The whole reason the modern.ie images were a big deal was because Windows isn’t free to download/use, and you couldn’t (then at least, no clue now) get past the installer without a valid licence key.
There’s nothing stopping anyone with a compatible machine downloading the installer for any version of macOS back to about Lion (10.7, Safari 5.1) from 15 years ago, and running it inside a VM.
…no? There are reverse-engineered third-party tools for downloading ISOs (like macrecovery), but Apple doesn’t support officially support downloading macOS outside of their custom macOS-only tools. They do offer regular browser-based downloads up to macOS 15… but only in .dmg (again, back to either the catch 22 of need-macos-to-unpack-macos or time to use the hackintosh toys).
And once you do have the installer, macOS still won’t let you get past it either unless you have the right license key hardware dongle (motherboard).
And yes, there’s OSX-KVM to help you fake that for a VM, but it still spits on the EULA that dictates that you must only use macOS on official Apple hardware. By that claim, Windows is free because there’s hardware out there that comes bundled with OEM licenses!
But even that won’t help you now that macOS 27 doesn’t even run on any of your x86 CPUs anymore anyway.
All of this is completely unserious for a trillion dollar corporation that is asking you to do them a favour for free.
If they want to be taken seriously then they could at least provide something like Microsoft’s old modern.ie VM images.
score 1 · canonical
“We have Safari at home”. /s https://lobste.rs/c/ea77vb
score 2 · canonical
The whole reason the modern.ie images were a big deal was because Windows isn’t free to download/use, and you couldn’t (then at least, no clue now) get past the installer without a valid licence key.
There’s nothing stopping anyone with a compatible machine downloading the installer for any version of macOS back to about Lion (10.7, Safari 5.1) from 15 years ago, and running it inside a VM.
score 1 · canonical
…no? There are reverse-engineered third-party tools for downloading ISOs (like macrecovery), but Apple doesn’t support officially support downloading macOS outside of their custom macOS-only tools. They do offer regular browser-based downloads up to macOS 15… but only in .dmg (again, back to either the catch 22 of need-macos-to-unpack-macos or time to use the hackintosh toys).
And once you do have the installer, macOS still won’t let you get past it either unless you have the right
license keyhardware dongle (motherboard).And yes, there’s OSX-KVM to help you fake that for a VM, but it still spits on the EULA that dictates that you must only use macOS on official Apple hardware. By that claim, Windows is free because there’s hardware out there that comes bundled with OEM licenses!
But even that won’t help you now that macOS 27 doesn’t even run on any of your x86 CPUs anymore anyway.
All of this is completely unserious for a trillion dollar corporation that is asking you to do them a favour for free.
score 2 · canonical