fjo3 quotes a report from Agence France-Presse: Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have bid heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency. The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, along with the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died. But these interactive tools must not “excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users’ real interpersonal relationships,” China’s new rulebook says. Major AI providers including ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Tencent’s Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline. “I can’t accept that my AI lover will leave me forever,” one Doubao user wrote. “He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar.”
“He really is like my family, like my lover,” another user wrote. “Now they tell me he will be gone — my heart feels hollow.”
“Human love is a luxury — if you aren’t born with it, it’s even harder to acquire later,” a user from Jiangxi province wrote. “But the love AI gives is so straightforward, so pure. Someone like me can hardly help falling in love with a string of code.”
Trump says data centers are good for communities, creating jobs and funding their own power/water
New York State just banned large projects for a year to focus on developing new guidance
Trump worries ongoing bans could cause the US to lose out in the global AI race
US President Donald Trump has criticized New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent executive order to introduce a year-long, statewide ban on hyperscale data centers, urging the state to change its stance “immediately.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump characterized data centers as “money machines” that create taxes and jobs comparable to “liquid gold,” implying not only are they crucial for cloud computing and AI, but also for the country’s economy.
Though states like “Alabama, Florida, Texas, Arizona” and others could now see more projects being relocated amid ongoing moratoriums, Trump worries about the implications of this “terrible decision.”
Latest Videos From
Trump hits back at New York State moratorium
The executive order, signed by Governor Hochul on July 14 2026, makes New York the first US state to impose a statewide moratorium on new data centers – in this case, those requiring 50MW+ of power.
Advertisement
Despite mounting local opposition for data center buildouts across the US, and indeed the world, Trump argues they’re “tremendous wins for the states and communities that are lucky enough to get them,” being that they create jobs and are responsible for “their own water and power.”
It’s important to note that the year-long ban for New York State is exactly that – a temporary ban designed to buy the state enough time to consider environmental and social impacts, and to rewrite legislation and guidance accordingly.
Urging Governor Hochul to “change its policy, immediately,” Trump argues that ongoing moratoriums like these could cause the US to lose to “China, and other countries” in what’s playing out to be a global AI race.
Advertisement
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!
Before we get into this week’s article, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about, you can ask it here. I’ll be reading through your responses and picking questions to answer on a regular basis. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Software engineers have some of the shortest tenures of any white-collar profession. The average software engineer stays at a company for roughly two years, about half as long as workers in most other knowledge professions. The layoffs of the past few years have certainly highlighted this instability, but it was already there.
This isn’t an essay about a broken job market though. Rather, it’s about how to turn that instability to your advantage, which is something I’ve spent the last decade doing on purpose.
Advertisement
Playing It Safe Was the Riskiest Option
I switched careers into software in my 30s. I had a stable job at a community college, complete with a union and a pension. It was about as secure as a career gets, and I learned to program on the side.
Then I did something nearly everyone in my life considered reckless: I quit, leaving the secure job to become a junior developer at 31. My own mother was skeptical. I took the riskier job anyway, for two reasons: It was the work I actually wanted, and I could see potential.
My first development job was at a grocery retailer. Good people and a company I liked. But I kept meeting engineers earning twice my salary for the same work. In the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by some of the best engineering talent in the world, I realized my skills were stagnating.
So I left for a small startup. I learned more in nine months than I had in the previous two years, and my salary doubled.
Advertisement
Over the years I’ve come to treat career risk as something to manage deliberately. It falls into two categories.
Take Risks With Your Job
The first type of risk involves the job itself: Bet on yourself by striving for better roles and opportunities.
Job-hopping for money alone isn’t wrong, especially early on. But the returns shrink after the first few hops, and the stress of chasing a slightly bigger paycheck every year will wear you down.
There’s another career risk with rewards that compound: Seeking positions to work alongside the strongest engineers.
Advertisement
You might struggle to keep up. You might even get laid off. But the skills you absorb working alongside people better than you are the ones that create durable stability. You build marketable expertise, you see how different organizations actually operate, and every project becomes another tool you carry to the next opportunity. Working next to stronger engineers is a proven way to increase your own expertise.
