A few months ago, I published a guide to help you guys bring Mojave to the Hp Spectre, then I switched to Catalina (no guide needed, follow the steps in the Mojave guide and everything should work just the same) and then, Big Sur became kind of an obsession. I had to get it but I had things to do and did not feel like spending what I thought would be days on switching from Clover to OpenCore and install Big Sur. My fears were wrong, it took about 6 hours including the installation that took about 3-4 hours because I restored from a backup. Just like in the previous guide, my configuration is as followed: HP Spectre x360 15-ap012dx, i7-6500u, Intel HD520 Graphics, 4k touchscreen and a new 1-year old 1tb SSD.
This guide is about my experience with installing Big Sur (and the switch to OpenCore) as well as a readable version of TechNolli’s guide on Youtube, which I followed through to get my Spectre up and running.
Before we begin, I have to give a big shoutout to every one on r/hackintosh and Dortania for amazing help throughout my journey. I would also like to especially thank TechNolli for his guide as it is very well explained and it would have been much harder to do it without his guide. Also, remember that hackintoshing is not for the faint of heart, you will have to tweak and edit some code so that your laptop “works” on MacOS, while sacrificing a few features, but I think it is worth it.
Another note before we begin, this guide is intended for the HP Spectre x360 with a i7-6500u. If you have that laptop, great! If you don’t, if you have another laptop, whatever it is, feel free to follow this guide along with Dortania‘s guide for your specific application.
Important notes
- If you used Clover in the past, DO NOT throw away everything. DSDT.aml will be needed to fix a few things including brightness control and battery management. Otherwise, you will need to generate a patched DSDT.
- Apple deprecated the use of Kexts so it is not necessary, even useless, to place them in /Library/Extensions now. Just place them in your OC/Kexts folder and make sure to add them to config.plist.
- If 3 (three) fingers gestures don’t work, hop into sysprefs -> keyboard -> shortcuts, find mission control, change mission control shortcut and use your three fingers up instead of keyboard input. I did the same thing to show the desktop, except I did “3 fingers down” and now everything works!
- Sleep works on Big Sur!!!
Read everything carefully, because missing even a small detail could keep you from a successful installation. There’s a lot here—so let’s get going!
Broke Pupil 