The exclusivity here is not technical but logistical. Maintaining a library of macOS Qcow2 images across versions (from High Sierra to Sequoia) for multiple architectures (x86_64 vs. experimental ARM via QEMU’s qemu-system-aarch64 ) is labor-intensive. Providers use “exclusive” as leverage for subscriptions or donations.

As Elias hovered over the download button, he remembered the warnings from the community:

To understand the phenomenon, one must first grasp the container. Qcow2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write version 2) is the native disk image format for QEMU, an open-source machine emulator and virtualizer. Unlike raw .img files or VMware’s .vmdk , Qcow2 offers several features critical for macOS virtualization on non-Apple hardware (e.g., a Linux host or a Windows PC using QEMU):