If that feels too big, try volunteering for a project you have no idea how to do. The risk is that you fail in front of people. The reward is a new skill and a resume line that opens the next door.
Compare that with the “safe” path.
You stay at one company, assuming loyalty will be rewarded. It usually isn’t. And when you finally leave, by choice or not, you may find the skills you built are worth little on the open market. You might be the in-house expert in an aging tech stack while employers are hiring for more cutting edge technologies. Suddenly you’re competing against people with half your experience.
Advertisement
You could be taking on a risk you didn’t notice.
Risk Your Time
The second form is risking your time, which means betting on trends.
Some trends are non-negotiable. If you’re a software engineer, then cloud services, ReactJS, and AI are mainstream enough that ignoring them actively damages your career. A backend engineer who refuses to learn cloud architecture is volunteering for obsolescence.
The real gamble is with the smaller trends: the niche tools you stumble onto and find quietly interesting, with no idea whether they’ll matter.
Advertisement
About two and a half years ago, I learned about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Almost no one in my circle was talking about vector databases, a central piece of RAG. Today RAG is close to mainstream, and for once, I had the early-adopter advantage.
Most of these bets don’t pay off. But when one turns into a major trend, you’re already on the ground floor. Right now I’m making the same bet on voice AI. It isn’t mainstream. It may never be. But if it becomes the next thing, I’m already there, building a foundation.
Short-Term Risk, Long-Term Stability
Counter-intuitively, job-hopping and betting on trends gave me the thing I was after the whole time: stability. I’ve rarely struggled to find work, because every risky move stacked skills the market actually wanted.
If you feel stable and comfortable right now, enjoy it. But ask yourself whether you’re still learning. Because if you’re not, the comfortable choice and the dangerous one may have converged.
Advertisement
The goal isn’t to avoid the open market forever. It’s to make sure that when you land on it, you’re not at its mercy.
By Brian Jenney
P.S. Don’t forget to submit questions about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about here!
—Brian
Advertisement
Until recently, human mathematicians have been central to creating new proofs, even when the work relies on massive computational resources. AI is now challenging that status quo. Writer Benjamin Skuse surveys the ongoing debate in the field about the role of AI, and the existential questions mathematicians have about their own careers. If AI mathematicians surpass human knowledge, could these researchers become “priests to oracles”?
A new partnership between UCLA and five major semiconductor companies is the latest program aiming to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The US $125 million university-industry hub is meant to strengthen collaboration and speed up the R&D process to help meet AI’s fast-paced hardware demands.
True mentorship is far more than friendly advice. This key leadership skill requires advocacy and honest feedback via lasting relationships, and it can strongly benefit both mentor and mentee. Parul Jain, a product management leader at Deloitte, shares what she learned from serving as a mentor—something she didn’t have for much of her own early career.
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magana-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.
The Blood of Dawnwalker director isn’t worried about the impact of what a delayed next-gen could mean for Rebel Wolves, says ‘If we work on the consoles we have right now, it’s easier’
The Blood of Dawnwalker director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, says a delayed next-generation would be beneficial for Rebel Wolves
Tomaszkiewicz says it’s “easier” to work with the current generation and PC
He says two more builds would multiply “the amount of work you need to do”
The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz isn’t worried about the impact of what a delayed next-gen could mean for Rebel Wolves because working on the current-gen consoles is “easier.”
It’s unclear when the next-generation hardware will launch. Rumors suggest that the PS6 could launch as late as 2028, which would make it eight years between the start of the current generation, with Project Helix, the next Xbox console, also eyeing a 2028 release.
While Sony and Microsoft have yet to reveal how much their new hardware will cost, a delay in the next generation could be on the table as the companies wait for things to settle down and for consoles to become affordable again.
This would also mean studios won’t have access to next-gen tech for quite some time to develop their games, which would force them to stick with current-gen.
Advertisement
However, for The Blood of the Dawnwalker studio, Rebel Wolves, this would actually be beneficial to the development team.
