Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b_A7xhdBFE
One Weird Trick For Running Modern macOS On Ancient Macs
Introduction
The last macOS release to officially support this 2008 Intel MacPro 3,1 was El Capitan way back in 2015, and that hasn’t received any security updates since 2018! So let’s run a bang up to date release instead, thanks to a community project known as OCLP.
Script
This rather magnificent beast you see on the desk in front of me is my 2008 Intel Mac Pro - a 17-year-old machine that has featured on the channel a couple of times previously - and in those previous videos, we discovered that this was actually quite the beast when it left the factory in 2008 with its dual quad core 2.8GHz Intel Xeon CPUs, and 20GB of RAM.
But that wasn’t enough - oh, no! I went on to add my own upgrades to this in the form of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 GPU with 4GB on board, a SATA drive to install the operating system, an NVMe PCI Express drive for data - which actually went on to install eXoDOS on - and a USB3 card - and to take advantage of all of this additional hardware, I decided the best operating system would be Windows 11, which actually runs surprisingly well on this 17-year-old machine.
But of course this thing was designed to run Apple’s operating system - macOS - with the last officially supported release being El Capitan all the way back in 2015.
Yep. 10 years ago. Subsequent releases dropping support for this particular generation of Intel Mac Pro - and if it were up to Apple, that would be the end of the story because, well, they’d rather you went out and bought a new Mac instead, thanks to their policy of planned obsolescence. But it turns out that modern releases of macOS can actually run quite happily on this ancient hardware thanks to the efforts of the community - specifically a project called OCLP or Open Core Legacy patcher.
And what this is, is basically a collection of kernel extensions and scripts that run on startup and inject themselves into the running macOS to re-enable the missing support for that older hardware - and it’s all very nicely packaged with this lovely graphical user interface and all this kind of wizard-based system, which of course we’ll have a look at in a second.
So, which modern release of macOS am I going to be running on my 2008 Intel Mac Pro? Well, of course there’s Sequoia, the very latest one with all of its wonderful AI stuff and whatnot built in, but to be honest, that hasn’t been out all that long - and the OCLP team haven’t had a huge amount of time to adapt all of their scripts and things and fix all of the issues with that so while it will boot on a 2008 Intel Mac Pro it leaves quite a lot to be desired, particularly as far as performance and stability are concerned - so we will skip that for now, although I would like to revisit it at some point in the future.
So, what about the previous release - Sonoma? That is, of course, officially supported by OCLP on this generation of Intel Mac Pro again, and actually it runs pretty well based on my experiments, but there are some workarounds and some hoops to jump through and some hardware that isn’t supported so not quite the seamless experience that I was looking for for this video and - hey, why should we suffer when we have Ventura from 2022, which is still an officially supported current release of macOS? In fact, the most recent release was the 31st of March 2025, and it’s not expected to reach end of life until the end of 2025.
It supports all the latest macOS software, gets security updates, and actually runs absolutely brilliantly on this machine ss I’m going to demo to you right now.
But first I’d just like to say a very quick thank you to this channel sponsor PCBWay.com. PCBWay has been offering PCB fabrication services to the community for over 10 years now, and has built up quite the reputation for fast turnaround times and excellent quality. They’ve also recently started offering additional services including CNC machining, injection molding, and 3D printing - so if any of those are a requirement for your next project, please do check out the link to PCBWay.com down in the description, and a big thank you once again to PCBWay for supporting the channel.
Now, back to OCLP.
So, the first thing we need to do, of course, is to create the installer for our Mac Pro - and as previously mentioned, I’m going to be using Open Core Legacy Patcher to do that - or OCLP - so this is the very latest version, the download link for this will be down in the description, and of course we also need a USB flash drive, so I’m just using a very basic bog standard USB 3 flash drive for this. But yeah, first things first, let’s get this installer created - so the first thing that we need to do in OCLP is go into Settings and we need to set our target model because of course we’re running this on a modern Apple Silicon MacBook Air here but of course, we want to build this for an Intel Mac Pro 3,1, which as it happens, is the oldest supported model by OCLP - so we select that - so yeah, we’ll just go through the options here - so I’m going to enable XHCI booting, not entirely necessary, but I do have a USB 3 card in this machine, and I may need that, so I may as well just enable it anyway.
