The jailbreak community is once again pushing Apple’s devices far beyond Cupertino’s comfort zone – this time by bringing macOS to the iPad. 
What was once a far-fetched Hackintosh dream is slowly taking shape, thanks to the relentless work of developer Duy Tran and his MacWSBootingGuide project.
While the demo currently runs on iPhone hardware, iOS and iPadOS share enough DNA that a port to Apple’s tablets is well within reach. Early test runs have already launched Terminal, Disk Utility, Activity Monitor, and even Xcode – all on a jailbroken iPhone. For iPad owners who have long wished for a true touchscreen Mac experience, this could be the first step toward that vision.
Of course, this isn’t plug-and-play magic. Pulling this off demands deep technical skill and a willingness to bypass Apple’s built-in restrictions. Many older devices, especially those with the A11 Bionic chip or earlier, remain jailbreak-capable thanks to the unpatchable hardware-level checkm8 exploit. This has kept tools like palera1n and Dopamine alive for the retro-hardware crowd, allowing them to break out of Apple’s walled garden – though not without security and stability risks.
Apple’s stance on macOS for iPad hasn’t changed. Craig Federighi once argued that merging the two platforms would create a “spork” – a tool that tries to do everything but excels at nothing. Still, projects like MacWSBootingGuide prove that platform boundaries are not immovable. They inspire discussions about hardware modularity, user freedom, and whether Apple’s devices should be defined by software walls or hardware potential.
As Steve Troughton-Smith joked on Mastodon, the word “Hackintosh” might soon describe an iPad running macOS, not just a PC pretending to be a Mac. Whether or not Apple ever embraces the idea, the jailbreak scene has once again shown that innovation often happens at the edge of what’s “allowed.”