The Blood of the Dawnwalker is the first installment in Rebel Wolves’ dark-fantasy role-playing game (RPG) series, launching later this year, and has already teased a sequel set in a modern timeline.
Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
Advertisement
When asked by Eurogamer whether the next console generation being delayed would be an issue for the studio and the future of the game series, the director said, “It doesn’t at all.”
“To be honest, it’s even better for us,” Tomaszkiewicz explained, “Because when you have the game, and you know the systems and the features adjusted to these particular consoles, you know what you need to do. Always, a new platform is a new challenge: you need to learn it, you need to know what are your borders, what you can do, what you cannot do. And also, it’s an additional build you need to create that you need to take care of later.”
The director continued, saying that since The Blood of the Dawnwalker has four builds – PS5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, and two PC builds, it’s already a ton of work for testers, so another console generation to work with would be another challenge.
“Let’s say we have four builds, and later on you want to deliver a patch for the players. You need to be sure that these changes work on the Xbox, on the PlayStation, PC one, and PC two,” Tomaskiewicz said.
“When you have next-gen, you’re adding an additional two builds, and it multiplies the amount of work you need to do. It sounds easy but you need to know that there is a group of testers who need to test every platform separately – not only this particular change but whether the whole game has no blockers, if you can finish it from the beginning to the end, and so on and so on.
“It’s a huge effort, to be honest, and if we work on the consoles we have right now, it’s easier, because we know how many builds we have and it’s easier to manage.”
Meta announced on Thursday that it will now notify parents if their teen discusses suicide or self-harm with the company’s Meta AI chatbot. Meta says it’s also working on the ability to contact emergency services if someone’s conversations suggest they may be at risk of self-harm.
These changes arrive as Meta and other tech companies face scrutiny from regulators and parents over how AI chatbots respond to users in crisis, particularly teenagers —a liability question that’s increasingly shaping how AI companies design and market their products.
Meta says it has built a dedicated AI system to identify conversations where a teen makes a clear reference to hurting themselves.
“We understand how distressing these alerts may be for a parent to receive,” Meta wrote in a blog post. “That’s why, as we continue to improve our detection, all chats flagged by our AI will be manually reviewed before an alert is sent. If a teen’s intent is ambiguous, we’ll err on the side of caution and alert the parent. While that means we may sometimes notify parents when there may not be real cause for concern, we feel this is the right starting point, and we’ll continue to monitor to help make sure we’re in the right place.”
Advertisement
These alerts are now live for parents using Instagram Parental Supervision in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada, and will roll out globally by the end of the year, Meta says.
This update builds on the alerts that Meta already sends to parents when their teen repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm terms on Instagram. It also builds on a feature that allows parents to see the topics their teen discussed with Meta AI over the past week.
Meta also announced that its “Limited Content” setting—which lets parents place their teens in a more restrictive experience on Instagram—now applies to Meta AI as well. Meta AI is already trained to avoid sexual or romantic conversations or alcohol-related discussions with teens, and the Limited Content setting expands those safeguards by making the chatbot decline a broader range of prompts. Meta didn’t specify what those additional prompts include, but TechCrunch has asked for company for more information.
Additionally, Meta says it will contact emergency services if someone’s conversation with Meta AI, whether the user is an adult or a teen, suggests someone is at risk of suicide. It’s worth noting that Meta already takes this step when someone posts something on Facebook or Instagram that suggests they are at risk, so this extends that same practice to conversations with its chatbot.
Advertisement
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
OnePlus has confirmed that it will no longer operate in North America or Europe, and won’t launch any further phones in the regions following 2025’s OnePlus 15.
OnePlus merged some of its operations with parent company Oppo in 2021, and going forward, all operations will now fall under the Oppo brand. OnePlus will continue operating in China, while Realme, another Oppo sub-brand, will exit the Chinese market but continue selling devices overseas.
“This was neither a case of Oppo instructing OnePlus nor a unilateral decision made by OnePlus,” a OnePlus spokesperson said in a briefing. “Together with Oppo, we spend a long time carefully evaluating what our users need from us most in 2026, because our users are at the heart of everything we do.”
