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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

macOS virtual machines using Virtualization cannot sign in to iCloud.

I have a Monterey VM running on my home server inside Unraid with virtualization. I can login to Apple developer accounts. I use this as a macOS gitlab runner VM.

Or is my setup not what you’re describing?

Yeah, I’m talking about capital V Virtualization, the framework that Apple provides for making macOS virtual machines (and is used by this sample code). Signing in with your Apple ID is explicitly not supported in those.

Thanks for the clarification.

Is there an official location where Apple states this? I'd be curious to see where it's said.

Not that I know of, the sign-in will just fail because Apple refuses connections from these.

To my knowledge, macOS running in an x86 VM works with all iCloud services _except_ iMessage and FaceTime. To get iMessage and FaceTime working, you need to generate a serial number that is in Apple's databases and spoof the virtual machine's serial number.

If the macOS you run in an M1 virtual machine is the same macOS, then why is the same not true? And I suppose I wonder whether the officially-supported ESXi-virtualizing-macOS has iCloud support, and how that works.

Your setup sounds better. Have you noticed any problems?

I haven’t noticed any problems for the use case I’m using it for.

I’m giving it 8GB of ram and 6 cores/12 threads. VM is running on pcie ssd. Speed is good.

No gpu is in my server so it’s using a basic VNC connection. If you add a gpu and pass it through the desktop experience would be much better. However I only needed to do this to do initial setup.

The cool thing about my setup is that it uses a docker container called macinabox which handles the initial Vm configuration and macOS installation, estuary automating the “hackintosh” process.

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