can you make mac os bootable usb without a mac?

[HK007]

I m gonna start by saying that I m not a Mac user and have never owned a Apple device. 

So recently a friend of mine was looking at some 2016ish era of used macbooks, somehow we got into the conversation of how you cant make bootable usb for macs, i was shocked to say the least and didnt believe him tbh. I googled some and couldnt really find a valid answer. 
I just wanna ask/discuss this with mac users and much more informed tech people if this is the case or i m wrong with the information.
 

[Arika]

can't, has to be done on a Mac.

[jaslion]

Just now, Arika S said:

can't, has to be done on a Mac.

Technically you can with a vm but it's a massive pain to do an no guarantee it will work at all so basically as you said it's a no.

 

 

[maplepants]

1 hour ago, HK007 said:

you cant make bootable usb for macs

On macOS, you absolutely can. It's a native OS function and very easy to do. It's true that you can't make them from non-macs, but if the context is your friend buying a Mac, then he can for sure make the bootable USB from that Mac. 

 

It's a very common use case on a Mac that you might have different OS versions on different disks. This is used all the time buy people hacking on the kernel, or Mac App developers who want to test their software on a macOS beta but don't want to daily drive it. You can grab yourself a thunderbolt hub, slap a thunderbolt drive into each port and run loads of different versions of macOS.

 

APFS volumes even give you an easy way to install multiple versions of macOS onto the same drive if you want. 

[FRSHPRNCFBLR]

You can legally buy bootable usb sticks with macOS in some countries, such as Germany, where the software has to be available separately from the hardware for some reason. 

[Nayr438]

You can unofficially with TransMac.

1. Format disk for Mac
2. Restore with disk image

There is also Paragon HFS+ which can do this and I'm sure others.

 

You however still need a Mac to legally obtain the installation image.