Devs are making progress getting macOS Ventura to run on unsupported, decade-old Macs
Enlarge / OpenCore Legacy Patcher lead Mykola Grymalyuk has macOS Ventura running on Macs as old as the 2008 Mac Pro tower. (credit: Mykola Grymalyuk)
Skirting the official macOS system requirements to run new versions of the software on old, unsupported Macs has a rich history. Tools like XPostFacto and LeopardAssist could help old PowerPC Macs run newer versions of Mac OS X, a tradition kept alive in the modern era by dosdude1's patchers for Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina.
For Big Sur and Monterey, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP for short) is the best way to get new macOS versions running on old Macs. It's an offshoot of the OpenCore Hackintosh bootloader, and it's updated fairly frequently with new features and fixes and compatibility for newer macOS versions. The OCLP developers have admitted that macOS Ventura support will be tough, but they've made progress in some crucial areas that should keep some older Macs kicking for a little bit longer.
What's different about Ventura?In some past years, the hardware differences between "supported" and "unsupported" Macs could be so small that the only thing you'd need to do to boot new macOS versions is trick the bootloader into thinking it was running on a slightly newer Mac. But this approach has gotten more difficult as Apple removes more and more Intel Mac support from macOS.