I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get <i>really</i> weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again...<p>Unfortunately, the information is still very fragmented and it takes a lot of time and effort to get one running. Actually building the thing is the easiest part, it's the booting, installation and OS patches/fixes that eat up time.
As a Hackintosh user, I'd recommend an NCASE M1 v5 or the Shuttle SZ170R8 for a significantly better chassis.<p>With the NCASE, you can get a LGA 2011-v3 mini-ITX board and get as fast of a computer as you want. Though truthfully, I don't think there's much of a point.<p>Likewise, an old NVIDIA card for a Hackintosh? Also not much of a point. The web drivers are so bad. Who knows when Apple will ship another NVIDIA chip in a Mac?<p>If you need "CUDA stuff," use Linux or Windows. Software like Octane is so buggy and suffers from worse performance on Mac anyway. Final Cut and After Effects both support OpenCL acceleration. Besides, the RX 480 is $189.<p>If you're doing "VR stuff," well pity on you if you're developing for an Oculus on a Mac. The Vive doesn't, and probably never will, support Mac. Whatever VR solution Apple releases will obviously run great on the video cards they support, so that again strongly points to purchasing an AMD card at this time over your alternatives.<p>With regards to this specific build, a high DPI display will greatly improve the enjoyment of this computer. The Dell P2715Q is the best deal. Mac OS has such good HiDPI support compared to Windows (and especially Linux). Enjoy the features you pay for!<p>Truthfully, I'm hard pressed to see the point of a Hackintosh, and I own one.
I'm in the same boat this author is. It's disappointing to see the desktop market lagging so far behind. For all of the 68k/PPC years, we could at least say "different architecture" and Intel hadn't caught up. Now we're all Intel, and it's Apple that isn't keeping up. It's frustrating, and I'm not necessarily a "Pro user" anymore at all. I have a current generation Mac Mini, and it's over 2 years old now. What I can buy from the Apple Store right now for the same price is what I got 2 years ago.<p>I wish I know what Apple was thinking. One would have thought that the "iPhone halo effect" was something that they would have wanted to give momentum to. Instead people are looking at Windows units again.
Just to provide a counterpoint, I recently did a new desktop build and installed Windows 10. It's not bad, and very different from the Windows 10 beta that I gave up on in frustration two years ago. With the Ubuntu subsystem I can do useful work right away. After turning off some of the annoyances (via the Services and Group Policy control panels), it really does a decent job of just working. You can download and install with a USB stick (no more stupid DVDs). It still demands a license key, but runs indefinitely without registration with a little watermark.<p>If you haven't built a desktop in the past few years, the performance boost from PCIe NVMe SSDs is great, and Intel i5-7600K (now retails for $200) can run at 4.5 GHz reliably and stay cool. I'm impressed.
This is both informative and interesting from other angle. If Dan Counsell, well known owner of Realmac Software, has to build hackintosh then wtf is Apple doing?
My concern with these hackintosh systems is safety. Tools like Unibeast/Clover and whatever else. They manipulate the OSX install image. It all seems to work but then you type in your credentials for the bank or work into a browser and who knows if the OS is compromised.<p>Is it safe? That is the question.
I started to build a Hackintosh using this kind of setup but I realized that I no longer love the OS (I already own a Macbook) and that there's no reason for such a hassle.
Problem is, Apple doesn't have anything for power users or developers right now. I'm currently hackintoshing, but with every "dumb it down" decision (like remove the battery life time estimation), hardware mishap (LG monitors not working near wifi, come on) or new hardware announcement that <i>still</i> doesn't serve my demographic i wonder if i shouldn't just switch back to Linux.<p>I used to say that their laptops are fine, and it's only the desktop where i need to hackintosh, but ... touch typing hostile emoji keyboard?
