When I was half asleep and getting really annoyed with the process, it occurred to me multiple times, “Who cares if I get it next week? It’s not a very exciting upgrade.”
On one hand that’s true, and on the other, I’m spending $1100 and I want my new shiny immediately.
Regarding iMessage on Windows/Android, I run a program called Airmessage in a MacOS VM. It works great. It’s more than a little silly to dedicate a CPU core and 4GB RAM to run an entire OS just for iMessage, but what the hell.
Hmm. Do you have a link to a dummies guide to setting up an OSX VM on Windows? I’d give it a shot.
No, I’m running it on Linux. You can get a cheap ancient mac mini and run it there though.
Helps if you have Intel, much harder with AMD. On VirtualBox there is no working sound. On PC you need a “patched” version of VMWare Workstation/Player.
Here’s a guide for Windows that supposedly works. I can’t vouch for it.
I didn’t want to setup dedicated hardware. But I guess I could dig out this old Intel NUC I’ve got, install Linux and give it a shot as a weekend project. My primary rig is a Ryzen so I’m not going to bother trying to get patched Vmware running on it for OSX.
Thanks for the 🔗 @stusser .
Well dedicated, yes, but extremely cheap. For example here’s a 2014 mac mini for $154.
Thanks. If the NUC I own can run OSX as a VM I’ll try that first. Installing Linux is pretty quick and it’s the same form factor. Plus the NUC has an SSD and 16gb of ram.
Yep basically install ubuntu and then the sosumi snap.
I didn’t use it, I setup my MacOS VM before sosumi exists, but that’s what everybody recommends. Getting iMessage to register properly can be a bit tricky.
I found it to be a fun project.
Thanks for the sosumi pointer!
Honestly if I end up banging my head against the wall too much I’m just going to can the project. I’m totally happy with Android. This is more of a lark to see if I can use an iPhone for more than a weekend at a time.
Well, this will give you iMessage on android. And windows, and linux.
People will be like “Hey, you finally got an iPhone, you broke down,” and you’ll be all like “nah bro, typing on my droid right now,” and they’ll be all “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa???”
After Stusser’s previous commentary on running Mac OS X in a VM I set it up in VMWare on my Win 10 PC just to try it.
It works, but it’s dog slow on a Core i9 desktop. Painfully so. Assuming it must be better on Linux, but I’m not going down that rathole.
But until I decided it was just easier to set my iPad with keyboard next to my PC, it did let me use iMessage on the PC.
Wish Apple would just freaking port iMessage to the PC already and somehow tie it in to owning an Apple Device. They are finally going to allow you to Facetime with Windows PCs on iOS 15, so they’re at least heading that direction, but guessing the FT decision was due to everyone jumping from Facetime to Zoom due to the pandemic.
Heh. But wait, does it also support SMS? So if I get texts from non iPhone/iMessage folks, to my iPhone, can I respond from Windows?
Yes SMS works too.
I think the android app replaces the default SMS app also, so you can iMessage and SMS from the same app there. But it doesn’t work with RCS, if that’s a thing now. I wouldn’t know, I just use iPhones.
Cool.
RCS isn’t a big deal. Yeah, on Android I enable it and Google Chat Features use RCS, but I don’t really care about RCS any more than I care about iMessage on iPhone. I just want to be able to send texts to everyone from any platform. At the moment, that happens easily if you’re on Android since they’ve enabled Messages on the web, but on iPhone, I’m jumping down this rabbit hole.
They should just enable messaging via iCloud.com.
They should, but they won’t.
Regarding performance yes it will be slow interactively on any platform due to unaccelerated video unless you passthrough a PCI-e GPU. If you do that it basically runs at native speeds and is completely usable as a primary computer. But for just airmessage, you don’t need it, give it as little resources as possible, the entire VM exists for iMessage only.
@Editer setup Airmessage cloud. It’s awesome.
Yeah, I won’t care about performance as long as it’s robust passing along messages. I’ll give it pretty much all the resources on the NUC. The only reason I’ll be running the box at all is for the OSX VM that I’ll rarely be logged into directly.
I’ve been running the mac VM for well over a year now since May 2020, it works great. Every couple of months the VM kernel panics and crashes, but it just restarts and I wouldn’t even notice if my monitoring didn’t alert me.
Yes, I monitor everything on my LAN. I have pingchecks for my smartbulbs. You got a problem with that?
LOL. Probably having kids precluded my going down the path of pingchecking smartbulbs. Maybe when they move out.