In recap, I solved the 'Cannot initialize HAX' issue with following steps Reboot was the fastest way for me so I took the shortcut here. I'm quite sure there are some steps you can do to solve 'extension unload failed' -issue other than rebooting the laptop. I solved this by rebooting my laptop and manually uninstalling current HAXM version. For me, update failed because older version failed to unload. Updating HAXM was not as straightforward as one might think. HAXM is now a open source project in github, releases are located here:

By the time of writing this latest version is 7.1.0. Solution is to update HAXM to more appropriate version. This is badly outdated and is the root cause for 'Cannot initialize HAX' -error. Tizen Studio includes HAXM version 6.0.3. This solved the 'Unable to select workspace' problem HAXM / Cannot initialize HAX.

Note that Virtual Machine setting needs to be set before -vmargs option.

Edited the eclipse.ini found inside TizenStudio.app/Contents/Eclipse/eclipse.ini with forced VM version by following setting.

Downloaded and installed Java 1.8.0_151 from Oracle archives.

Since it's generally a bad idea to globally downgrade your Java version, I solved the issue with following steps > When Tizen Studio runs, one can not click 'OPEN' on workspace selection popup making it impossible to select one and proceed to actual Tizen Studio. Some documentation mentioned that Java version should be 1.8.0_151. Instead, here are the issues I could reproduce and solve. Since I was not able to reproduce those issues and can't really provide any meaningfull information about those issues, I'm not going to write about them. There were some failed installations and other (minor) issues which were solved by removing and reinstalling Tizen Studio. Radeon Pro 450 2 GB / Intel HD Graphics 530 1536 MB (OpenGL 4.1)

Mac os 10.13 emulator