[xkemp]

I've been using a "Hackintosh" desktop for the last five years, and once it was set up, it has worked flawlessly. That includes all the hardware except the Intel Bluetooth, which was replaced by a tiny dongle that came with something or other. Even the yearly major update has never been a problem. It's far less hassle than my last Linux-on-Desktop attempts, even though Apple isn't even trying.

So that would seem to be evidence against your theory that Apple is concerned about people running MacOS on generic hardware. While some cryptographic hardware would indeed be needed to reliably prevent such shenanigans, I'm somewhat certain they could sabotage such systems with minimal effort and raise the pain to levels where it's just not worth it.

They don't even bother to, say, check the CPU and refuse to run on AMD. That could probably be done in a single line of sourcecode. Not doing anything like that and instead designing custom silicone just isn't rational behaviour.

[apfsx]

I think the reason you've been having a good Hackintosh experience is solely because of the amazing Hackintosh community and the advancements that have been made within these past few years. I've been involved in that community for a little over 10 years now. Sometime back we did not have these incredible tools (new bootloaders like Clover/Open Core, vastly improved audio/storage/graphics kexts, advanced SSDT/DSDT tools & patching) that now in its current state make Hackintosh much easier and straightforward. I agree with you that Apple hasn't been actively going against the community but its definitely begun. To approach what you said about sabotaging the Hackintosh systems with minimal effort... they definitely wouldn't just start pushing software updates hunting for Hackintosh systems. It would work but it'd be feeding more into the cat and mouse games we see. (This behavior is not out of line with them... see their war on iPhone app sideloading & iPhone jailbreaking). The best approach would be to begin integrating these chips in the lineup and soon enough after some generations of new hardware and software, Mac's without these chips won't be supported by macOS. Effectively choking out the Hackintosh community silently.

[ValentineC]

Apple has deprecated kernel extensions [1], but I'm sure the Hackintosh community will soon find a way around it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22251076