And also NVMe booting, because I do have that NVMe drive in that PCI Express X16 enclosure thingy inside this machine - and based on the speed tests that I’ve done previously this is so, so much faster than the than the SATA drive that I have in here - the 500GB SATA drive that I’ve been booting from so far - so I’d really like to run OCLP from that SATA Drive and install the actual OS itself on the NVMe drive in that PCI Express adapter if I can. That’s something I want to experiment with, so I am going to enable that - and we don’t really need to worry too much about these other options - I’m not installing Sequoia, so I can untick this because otherwise we will be limited to four threads - and of course this is an eight core machine, so we’ll be limiting our performance if we leave that enabled - one of the reasons I’m going with Ventura over Sequoia because it is actually just going to run a lot better on this machine.
So we’ll just go through the other options here - I don’t think we need any of these things, I’m not really going to touch any of this, the defaults are generally quite sensible. Yeah, security stuff, SMBIOS stuff - we don’t need to do any of this on this machine. Root patching, that’s not even available to us for this machine - and, yeah, that’s pretty much all that we need - so if I click on Return - and what we can do here, if I just plug this in…
Allow this to connect, of course - and the next thing we need to do is to create the installer, so I actually already have the Ventura installer downloaded from my previous tinkering, but there is an option in here to download it if you need to do that and that works perfectly fine - so if I just go through to “Use an Existing Installer” and we select MacOS Ventura here, disk5 “Extreme”, click on “Yes” - and that’s going to create the customized installer for OCLP for Ventura, and copy it to our flash drive.
Okay! Wow, that didn’t take long at all, did it? So: “Successfully created the macOS installer. Installer created successfully. Would you like to continue and install Open Core to this disc?”
Now I will say the first time I ever did this and this message popped up, it did worry me quite a lot because I thought it was prompting me to install Open Core to this actual machine - this host machine here - but no, this is referring to the flash drive and you absolutely need to do this to make this bootable from the flash drive. Rookie mistake by me, I am not a smart man, I will be the first to admit, but there we go. Yes, of course it is safe to click on yes. That’s configured it.
“Would you like to install Open Core now?”
So we just click on “Install to Disk” and we select disk5 “Extreme” 64GB. We’ll put that in the EFI partition on there because this is an EFI disk - and there we go, success!
“Open Core has finished installing to disk. You can eject the drive, insert it into the Mac Pro 3,1, reboot, hold the Option key, and select Open Core / Boot EFIs option.”
…and as we’ll see in a second, it really is that easy!
Okay, so hold onto your butts, right, I’ll hold down the Option key or the Alt key as it’s otherwise known, press the power button - and there we go - so we have a few different boot options here - I think we can select these. They don’t have labels, which isn’t very helpful but that is the Open Core logo there, isn’t it?
Yes. Let’s pick that one.
Ah, there we go! “Install MacOS Ventura” - so if I just click on this. Okay, so this is OCLP doing its thing - it runs a few scripts and things just before the installer itself starts just to patch some kernel modules and stuff like that so this is all perfectly normal and it will take a while, but hopefully we should get the official Apple Ventura installer popping up in a moment.
Ah!
Ha - and we should have, yep - so we have a working mouse. Presumably the keyboard works, the mouse is connected via the keyboard - and we can go into the Disk Utility, or-
In fact, let’s do that: let’s go into Disk Utility and see if we can see… There it is, look at it! That’s the PCI Express-
In fact, there it is - “PCI Express external physical volume NTFS” - so that was the second drive that I was using in Windows 11. It’s got a 1TB SSD in IT, an NVMe SSD.
We’ll call it “Ventura” shall we? I know, very imaginative - and format that as a macOS volume - and I mean, it may well be that the installer would’ve done that as part of the process anyway, I’m not quite sure, I have had problems with that in the past, so just to be on the safe side - and we will fire up the Ventura installer.
I’ll just agree to this…
“I have read and agree”, of course, and “Select the disc where you want to install macOS Ventura.”
57 minutes remaining. Ah!