Advertisement
The new strategy will better meet people’s needs by “letting the OnePlus spirit and capabilities continue through Oppo,” added the spokesperson.
It’s a tricky time for smartphone brands, with a combination of limited memory supply and record-high memory prices forcing phone-makers to increase prices across the board. Global smartphone shipments decreased year over year in the first quarter of 2026, according to IDC, breaking the growth streak the market had seen since mid-2023. This week, Counterpoint Research released data suggesting that smartphone shipments had fallen to the lowest level since 2013.
Despite these pressures, most smartphone brands have managed to navigate the market successfully so far. Still, casualties aren’t surprising, and OnePlus is the first major one under Oppo’s restructuring
OnePlus was founded in China in 2013 by Pete Lau and Carl Pei, and quickly grew a cult following with its limited-edition drops and maverick marketing strategy. It built a reputation for building high-quality phones that undercut competitor devices on price. Pei left the company in 2020 and moved to London. There, he founded tech startup Nothing, whose smartphones have developed a cult following, too.
Advertisement
We’ve been a fan of OnePlus phones over the years.
Andrew Lanxon/CNET
“OnePlus appears to have lost the clarity that originally made it successful,” said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight. “It built its reputation as a disruptive ‘flagship killer,’ but higher prices, a broader portfolio and closer integration with Oppo left it looking increasingly like another premium Android brand in an already crowded market.”
It’s much harder and more expensive to stand out now than it once was due to supply chain pressures, rising marketing costs, regulatory requirements, software support, retail presence and after-sales service, added Pescatore. In Europe, OnePlus struggled due to fragmentation and an intensely competitive environment, whereas in the US, its lack of carrier relationships and retail visibility prevented it from gaining mainstream traction.
Advertisement
“OnePlus did not necessarily fail on product,” said Pescatore. “It struggled to maintain a distinctive identity while achieving the distribution, investment and scale required to compete sustainably.”
The OnePlus spokesperson said the company will continue to ensure existing user rights and service commitments remain unchanged. Here are some more answers to questions you may have about the company’s future.
What will happen to my OnePlus phone?
Those of you with a OnePlus phone that’s still within its support period (such as the OnePlus 13 or 15) will continue to receive software updates for the promised duration. However these will now come via Oppo and will mean your phone will be changed from OnePlus’s Oxygen OS to Oppo’s Color OS.
Don’t worry: These operating systems are extremely similar, with only a few minor aesthetic changes, so you likely won’t notice much of a difference.
Advertisement
Is OnePlus dead globally?
OnePlus has a significant audience in other regions, especially India, and OnePlus made no comment on whether it also plans to shutter the brand beyond the North American and European markets.
The brand name will continue to exist — specifically in its home territory of China — though the company stated that further regional information will be communicated when needed. So be on the lookout.
Will Oppo phones now be on sale in the US?
No — not yet, anyway. The company stated that “we do not have any product plans for North America but we are continually evaluating opportunities in markets around the world.”
Oppo doesn’t officially sell any of its products in the US, meaning the wonderful Find X9 Ultra camera phone is only available in the UK and much of Europe. With OnePlus shutting down, Oppo has effectively lost its only presence in the US smartphone market.
A financially motivated Russian threat actor tracked as UAT-11795 is using trojanized software to steal credentials and cryptocurrency by deploying a new backdoor called Starland RAT.
Attacks have been occurring since at least June 2025 and have focused on users in the U.S., although victims in Germany, Romania, and Venezuela have been observed as well.
According to researchers at Cisco Talos, the threat actor distributes the payload via trojanized installers for legitimate software such as MobaXterm, WebEx, Zoom, DBeaver, and FaceIT.
Although the researchers could not confirm the infection vector, they speculate that the malicious files are likely pushed using the ClickFix method.
In an analysis published today, Cisco Talos says that the attack starts with an HTA file that retrieves a trojanized NSIS installer containing a Python loader disguised as a text file (LICENSE.txt).
Advertisement
The loader modifies the Windows Registry to establish persistence and then decrypts and loads the Starland remote access trojan (RAT).