I built a crazy fast Hackintosh using the intel 8 core 5960x CPU. 17000 on Cinebench. However I sold it a week ago.<p>Being iOS developer really sucked, as I needed to upgrade OS X for Xcode but the CPU wasn't supported with Sierra for 6 months.<p>Also I spent at least 2 weeks of work on it during the year I had it. So not worth it. But there are slower cpus that are better supported. It was fun the days it worked though:)
I'm wondering whether it would be easier to run macOS in VM. No more fear of updates with snapshots, and I imagine ease of installation and less compatibility issues.<p>Anyone does it, how's performance and keyboard "tunneling" (CMD vs CTRL)?
While this PC looks great, visually, and spec wise; isn't this missing the point?<p>It seems like a company needs to build a _very_ good linux distro with design first principles. It needs to work on a number of devices. More importantly, it needs to be a paid OS. It can have an open source distro underneath, but the UI needs to be created by people who are paid well.
I bought my Mac the first month they appeared in 1984. I won't bother you with the ensuing history, but I will raise a question related to it:<p>I remember when Apple could not offer a retail OS, not without cannibalizing hardware sales. If Pro desktops fade, is that still true for that segment? Or could they offer something Xeon only (to keep out commodity laptops) as a legal Hackintosh? Or do certified configurations a la Oculus? If their profit is in mobile, and cloud services, it might help more than hurt.<p>FWIW I like Debian now, and the non-intrusive UI.
I have a Ubuntu desktop (i7 6700K, nVidia GTX 1080, like everybody else's), and a recent MacBook Pro.<p>Each time I open the latter, I have a mixed feeling of "how beautiful everything is!" and "how slow everything is!"<p>(I am a Scala software engineer occasionally working with GPU-based machine learning)
I have been using a similar (a bit lower specs) hackintosh for 2 years.<p>About two weeks ago, I decided to stop and look elsewhere.<p>I started a small serie on my experience if you are interested:
<a href="https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-motivations-b10accc10889#.k6ccx7dt5" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-moti...</a><p>I am still testing my current setup, but I guess I'll soon publish the last bit, with the setup I found and my conclusions on the switch.
I had a Hackintosh for years. I used the stock/retail CD from my former mackbook, used some custom kexts and a guide to generate the right plist edit to unlock my nvidia card. I never had issues with updates either.<p>It ran Snow Leopard and I used it for all my development, video editing, photo editing, etc. Eventually I left for Australia and decided to get a real MacBook and unfortunately it had Lion on it.<p>I hated Lion. Gone was Expose. Gone were rows of virtual desktops (Missing Control had one row with multiple columns. I hated that shit). There was no way to get the old functionality back. Eventually I started using Linux again in a VM as my primary OS.<p>Today I'm back on Linux with i3 as my tiling window manager and I don't think I'd ever go back to macos. I think many of their design decisions since Lion and onward have been terrible. I just keep around a Windows laptop or VM for when I need commercial products or to play games.
>> Maybe Apple have been waiting for the recently released Ryzen CPUs from AMD?<p>You can't even run the stock kernel on AMD chips. How much QA and other work Apple would have to do, I have no idea.
I'm a Hackintosh user for almost 10 years (from 10.6!), though I do have a MacBook Pro with my when I'm out.<p>As other people stated, yes, it is very time consuming to get it straight. Treat it as a hobby, you'll understand things about the Mac (or computers in general) other people don't, such as DSDT patches, how drivers are loaded, and Mac power management, etc.<p>If you use Clover, and get all the patches right, you can almost get an update-proof setup (Except when you go from say 10.11 to 10.12). But even at the worst case, usually people on the Internet will figure out fast enough for you to apply the new patches. Minor updates are really really easy and fine. I always click Update without batting an eye.<p>It's a tinkerer's hobby. If you like doing researches and being fine with spending time figuring out stuff on the Internet, I will say go for it and try it out! The process is fun and the result is very rewarding.
I know I could Google and read about some experiences but since this made me think about it... have any of you HN'ers tried to virtualize OS X or run it virtualized (on anything other than an OS X host) on a regular basis?<p>I've got a (still pretty new) high-end MacBook Pro sitting at the end of my desk but -- after putting together a new, <i>extremely</i> over-built workstation a few months ago -- I haven't even turned it on since I don't know when. I've got KVM/qemu, VMware Workstation, and VirtualBox all installed on my workstation, though, and it might be interesting to try to get OS X running under one of them.