So 20 minutes in and we’ve just had our first reboot - it’s now showing 29 minutes remaining, which is obviously kind of on par with what it first predicted when the installer first set off - and I have noticed actually that the activity light has stopped flashing on the USB flash drive and is now flashing frantically on the NVMe drive internally so I guess that means that it’s doing stuff on there - so you never know, it might speed up, it might not take the full 50 minutes, but either way, I still think quite a reasonable install time if it does prove to be true - and it has just occurred to me actually that I do have that USB 3 card in there, and I did inject the drivers for that into OCLP so perhaps if I were a smarter man, I would’ve installed OCLP to a separate flash drive and booted from that - and then plugged this into the USB 3 card and used that to install, which would’ve made the process - at least the first part of that process - quite a bit faster. But hey, I’m only going to do this once, I just wanted to mention that just in case anyone else is following along at home and has a similar setup and is perhaps inspired by my own stupidity…
…another reboot, a load, more this… of this, it’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine…
…incidentally, we’re about an hour in at this point…
Oh, we have some frantic fan activity going on - I wondered how long it would be. Obviously this is the Intel Mac Pro, absolutely notorious for running quite hot with those two 4-core Xeons in there. But yeah, we’ve had a few reboots, as you’ve probably seen, we’ve had some very similar-looking text scrolling past, and some similar-looking Apple things with progress bars. But the thing is, they are similar, but they are actually ever so slightly different if you do pay attention to what’s going on, so it may look like it’s broken, but I’m still very confident that it’s not - and at some point we are going to get a working install of Ventura!
“System is shutting down…” Right? You never know - this might just be the one! You never know.
Oh, what’s this? We have a working mouse. I’m sure I just heard a click from the speakers as well. This is-
Ha! Very promising indeed - those fans running flat out with those dual Xeons. Wow. Okay - so “Country or region”. Scroll isn’t too clever, but there we go.
“United Kingdom”
“English (UK)”
British, British, innit. Very good.
Accessibility, not now. Data- whatever- Continue. Transfer Information… Not now. “Sign in with your Apple ID”. Now I know from previous testing that this does actually work, all the cloudy stuff works, all the sync stuff works - and so yeah, we’ll set, set that up later, potentially. We’ll just skip that for now.
Terms and conditions, yada, yada, yada. That’s all good. Yep, that’s fine.
I think we will change that profile picture, shall we?
Huh! That’s tempting, isn’t it?
How about a nice taco? Perfect.
The Taco Mac Pro. I like it.
…and here we are on the Ventura desktop, a version of macOS released in 2022, running on a Mac from 2008 which hasn’t been officially supported for how many years. I mean, this is quite good stuff, isn’t it? And I’ll just close that. But yeah, we’ve got WiFi here - so, yeah, we have the list of SSIDs of all of my neighboring offices here - I’m not going to connect to the WiFi for now because I am on a wired ethernet connection - so I’ll just go to “About This Mac.”
Look at this! We’ve still got the old Mac Pro here, Mac Pro, early 2008, two 2.8GHz, quad core Intel Xeons, we’ve got that GeForce, GTX 680 4GB graphics card there, 20GB of DDR2 RAM, and we’ve got Ventura there - and of course we’ve got the machine serial number and everything else - and if we go into More Info…
…there we go! We’ve got the Apple Cinema HD display 1920x1200, and that’s all recognized perfectly fine.
[This is a 2008 Intel Mac Pro. It has two quad core Intel Zeon-]
Audio works!
[…2.8GHz - so yep. This is an eight core machine from 2008. It has 20GB of ram, and in a previous video on the channel, I tore it down and cleaned it out and showed what was inside it. Then in a follow-up video, I installed Windows 11 and eXoDOS on this machine, which involved upgrading the GPU to a GTX 680 and also installing a couple of SSDs as well - and we discovered that actually this 17-year-old Apple machine does actually make a pretty decent DOS gaming rig. But of course that begs the question of, well, modern Windows games. I mean, we have a relatively recent GPU in here. We’ve got some beefy CPUs-]
480P quality!
[…a decent amount of RAM, and so with specs like that-]
I mean it’s a 1080P display…
[…next logical step to me seems to be to check out some. Well, some modern Windows games like Untitled Goose Game here, and perhaps we can push it even further than that.]
That - full screen, 1080P-
I’ll tell you what, rather than arguing with myself-
Fullscreen 1080P video playback on YouTube with audio all working perfectly fine!
