Tong Family

Well, OLCP has been working remarkably well on all my machines. Since disabling the dGPU on our MacBook Pro 2010, this has worked just great. Even though the fix was for a MBP 2011, this one had the same problem. The MacBook Air 2011 has also been running well if a bit slowly since it only has 4GB of RAM.

My main problem now is the MacBook Pro 2014 which is not rendering Safari after the first paint, Authy strangely, and Geotag and Maps are both blank. This is quite different than the MacBook Pro 2010 crashes, so I’m not sure it is the same problem, although this does have a discrete GPU (this time an on-chip Intel Iris Pro as part of the Crystal Well Intel processor)

A little more searching leads to this being a “Legacy Metal” system. That is, it supports Apple’s Metal graphics interface but isn’t modern, so the good folks at OLCP had to rebuild it. I sent a note on Discord asking about this, but the FAQ has nothing that looks like this problem.

Interesting the open issue about these machines doesn’t mention the Intel Haswell HD4800 as a supported GPU type, just the HD4400/4500 and 5000. There is an extensive list of issues getting Ventura (MacOS 13.x) to run on these machines, but no mention of this problem.

But given it’s a render problem, not a crash, it seems like the Metal emulation has a problem.

Second is that it is pretty hard to figure out the underlying chip, while Apple does give you a spec, it doesn’t specify an Intel chip model. Turns out you need to run a command:

sysctl machdep.cpu.brand_string

And you will see the processor number and I get the “i7-4870HQ” which leads to an Intel brand page and finally to an explanation that Crystal Well is a bundle of a L4 cache, processor, and graphics chip all in the same package.

The final thing to note is that there are older machines that aren’t Metal compatible in which case hopefully you’ve cached Apple applications that are older but work before this graphic interface change.