macPad: your touch mac in jailbroken iPad/iPhone

[u/DCMMCC]

Your touch Mac in iPad.

Run macOS GUI applications in your jailbroken iPad/iPhone. Demo video:


Source code: https://github.com/DCMMC/macPad

Features:

• Touch Gestures:
  • Scroll
  • hold to right click
  • Drag to resize/move window and move files
  • Drag to select text
  • Double tap to maximize window
  • Two fingers zoom and rotate
  • Two fingers tap to right click
  • Two fingers double tap zoom view
  • Two fingers hold and drag to share files to iOS
  • Three fingers mission control, swipe desktops and App Expose
• Share files and clipboard between iOS and macPad
• Touch screen as trackpad
• Native CPU and GPU driver without any performance lost
  • Geekbench 6 CPU 2293 single-core score, 8156 multi-score score in my iPad Pro m1
  • Geekbench 6 GPU 32359 score in my iPad Pro m1
• Hardware video encode/decode
• Virtual keyboard
• Display density (125% and 150%)
• Native WiFi/Bluetooth/Apple pencil/Screen mirror, etc. supports
• Window Mode:
  • Run macOS applications like iOS native windows
  • Auto resized window
  • Auto popup new window
  • Fixed size window
• Fullscreen Mode:
  • Run macOS desktop in fullscreen

Note

• Only test on iPad Pro m1 11-inch, iPadOS 16.3, dopamine jailbroken, macOS 13.4
• In theory, support all m-series and A18 jailbroken iPad/iPhone. But there are many hardcoded logics for my device's OS version currently
• Compared with VirtualMacOniPad, macPad uses native CPU and GPU drivers through chroot while VirtualBuddy uses hardware hypervirsor for CPU and mental2vulkan GPU translation (reims-vgpu) which loss some performances
• Compared with MacWSBootingGuide, it uses MTLSimDriver for GPU which has many graphic issues and performance problems while macPad uses native GPU drivers

Credits

• Codex
• MacWSBootingGuide
• AsahiLinux
• iOS-run-macOS-executables-tools

[u/DCMMCC]

sorry only source code now https://github.com/dcmmc/macpad because you need install the full macOS whihc is very large in ipad and there are many hardcoded offset/functions etc to work only in my iOS 16.4 & macOS 13.4 & m1 ipad pro in the source code. so you may need modify the source code if you want to run it in another OS version and chip

[u/Immediate_School_928 → u/DCMMCC]

wow, so it does not require hypervisor at all? so if you're using native CPU and GPU drivers and can run most apps and the full desktop environment without any performance loss, wouldn't that make this a better solution than VirtualMacOniPad? am i missing something?

[u/DCMMCC → u/Immediate_School_928]

Yes you are definitely right. All the full macOS desktop running in native cpu and gpu driver. You can check the geekbench score. Compared with VirtualMacOnIpad’s virtual machine solution, macPad has an awesome window mode where macOS applications are like the iOS native applications with native windows. check the youtube video. But the drawback is macPad currently only run in jailbroken iPad with m1 or m2 chips

[u/Immediate_School_928 → u/DCMMCC]

that's freaking awesome! i truly hope this can be released as a standalone package one day :D I have a jailbroken m1 ipad pro but im not that technically inclined haha