, but it is, unmistakably, macOS 27 running on a Zenbook. And this is just the start.
The project is called Snapintosh, a play on the term "Hackintosh," given to projects that port macOS to non-Apple devices. A big part of making a Hackintosh is connecting the hardware to the software so they play nicely, and Cruz says he's making progress there:
"It is an EL2 monitor (hypervisor) and the toolchain around it. The monitor runs Apple's stock kernelcache (the J700/T8140 kernel) unmodified by default. It supplies the platform contracts that the kernel expects from Apple silicon: the SPTM and TXM monitor calls, translation of the kernel's 16 KiB page tables, and the Apple devices the kernel looks for."
Cruz didn't explicitly state what he used to develop this, but given how he mentioned that he was working on "de-slopifying the codebase" and that the project's gitignore file specifically mentions a Claude directory, there's a good chance Cruz used Anthropic's AI model to get the job done. You can check out all the details for yourself over on the Snapintosh GitHub repo.