Best mac I ever had is my Hackintosh. I built a fusion drive for it and use Clover instead of Chimera for a boot loader, so I can update from major versions without trouble.<p>I've never had any issues, i just shop for compatible chipsets. I've had tons of issues with Linux on the desktop in comparison to Hackintosh. Never understood how people say it's time consuming to do it!
One day I want the Adobe suite to run on linux (natively) then I can leave OS X just like Windows. Local Media editing is the last reason for windows/os x to exist.<p>Everything else (games, calculations, social networks, model rendering) is better served by a web or mobile app backed by a server running linux.
There are some comments here as to motivation: why go through all this? I make video money using after effects, mainly. I'm chained to the oars. The choice of intermediate codec (ProRes) is surprisingly important, there are other solutions that don't make it for my workflow. And it's not just codec, lots of things about windows 10 make it an unprofessional choice. I was planning to build a windows box anyway, with i7 6900K, 128GB ram, ASRock X99 Taichi, GTX 1080, NVMe, all that. When I overlaid that over a hackintosh, it seemed a bit past what is possible, at least from a cursory look at tonymacx86. It's worth a week of work to me, maybe I'll look harder. Thanks for listening!
I custom built my PC before knowing of what a hackintosh was so I didn't purchase my hardware specifically for it. According to the compatibility wiki my config was compatible.<p>I remember during college of wanting to do some Ios development but afford a MAC. I spent atleast 20 hours of tweaking kewts settings and trying different distros. I finally got it to boot but it crashed whenever I tried to run the emulator.<p>I haven't touched hackintosh stuff for several years but the grief and time wasted makes it not worth it. It's a shame apple is limiting their development tools to MacOS. They could learn a thing or two from Microsoft.
I have a Toshiba Satellite Radius 11 L15W-... its a cheap 300 dollar laptop runs windows 10. changing the OS is not supported and actually blocked my the manufacturer. I was able to find a few tools to remove some of the counter measures set in place. It is now a Ubuntu Laptop, I would use a Mac for development but Macs are expensive. I have built 2 PC gaming rigs that were more expensive then the 1500 price tag of a hackintosh.
Bottom line is you can get any modern OS working on almost any machine. It just starts to get really hacky and information can be hard to find.
I'm not a Hackintosh builder, have considered it many times. From the video's I've watched, the big trick, especially if you use Final Cut Pro X with OpenCL, is to avoid NVidia and use AMD Radeon video cards. Supposedly this makes the build process a lot easier/less finicky, and even faster. Can anyone confirm?
Has anyone here tried running OS X under Parallels Desktop on Linux?<p><a href="http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallels_Desktop_Users_Guide/22555.htm" rel="nofollow">http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallel...</a>
> I've switched off auto-updates in Sierra. While system updates should work just fine, I prefer to hold off until the community over at tonymacx86 have confirmed there are no issues.<p>Does anyone know why some of the updates can brick the machine? Also how often does this happen? Or like what percentage of updates break things.
a bit off topic. NVIDIA driver for mac is kind of suck. the bug, which showing a transparent window whenever you try to open an epub file with ibook.app, is been there for a very long time, and still no fix yet.
Those cases still look really ugly. Reminds me of the look I was going for twenty years ago when i was a teenager w all the neon. The Macs at least look elegant and like something I'd want in my house.
After years of making fun of Linux folks for having to "know everything about the computer" to get things working, Mac folks seem to be embracing the culture these days.
Apple have made some terrible design decisions since Jobs died.<p>A 'thin iMac' - whose thin-ness was absolutely pointless.<p>The MacBook (2 lbs) and MacBook Pro (3 lbs) were designed to weigh arbitrary weights instead of thinking about features: <a href="http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&product2=macbook-pro-13" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&p...</a><p>And the MacPro was possible the worst shape for upgrades.<p>Jobs inspired people to come up with great machines, but he also had a pragmatism which seems to have been lost at Apple.