It’s the next day and I have been a very busy boy indeed, testing all sorts of stuff out on this 17-year-old Mac Pro running Ventura and getting all sorts of software installed on it, which I will show you in a moment - and I must say I’ve been blown away by the performance of this and just by the polish of the overall experience, just how well everything runs and just how usable this is considering Apple stopped officially supporting it 10 years ago - and that is a real shame. But anyway, let’s dive back in and I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.
So as we’ve seen, everything is working perfectly fine hardware-wise, no issues at all there: we’ve got the WiFi, we’ve got that NVMe drive, we’ve got everything - and I’ve now gone in and I have re-partitioned that SSD that’s plugged into the SATA port so we’re not reliant on the USB stick to boot anymore, and I’ve also turned off verbose mode and all of the debugging stuff in OCLP - so we now have a very Apple-like boot experience, which I would like to show to you now because this is quite impressive.
So we’ve got none of that debug text flashing past on the screen with all of those system services and kernel extensions and patches and things - literally straight into the standard Apple boot screen and…
Straight into the login screen! That’s how quickly this thing boots to the login screen, and I’ll just type in my password - the old Mac Pro Taco.
I’ve got this linked to my Apple ID now so the App Store is all working, iTunes is all working, Apple TV, all of that kind of stuff all working perfectly fine as expected. Performance is really, really good. I’ve also installed Steam and Microsoft Office and some other bits and pieces as well - a really, really usable machine.
So if we just fire up that most exciting of software, Microsoft Excel, and just see how quickly this starts up on this 17-year-old machine, I mean, it’s instant, isn’t it? We’ll start up a new blank workbook and yeah, we’ve got Microsoft Excel - so if you have an older machine like this and you want to install a modern version of macOS on it for basic office stuff, word processing and spreadsheets and that kind of thing, it all works absolutely great - I mean, the performance is surprising for such an old machine, all the 3D acceleration, the graphics acceleration and everything all working great as well.
Of course, we’ve already seen YouTube and video playback so I won’t demo all of that today. But as mentioned, I have installed Steam on here and I do have a few games installed so let’s just start up Steam - of course, it has a native macOS client, which does still support Intel Macs - and it fires up, logs in, no problems at all - and if we go into the Library, fortunately I do have a nice fast internet connection here and I can filter this based on games that run natively on macOS - and we do have quite a few - so I’ve installed BioShock Remastered. Let’s just have a look at that because I tried to run this yesterday and for some reason it just gave me a blank screen - so let’s see if it wants to cooperate today.
Nope! Doesn’t work today either. No idea why BioShock Remastered isn’t running but there we go - probably something to do with the graphics card, but I do know of a couple of games that do work on here, so we’ll just go through and of course, the classic Untitled Goose Game!
…and I haven’t played this one in a very long time, actually, but I saw that this was in the list and I thought, you know what? Let’s install Two Point Hospital and revisit this - I haven’t played this game in years - and if we just click on play…
Huh! 2019! Wow - yeah - so has been quite a few years!
[Doctor needed in GP’s office]
So there we have it - a modern release of macOS running on an Intel Mac Pro from 2008 - a 17-year-old machine, and a machine that hasn’t been officially supported by Apple since 2015 - and I think it just goes to show just how bad their policy of planned obsolescence is, I mean, it just goes to show that they could quite easily support these machines with these newer OS releases if they were so inclined.
But of course, that doesn’t sell new hardware, does it? And I don’t want to belittle the attempts of the OCLP project as well, of course. The reason this all works is because of their efforts, because of their kernel patches and stuff like that - but I don’t think anyone could reasonably argue that Apple doesn’t have the in-house resources to be able to do that.
But anyway, that’s a bit of a rant. I do have some future plans for this machine: I have a second graphics card to go in it, so you know, we’ll see if we can get a bit of an SLI setup going. I want to max out the CPUs, I want to max out the RAM - and then probably the more sensible option, I’ll probably put Linux on here and see how far we can push it for gaming and stuff like that.
So if that’s something you want to see in the future please do be sure to subscribe to the channel - but that’s all I have for you for this video, big thanks as always to my supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and of course my YouTube Channel Members as well - they get videos a little bit early and also ad-free. But that’s it for now - so thank you very much and I will hopefully see you in the next one.
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