Autodesk Fusion EOL on Intel based MacOS systems running OpenCore legacy

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Recently, MacOS Autodesk Fusion users will be greeted with a warning upon launching the application on an Intel based MacOS device running OpenCore legacy and macOS 15 Sequoia or earlier. The corresponding support article states that support for the Fusion application on these systems had been dropped in March 2025. The application results in a "Installation pre-check" failure, preventing the user to update or reinstall the software and with further functionality likely breaking in the future.

Fusion360 cannot be updated due to a supposed hardware incompatibility.

Background

OpenCore legacy allows owners of intel based MacOS devices to run unsupported versions of MacOS on outdated hardware. OpenCore implements a custom boot loader and kernel extensions to bypass these restrictions. Functionally however, an unsupported Intel MacOS device running OpenCore is similar if not identical in terms of everyday use and application compatibility to a still supported Intel MacOS device, as the hardware is clearly still capable to run these applications.

Even though Apple will continue support for some Intel based Mac devices with MacOS 26 Tahoe, Autodesk introduced checks to determine if the devices operating system had been modified and whether the hardware is officially supported.

While support for Intel based Macs will be dropped altogether once Apple fully moves on to ARM eventually, it is no excuse for Autodesk to divide Intel based Mac users in this way prematurely, despite running an identical processor architecture.

EOL announcement by Autodesk

Statement by Autodesk regarding the issue

On February 5th 2025, Autodesk released a public statement regarding ending support for "unsupported" hardware by the end of March 2025.

- "The detected device hardware is not officially supported for the installed version of macOS. This can be due to use of alternative, unofficial methods to bypass Apple's hardware upgrade restrictions when attempting to install newer versions of macOS on legacy, unsupported generations of Mac devices."

The customer is being denied access to a paid subscription service, losing the ability to update, reinstall and possibly use the software on such hardware in the future.

• Product support for these unofficial Mac hardware configurations is not available.
• Your installed Autodesk Fusion client will not be able to update after March 2025.
• After March 2025, if you uninstall Fusion you will not be able to reinstall on unsupported hardware.
• Legacy builds of Fusion may fail eventually to connect to Autodesk servers as APIs, endpoints, and security requirements change.

Workaround

According to u/Alextrical and u/kookey on Reddit, the user can download and patch an officially downloaded Autodesk Fusion .dmg installer to bypass the "CheckMacOSHardwareConfig" requirement, skipping the installation pre-check on OpenCore legacy MacOS systems.

Mount the Installer, copy the "Install Autodesk Fusion.app" to the computer and edit the "precheck_config.json" file located in "/Contents/Resources/resources" when right clicking the installer app and selecting "Show package contents".

Add an entry for "CheckMacOSHardwareConfig" and set the "mandatory" property to "No". Type "sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine" into a terminal, then drag&drop the "Install Autodesk Fusion.app" into the terminal, or type the path of the installer app manually and run the command. Now launch the installer and retry the install, it should ignore the hardware check and skip right to the install process.

Screenshot of modified precheck_config.json