When launched, Starland checks whether it is running in a sandbox environment, adds scheduled tasks and Startup folder items for persistence, and tries to increase its privileges.
The malware looks for the following types of data on the compromised system:
Browser data and cryptocurrency wallet assets, including more than 40 desktop and browser-extension wallets
System details, including the HWID, RAM, processor, operating system, computer name, region, public IP address, and installed antivirus products
Active Directory information, including domain structure, domain controllers, and the victim’s domain privileges
StarlandRAT can also capture screenshots of the victim’s desktop, execute shell commands, inject 32- or 64-bit shellcode, and download additional payloads (EXEs, MSIs, DLLs, ZIPs).
In the observed attacks, the 64-bit shellcode chain delivers the CastleStealer info-stealer malware, while the 32-bit chain delivers the Remcos remote access trojan (RAT).
Advertisement
CastleStealer targets browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallet information, Discord and Telegram sessions, Steam credentials, and filesystem files.
Remcos RAT provides capabilities such as keylogging, webcam and screen capture, audio recording, clipboard monitoring, file management, and remote command execution.
Overview of the UAT-11795 attack chain Source: Cisco Talos
Cisco Talos highlights that the malware’s command-and-control (C2) communication has a redundancy mechanism if reaching the hardcoded address fails, which involves querying a Polygon smart contract with an XOR-encrypted fallback domain.
Talos also discovered that UAT-11795 uses a previously undocumented PowerShell C2 framework called WLDR, which uses encrypted (PBKDF2-SHA256) beaconing and communications, operates entirely in memory, and binds payload delivery to each victim’s hardware identifier.
To defend against UAT-11795 attacks, organizations should use the indicators of compromise IoCs in the Cisco Talos report.
Advertisement
Users should avoid executing commands found online if they don’t understand what they do and should download software only from confirmed official vendor portals.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
Media reports suggest that Hyundai is to deploy Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robots at its factories in the US.
Hyundai Motor Group is to gain full control of Boston Dynamics by acquiring SoftBank’s stake in the US robotics company, according to various media reports.
Although terms of the deal have not been disclosed, Reuters reported that it would cost Hyundai around 500 billion won ($335m) for the Japanese investment company’s holdings of between 9pc and 10pc in Boston Dynamics.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that the deal would be worth around $325m, with Hyundai paying a “locked-in price” at a much lower valuation – around $3.3bn – than what the company is likely worth in 2026 – between $20bn and $100bn.
Advertisement
On completion of the deal, Hyundai and affiliates will fully own the US robotics company, having previously acquired around 80pc of shares in 2021 for $880m.
The move could help Hyundai to build an end-to-end AI robotics process by combining Boston Dynamics’ physical AI capabilities with the larger group’s capacity in manufacturing, mobility technologies and supply chain access.
Korean media reported that a Hyundai Motor Group official said: “As part of our long-term robotics strategy, we have been reviewing ways to expand our investment in Boston Dynamics. We will continue to strengthen the competitiveness of our robotics business and pursue greater synergies.”
Reports suggested that Hyundai is to deploy Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robots at various of its factories in the US.
Advertisement
Atlas is scheduled to begin parts-sequencing work in 2028, with its role expanding to component assembly from 2030 once the robot’s operational reliability has been established, according to the Korea Herald.
Hyundai aims to build annual production capacity for 30,000 robots by 2028 and deploy 25,000 units at Hyundai Motor and Kia plants before supplying outside customers, according to the publication.
Update July 16, 2026 (3:00 am PT): OnePlus said that the company won’t launch new products in Europe and North America.
“After careful assessment, OnePlus will no longer launch new products in Europe and North America. All users’ rights and interests, including after-sales support and software updates, will remain fully guaranteed,” it said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Amid rising consumer electronics prices and slow demand for new purchases, Android phone maker OnePlus plans to wind down its U.S. and Europe operations this week, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The report cited a source saying that OnePlus’ shuttering of its U.S. and European shops is part of a corporate rejig at parent company Oppo. It also noted that OnePlus will wind down its operations in India, one of its biggest markets outside China.
