The Hackintosh community is giving thumbs down to Apple Chips and is coming up with new ways to support it.

The developers behind OpenCore, the most powerful and actively maintained bootloader for loading macOS on standard PC hardware, improved its Alder Lake support in this month's release, version 0.7.7.

 In a blog post over the weekend, the developers also detailed their efforts to update OpenCore and its associated software to work with Intel's Z690 chipset.

The key to building a functional Hackintosh is usually to build a PC as close as possible to Intel Mac hardware -- most crucially, the CPU, GPU, and chipset.

OpenCore's job is to bridge whatever gap is left between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS boots and works properly. It adds support for reading and booting macOS filesystems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system's audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs hardware to take advantage of macOS's built-in support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that is similar to but not quite identical to a GPU included in a real Intel Mac).

As OpenCore has developed and matured, it has improved at bridging more significant gaps between PC hardware and "real" Macs. It can get old versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) up and running on old hardware, and it can even be used to run newer macOS versions on real Macs that Apple has dropped from the official support list.

It can even run macOS on AMD processors, albeit with some caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality.

They can keep macOS working on 12th-generation Intel CPUs and the Z690 chipset.

There are some problems using 12th-gen processors' new efficiency cores (or E-cores) because macOS doesn't know how best to distribute work between the different cores. MacOS will never support Intel's "Thread Director" technology, which needs to be baked into your operating system to get the best performance.

In addition, users need to rely on a dedicated AMD GPU to handle display output and other tasks.  Apple is still adding support for newer AMD GPUs in macOS releases, presumably, so those cards can work in the Mac Pro -- the Radeon RX 6900 series, 6800 series, and RX 6600 XT are all supported -- but Apple could easily decide to stop supporting newer GPUs whenever it wants. Nvidia GPUs aren't supported.