Best lil' machine I ever had was a 10 inch Dell mini Hackintosh. Loved it, and got me through grad school .

I would be happy to return to the Snow Leopard aesthetic.

Is there no way to get it to run on ARM systems? Are none of them powerful enough to be useful without being Macs?

One more reason to switch to Linux

ARM isn't plug-and-play like x86 (n.b. it could be, but no one does it outside of servers)

You have to write a big JSON like file, called a DeviceTree, that describes exactly what is in the computer

Unless Apple decides to support Hackintoshes, their OS won't have devicetrees for other devices.

You might be able to make your own and get the OS to read it, but it still has to be for a specific machine rather than generic like before

What you don't want vista-fruitcake? Trash nobody wanted then so we repackaged it!

Yeah, I’ve heard that one before…

Given Apple‘s past, the most they will do is, at some future date, make macOS capable of reading custom JSON device tree files. Maybe

Abandoned mine several years ago. Kind of a shame, they were a good option for a while for people who weren't windows fans but didn't want to run linux full time. Apple just doesn't really have any offerings for people who want a desktop that's upgradeable, but don't want to drop the money on a Mac Pro.

I guess you could try with an arm hackintosh.

Impossible

Fair, I was not going to try.

Just an idea. I still use win 11.

A Wine-like Hackintosh is coming

Yep, I know the writing was on the wall ever since they announced Silicon. While annoyed at the time, getting out from under Intel's thumb was probably the right choice, and they're way more powerful machines as a result. Still not a fan of Apple myself, but wanting to do it themselves is respectable.

What's it called?

The SSD in the M4 mini is upgradable, for those who aren’t aware.

Is this a take in regards to soldering in new flash chips or replacing a board and then needing to wrestle Apple support during an RMA to replace a faulty component (because I quiet confidently believe, Apple will cross check your hardware with their records from the serial number).

And I don't believe regular PC manufacturers/OEMs are that hard to argue with if I insert my own SSD.

It’s replaceable, it’s not upgradable.

Apple doesn’t use standard NVMe M.2 drives. The controller is built into the SoC rather than being on the storage device itself.

Why the downvotes? Apple silicon ARM is not the same ISA as any existing ARM. There's extra undocumented instructions and features. Unless you want to reverse engineer all that, and make your own ARM CPU, you cannot run (all of) macOS on an off the shelf ARM chip. Making it effectively "impossible".

I’m aware, but I have upgraded my 256GB to 2TB so not sure what you’re on about.
See: https://appleinsider.com/inside/mac-mini/tips/how-to-upgrade-the-ssd-in-your-m4-mac-mini

And: https://expandmacmini.com/