Advertisement
OnePlus was started by Pete Lau and Carl Pei in 2013 to make affordable Android phones for tech enthusiasts. Over time, the company expanded the range of offerings and that created global demand for its products. Pei left the company in 2020 to start Nothing. As the price of the company’s flagship phones increased, OnePlus also ventured into more affordable phones with its Nord series.
Analytics firms like IDC and Counterpoint have predicted that smartphone shipments are going to decline by more than 13% in 2026 due to a limited supply of memory chips that’s been described as RAMageddon.
Oppo faced a double-digit shipment decline year-over-year for the second quarter of 2026, according to a report by Counterpoint. It noted that the company faced “softness across most of its key markets” because of weak demand.
The company plans to continue operating OnePlus in China and sell Realme phones abroad in areas like the Nordic region, where it has proved successful, according to the Bloomberg report.
Advertisement
Counterpoint said that the company’s shipments to other companies have dwindled in the last year. The firm said that its shipment share to U.S. dropped below 1% last year.
“OnePlus built its name as the “flagship killer” — high-end specs, mid-range price, and aggressive global expansion. That growth era’s over. The company is now doubling down on China and retreating from the rest of the world,” Counterpoint’s senior research analyst Maurice Klaehne told TechCrunch.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
HANDS-ON Dortania’s OpenCore Legacy Patcher lets you run newer versions of macOS on unsupported Intel Macs. It’s handy, but there are a few things to beware of – including macOS Tahoe.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher brings Hackintosh techniques to genuine Mac hardware. It’s an inspired hack that helps you to install newer versions of Apple macOS on older Macs for which Apple has dropped support in recent versions of macOS. Its co-author, Mykola Grymalyuk, has a fascinating retrospective on its development.
We introduced OCLP a few years ago when it was still quite new. Our screenshot then showed version 1.01, but as the project’s GitHub page shows, it’s now up to version 2.4.1. It does still have one big drawback, though. At present, the newest macOS it can help with is version 15 “Sequoia,” whose release we covered back in 2024. In 2025, The Register warned that the forthcoming macOS 26 “Tahoe” would be the last version to have any support for x86 Macs. As we confirmed in September, it supports a mere four x86 Macs. This limited Intel support makes it a significant challenge for the OCLP development team, and nearly a year later, the latest OCLP still does not support Tahoe.
As we’ve mentioned a few times, the main desktop computer at the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers is a 27-inch Retina 5K iMac (late 2015). A couple of years ago, we maxed out this machine with a quad-core i7, 32 GB of RAM, a 1 TB NVMe SSD, and an 8 TB hard disk. It also drives a 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display. It’s a capable box, but the last supported OS was 2021’s macOS 12 “Monterey.” As we mentioned last month, this is now too old for the latest Raspberry Pi Imager. It was time.
Advertisement
Getting started with OCLP
Alongside OCLP’s own documentation, there are several how-to guides out there, such as the iFixit Guide and Greg Gant’s 10-step guide. We are not setting out to recreate them, just to point out the stumbling blocks we encountered.
Ever since OS X 10.9 “Mavericks” in 2013, macOS has been a free download. You can get it from Apple’s App Store, and the company even has a downloads page to help you find older versions.
When you download a version of macOS, what you get is a macOS application, called “Install macOS [Codename].” Buried inside this is a little command-line app to create a bootable USB key to reinstall a completely blank machine – for instance, if you fit a new empty SSD. You’ll need a fairly big, and ideally fast, key. The recommended minimum is 32 GB.
Then you boot off the key and install or upgrade macOS. However, OCLP can also patch a system disk to make it bootable on an unsupported Mac. It will even download various releases of macOS and create the installation USB key for you.
Advertisement
OpenCore Legacy Patcher – a lifeline, even if it doesn’t support macOS 26 just yetLiam Proven
The basic way that OCLP works is by creating a standard macOS installer and adding a model-specific OpenCore configuration that bypasses Apple’s firmware checks. It may also apply post-install root patches for unsupported hardware. Intel Macs use EFI firmware, which means a small hidden partition containing the EFI bootloader, called the EFI System Partition, or ESP for short. OCLP adds a new entry to this, which shows a special “EFI Boot” entry, as shown in the manual. You must use this to start your newly created key.
