It may be possible to swap out the Merom CPU in some Macs for a Penryn, which would then allow Sierra to run.

In theory, it should be possible to get Sierra running on any Penryn or later Mac.

Hardware requirements for macOS Sierre include a CPU with SSE4.1, so it cannot be run on any Mac with a CPU prior to the Penryn Core 2 Duo. Hacking macOS Sierra for Unsupported Macs (We recommend at least 4 GB of RAM.) Officially Supported MacsĪll Late 2009 and later MacBook and iMac models are supported in macOS Sierra, as are all 2010 and newer MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and Mac Pro computers. 20, 2016 and officially requires a supported Mac with at least 2 GB of system memory and 8.8 GB of available storage space. Now it’s simply macOS Sierra – in keeping with iOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Mac OS X is no longer being called OS X, and Apple is not promoting Sierra with a version number either (however, it is internally identified as OS X 10.12).

No MacBook and iMac models prior to Late 2009 and no MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and Mac Pro models prior to 2010 are officially supported by macOS Sierra, although workarounds have been developed for most unsupported 20 Macs. For the first time since Apple released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in July 2012, Apple has dropped support for a number of older Macs that had supported OS X 10.8 through 10.11 El Capitan.

How to install mac os 10.12