OpenCore Legacy Patcher brings unofficial Ventura support to older Macs

The macOS Ventura update ended support for a wide range of Intel Macs, including models released in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. longer to receive updates. Version 0.5.0 of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project added Ventura support for Mac models starting in 2012, giving people who don’t mind small bugs the ability to update their Mac with new features.

The OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) is a fork of the OpenCore bootloader that focuses on re-adding support for older Mac hardware instead of running macOS on regular x86 “Hackintosh”PCs. Because Apple dropped support for so many Ventura Macs, supporting the OS on these older machines was a lot more work than in years past, as we’ve covered previously.

The official support list shown above is similar to those for Mojave and Catalina, the first releases of macOS that require a Metal compatible GPU. The only model from this release year that is not currently supported is the 2013 Mac Pro “trash can”, which has some GPU-related boot issues that are still being resolved. Older Macs with pre-Metal GPUs are not fully supported and graphics acceleration (among other things) will not work on these Macs; The team is working on adding support for these older models, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever work as well as the Metal compatible models.

Running Ventura with OCLP comes with risks. The OCLP team has also compiled a short list of graphical bugs affecting older Macs, mostly related to video encoding and decoding, DRM, and random application crashes. And you may have to wait for an update to the OCLP project before installing future Ventura updates, as these updates sometimes change things in ways that break the OpenCore bootloader or a lot of fixes that older Macs need to run new software.

These older Macs may also be missing some of the security updates offered for newer models. Official macOS updates sometimes contain new system firmware and other low-level fixes that may fix bugs or close security holes; Unsupported Macs running Ventura as part of the OCLP project will not receive these fixes.

If you would like to try OpenCore Legacy Patcher on your systems, the latest documentation is here.