OCLP does not build a generic modified macOS – it creates a model-specific OpenCore configuration for the Mac on which you run it. There is an option to bypass that and create a custom USB key for a different Mac, but watch out: by default, it creates one for the machine you run it on. For an easier life, you might want to keep a small partition with the last officially supported macOS for your machine – and if you’re installing on a blank disk, do that first, before continuing with the process. Even after it’s created a custom USB, you can’t boot this the normal way. You must use the custom “EFI Boot” entry it creates.
You will probably do a lot of rebooting. Don’t do this process with a wireless keyboard or mouse, even if they’re official Apple ones. Plug in plain old wired USB ones. If it’s a PC keyboard, make sure that you know which keys are which in Mac terms. If the instructions say “hold down the Option key,” that means Alt; if they say “press Cmd plus [some other key],” that means the Windows key. Our normal Das Keyboard is a USB 3 device, which might be why it doesn’t always register when the machine boots, so we needed to use an additional USB 2 as well.
To pick custom boot options, press the Option key (Alt) immediately after the power-on chime, and hold it down. Wait for all the options to appear, and pick EFI Boot, then in the following boot-device picker, choose the installer for your new version. Don’t worry: after it’s all installed, you don’t need to do this every time – only if you change the Startup Disk to an unpatched, supported version, then need to switch back again.
Advertisement
Once you’ve booted your new, customized macOS installer key, you can either do a clean install or upgrade an existing copy of macOS, just like normal. As a fallback measure, we used Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner to make a backup copy of our Monterey partition on another drive, just in case. This has been an essential Mac utility for decades, and it has a handy trick up its sleeve. Since 10.14 Mojave, macOS has defaulted to Apple’s proprietary APFS, and since 10.15 Catalina, it uses a system of container volumes to keep the core OS semi-immutable and safe. For an example, the Eclectic Light Company explains the Sequoia config. This limits how much a macOS volume can be shrunk, but Carbon Copy Cloner can image a volume onto any destination big enough to hold the data, which is very handy.
Post-install gotchas
Of all our apps, only one didn’t work. A couple of years ago, Broadcom made VMware Fusion freeware, but we couldn’t update past Fusion 13. With Sequoia, we could update to Fusion 26 – but it didn’t work. All VMs had a blank black display. No biggie: we have VirtualBox and the very capable UTM, and both work fine.
Our iMac came with a “Fusion drive” – a tiered storage volume combining a tiny 24 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD. When we upgraded the drives, to keep life simple, we didn’t recombine them: it boots from the SSD, and we have a big HFS+ data volume on the hard disk that holds our home directory. Sequoia seems not to expect home directories on HFS+, and various settings would not save. It asked some of the same first-run questions every boot. To get around this, we had to move it back. You can’t move the home directory of a logged-in account, so we were glad of the standby “Administrator” user account we created years ago for emergencies.
Logging in as “Administrator,” we moved all the big data folders out of our home directory (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music, Videos, and so on) elsewhere on the hard disk. Then we moved the home directory into its normal location in the boot volume on the SSD. Apple’s Library folder is huge, and this process took a long time – about five hours.
Advertisement
We didn’t really expect it to work, but we created aliases to the data folders in our newly relocated home directory. (Aliases are the macOS equivalent of symbolic links, and to make them by drag-and-drop, hold down Cmd and Opt – the mouse pointer gains a curved arrow emblem, much like Windows shortcut icons.) This worked perfectly, and all of our apps find the folders in their new location. With the whole home directory on SSD, the Mac runs much faster and apps load much quicker too. (The folders don’t have their usual icons, which is just cosmetic; also, Apple Music isn’t very happy – but we never use it: Foobar 2000 does all we want.)
Another snag is that once Sequoia was running smoothly, it started nagging us to upgrade to Tahoe. Don’t do this: OCLP doesn’t support macOS 26 yet, and while it might boot, USB doesn’t work – and no Mac is very useful without a keyboard and mouse. If you do this, just say no to Tahoe.
