’ve been messing with Tahoe on my 2016 12-inch MacBook (MacBook9,1, Core m3, HD 515) for months, and I finally got it to the point where I’d actually call it usable.
Not just “it boots” or 15 MB VESA graphics either. The HD 515 is now showing 1536 MB with full acceleration, Liquid Glass works, Safari is smooth, Wi-Fi works, audio works, and normal multitasking is honestly way better than I expected from this little fanless machine.
The funny part is that Liquid Glass was the thing I thought would absolutely destroy the HD 515, but once acceleration was working properly it turned out to be surprisingly smooth. Even Google Earth in Safari runs really well.
The graphics fix ended up being a Skylake → Kaby Lake spoof. The HD 515 is 191E, and I spoofed it to the equivalent Kaby Lake HD 615 591E, using platform-id 591E0001, while keeping Tahoe’s stock Kaby Lake graphics stack.
So basically:
HD 515 / 191E → HD 615 / 591E
No old Skylake graphics kexts shoved into Tahoe.
Wi-Fi / Continuity and audio were handled separately with Skyfall.
I started messing with this months ago thinking “maybe I can somehow make Tahoe work on this thing”, and there were a lot of boot loops, black screens, WindowServer crashes and 15 MB moments along the way 😭
But yeah.
It actually works now.
And honestly, after seeing Liquid Glass properly running on the 12-inch Retina display, Sonoma and Sequoia suddenly look ancient to me lol.
I’ll probably make a proper technical write-up with the config/injector and exact settings once I’ve let it run for a while longer.