I tried turning off dedicated AMD graphics and as expected, I lost support for a secondary display. Even without graphics acceleration, it hasn’t given me any real issues. I installed it on my 2011 17in mbp with AMD graphics and it runs fine. Although some newer officially unsupported Macs reportedly run Big Sur fine, many older Macs are not supported for a reason, and so the expectation shouldn’t be for a great or perfect experience if you go this route.
#Macos big sur supported devices mac os
Is this worth the hassle, risk, or effort to force Big Sur onto an unsupported Mac? That’s for you to decide, depending on your technical competency and how badly you want to run macOS Big Sur on a Mac that it wasn’t intended for.įor the vast majority of Mac users, if you’re already running a functional version of Mac OS system software on another computer, it’s recommended to simply stay on whatever version that is rather than try to force the Mac to run unsupported system software. The experience now is closer to that of running a Hackintosh PC compared to simply patching an installer and letting it run on an older Mac. If you have past experience using the excellent DosDude tool for Mojave or for installing Catalina on unsupported Macs, you’ll find the Big Sur Micropatcher is not quite as simple, and Dosdude has already publicly stated that a Big Sur patcher will not become available.
You’ll want to be sure to read through the entire document and follow the steps very carefully if you attempt to go this route, as it’s fairly complicated.Īs with all unofficial tweaks and mods like this, there is no official support, but there’s a useful thread on MacRumors Forums that pertains to the topic that may be of use to the adventurous users out there who wish to try this.
It’s fairly well documented on the patches Github page, but it’s not for the average user by any means, and you’re on your own if you attempt to use it to run Big Sur on a Mac that otherwise wouldn’t support it. The approach we’ll mention here is perhaps the best documented, using a “primitive USB patcher” that is applied to a USB boot disk.
#Macos big sur supported devices install
If you’re an advanced user who is comfortable with running unsupported system software on unsupported hardware, and you’re feeling adventurous, there are some solutions to install and run macOS Big Sur on unsupported Macs, but it’s nowhere near as straight forward or simple as installing Big Sur on an officially supported Mac is.