This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I suspect many readers of this newsletter have older computers in their possession and wonder what they can do to keep them useful for many more years.

When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release.

Comment by Dick Eastman:

I have a Macintosh laptop that is now more than 10 years old and no longer accepts updates from Apple. I didn’t want to throw it away so I took a different approach: i simply replaced the (now obsolete) Macintosh operating system with a current Zorin Linux operating system.

Zorin OS is an alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure, and privacy-respecting. It is also updated frequently and is at least as robust as the Macintosh operating system (and perhaps even MORE robust). It was a lot easier to install than following the rather complex method described above in this article. I am quite pleased with Zorin. It works on Macs and on PCs as well.

You can learn more about Zorin at: https://zorin.com/os/