Luca Todesco teases pongoOS running on an M1-equipped Mac

It’s not unheard of to see checkra1n team member Luca Todesco Tweeting about some sort of jaw-dropping hacking achievement. Todesco has shown time and time again that he wields magnificent hacking talents, and as of this evening, he appears to be at it again.

In a series of Tweets shared Saturday, Todesco teased multiple photographs of what appears to be pongoOS running on one of Apple’s brand-new M1 chip-equipped Macs.

The first Tweet appears to contain an image depicting Todesco’s initial testing with pongoOS on an M1-equipped Mac, whereas the second image depicts a fully working pongoOS boot on the same machine:

While the checkra1n team is best known for its work on the checkra1n jailbreak tool (gee, who would’ve guessed?), PongoKit is something that the checkra1n team launched last February with the hope that it would help further the deployment of other platforms on checkm8 vulnerable iOS devices.

Before the launch, Todesco teased numerous instances of pongoOS being deployed on various systems, including the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar by way of the notebook’s integrated T2 chip, and one of his own iPhone handsets. Further, Todesco was able to run Linux on his iPhone with the help of pongoOS, an incredible feat that can’t be written off.

In today’s teaser, we see one of Apple’s latest chips – the M1 – appearing fully vulnerable to Todesco’s mad hacking skills. Apple ships its proprietary M1 chip in some of its lower-cost MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks instead of an Intel CPU as the company has previously used in similar models.

We have yet to witness the full capacity of what pongoOS will be capable of on an M1-equipped Mac, but given that we’ve already witnessed Linux running on one of Todesco’s pongoOS-enabled iPhones, we can only assume that the same would be possible, if not more.

Everything to get pongoOS working on an M1-equipped Mac is now published on GitHub, which means those who know what they’re looking at can now begin playing around with it. Obviously, this stuff leans more toward advanced users rather than the average Joe, and so unless you’re a developer or an experienced computer tinkerer and know what you’re doing, you may want to steer clear.

In any case, it’s neat to see Apple’s latest system on a chip in Todesco’s Twitter feed. This could be a good sign of things to come in the near future…

Are you excited to see that pongoOS works on Apple’s latest M1-equipped Macs? Discuss down in the comments section below.