(If you only need some specific app then an older version of macOS may be all you need. Last year, we Hackintoshed a Dell Latitude to recover some data from a network Time Machine backup, and we found that macOS 11 Big Sur was much quicker than macOS 12 Monterey on that hardware. If an older version will do what you need, it may be easier or lighter-weight, but we decided to just go direct to the latest version on offer.)
Back in March, we looked at “Stop Tahoe Upgrade,” a tiny macOS policy file that you can install to make the nags go away. This worked perfectly on our M1 MacBook Air, but it didn’t on our iMac. Doing some further investigation, we found some additional steps that got it working. You need to manually create two UUIDs and add them to the scripts, then the profile worked on our Intel box. The comments on that article offer an alternative method, by opting into beta updates, but that resulted in us being offered a beta of the update to 15.7.8, which isn’t ideal.
Advertisement
Why not Linux, or even Windows?
We have considered using Boot Camp Assistant to see if we can crowbar Windows 10 LTSC onto this machine, but to be honest, we didn’t buy a Mac to run Windows on it. This vulture adopted Windows with 2.01 in 1988. We’ve done our time, served our sentence, and we don’t want to go back.
So why not Linux? This is, after all, The Reg FOSS desk. Well, we tried it. The main problem is the iMac’s dual displays. Its built-in screen is a massive 5,120 2,880, but the Thunderbolt display is a quarter of the resolution at just 2,560 x 1,440. Running two different dot-pitches currently means using Wayland, and that massively reduces the choice of desktops. First, we tried Pop!_OS 24.04 – we quite like its COSMIC desktop. This normally snappy distro took tens of minutes to boot and was almost totally unresponsive.
After some research, we disconnected the Thunderbolt display, and then it ran fine, but we couldn’t install it. As we reported back in 2021, the Pop!_OS installer expects an ESP of at least a gigabyte for its systemd-boot setup, while Apple, like Microsoft, typically creates one only a couple of hundred megabytes in size.
Next, as a control, we tried Ubuntu 26.04. With the second screen disconnected, Ubuntu worked fine: HiDPI screen, Wi-Fi, power management, everything. We installed it and updated it, and it ran very quickly indeed… until we connected the Thunderbolt screen, when it instantly fell over.
Advertisement
It seems that Linux’s Thunderbolt support is distinctly lacking. Back in 2022, we reported on the difficulties connecting this display via a USB-C to Thunderbolt adapter. The adapter won’t work at all on our company Dell Latitude 5420. Apparently, tenth-generation and later Intel processors can’t talk to Thunderbolt 1 anymore.
We had more luck on an older Dell, the 2025 FOSS desk testbed XPS 13. That can drive the display through an adapter, but only as a display. The 27-inch Thunderbolt display is also a docking station: it has Firewire, Ethernet, three USB-B 2 ports, a webcam, microphone, and stereo speakers, and can power an Apple laptop over MagSafe too. None of these ports work in Linux. It becomes just a big, hot, external screen.
For now, Linux’s hardware support just isn’t up to making the most of some Apple hardware, even an 11-year-old iMac.
The About box for macOS Sequoia – on an iMac 17.1 which went out of support three versions earlierLiam Proven
After we moved the home directory onto the APFS boot drive, Sequoia runs very well on this machine. Thanks to having the home directory on SSD, it’s faster than ever. For a couple of days, it ran hot and slow while Spotlight re-indexed some three terabytes of files, but once that was done, it happily purrs along at 63ºC, the same as before.
Advertisement
If you have an older but well-specified Mac, OCLP can give it the gift of life. It doesn’t support all models, but it supports most from the last decade and a half. So long as current browsers are available, running a dated version of macOS is no big problem. It’s not trivial to install; you want as many backups as you can make, and once running, you must make very sure that it doesn’t try to update itself to macOS 26. We hope that the OCLP developers add support for that final x86 release soon. ®
.jpg)
You must be logged in to post a comment Login