OpenCore Legacy Patcher delivers unofficial Ventura support for older Macs
Enlarge / Ventura drops support for the last of the pre-Retina MacBook Airs. OpenCore Legacy Patcher can add it back, if you want. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
The macOS Ventura update ended support for a wide range of Intel Macs, including models introduced in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. But as with older macOS releases, independent developers have stepped up to bring unofficial support for many of the Macs that no longer receive updates. Version 0.5.0 of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project has added Ventura support for Mac models going back to 2012, giving people who don't mind a little bugginess the opportunity to keep their Mac updated with new features.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) is an offshoot of the OpenCore bootloader that focuses on re-adding support for older Mac hardware, instead of making macOS run on generic x86 "Hackintosh" PCs. Because Apple dropped support for so many Macs from Ventura, supporting that OS on these older machines required a lot more effort than it has in past years, which is something we've covered before.
Mac models supported by the OpenCore Legacy Patcher project. (credit: OpenCore Legacy Patcher)
The official support list, shown above, is similar to the ones for Mojave and Catalina, the first macOS releases to require a Metal-compatible GPU. The only model of this vintage not currently supported is the "trash can" 2013 Mac Pro, which is having some GPU-related booting issues that are still being sorted out. Older Macs with pre-Metal GPUs are totally unsupported, and graphics acceleration (among many other things) won't work on these Macs; the team is working on adding support for these older models, but it's unlikely that they'll ever function as well as the Metal-compatible models.