The primary reason for using a Mac is that you get a unix-like environment, which works without having to piss around with drivers and compatibility. Macbooks also have the advantage of having very nice design and battery life.
A hackintosh takes away the only advantage macOS has over Linux, in my opinion. You now have the same OS, which is more closed and harder to change to suit your needs than Linux, and you will have the same driver problems that Linux users face.
The alternative to a hack was a pimped out Mac Pro for about thrice the price. I figured it wasn't worth it, and I was right.
At work I was running a Mac Pro, at home I was running the hack. I had zero problems with the hack, but every point upgrade naturally meant a moment of prayer. I always did a full mirror of the system disk with dd before upgrading, but never had a problem.
I think the primary appeal of Hackintoshes these days is that you can literally build systems for half the price that perform twice as well as what Apple is offering these days (this is true of the lower end Mac Minis and the high end Mac Pros).
The biggest market I've seen recently is probably for indie pros that don't want to change their media workflow (video, graphics etc) but need more price/performance, or increasingly just straight performance than Apple offers. Honestly, the Mac Pro's ancient E5 CPUs and D300 GPUs are sort of pathetic.
It's also nerdery of a very unrewarding kind (follow some instructions on a forum, which take ages and involve endless reboots, repeat with random other forum instructions when you find they don't work, and so on).
I ran an Asus eeePC HackBook a few years ago before concluding it was a mug's game. In a world where software updates were unimportant or infrequent, things might be different. This is not that world.
It was never my primary environment and I eventually gave up on the projects. I generally find macOS unpleasant and incompatible with the way I think.
So, yeah, the appeal is that if you need to develop for macOS or iOS, and a Mac would be a ridiculous waste of money for someone like me (I don't want the OS, and while the hardware is pretty good, it has a very high Apple tax attached to it, and some other vendors make very good hardware these days). It's also kinda fun to thinker with weird stuff.
Mac Pros are scandalously expensive and aren't passively cooled. iMacs and Mac Minis are very noisy under high CPU load because of the small blower fans. Hackintoshes provide the best of both worlds - you can build a reasonably priced computer with no moving parts[2] and run an OS that is optimised for real-time audio applications.
Drivers aren't really an issue if you choose components from an approved list - either It Just Works or it doesn't.
Unlike a lot of people I actually like MacOS. I just wish it wasn't tied down to apple hardware.
I'm a massive Linux user (it's on everything, I don't own a Mac) but you can't run Creative Suite on Linux you can on a Hackintosh as well as all the other Mac native applications.
It's easy to fall into the trap that "my use case is the only use case" and that's not true. If I was a .Net developer I'd be on Windows, if I was an iOS developer I'd be on a Mac.
The 27" iMac uses a modern Skylake chipset and has an excellent 5K monitor. It's definitely not out of date, but it might be too expensive for your friend though.
So as a developer who also dabbles in the above you have 3 options:
1) Hackintosh
2) Pay double/triple the cost for a real Mac with worse hardware
3) Run Windows with a "seamless" Linux based VM and spend 99% of your time in the VM (this is what I do but honestly, it's not ideal because despite having a fast machine it doesn't have that "liquid smooth" feel to it even tho it's fast)
If you happen to enjoy games too then generally #3 is your best bet. Btw driver support for Linux isn't that bad anymore. I picked out standard parts (similar to what OP did in his blog post, but not his parts) and everything worked out of the box with Linux.
If you're lucky you won't have driver problems so that might not be an issue for you.
I cannot quite put my finger on why Linux feels so much better. Everything just tends to work and is more straightforward and simple. Perhaps it's just about being used to the environment.
I usually use Arch Linux and i3, sometimes changing to Gnome. I guess OS X has nothing comparable.
> I agree that OS X is way more stable than Ubuntu, Fedora and any of their derivatives
You guys are doing something seriously wrong. I've been using Debian, Ubuntu CentOS and Fedora for years with no issue whatsoever, from puny Celeron-based laptops to multi-socket Xeon boxes.
I love my Macs, but to say they are in any way more stable than the Linux machines is indicative of something odd. To me, the biggest advantage of the Mac is being able to run iTunes and sync my phone.
I guess you never used Slackware. ;)
I agree that OS X is way more stable than Ubuntu, Fedora and any of their derivatives.
An all-in-one liquid cooler will always be noisier than quality air cooling, for example the Noctua NH-D14. Especially in a great case like that. You'd need to build a very costly loop to have a quiet one and these days CPUs have dropped their TDP so much that there's absolutely no reason to liquid cool them. When you CrossFire/SLI and especially triple CF/SLI top video cards only then you need to begin to think because there's so little space between the cards for air to move. EKWB have special parts to help with watercooling such setups.
tangible
Just by using the Clover bootloader + FakeSMC.kext (to bypass DSMOS) you can boot... if your system is supported. You can't blame them for not making drivers for everything, taking into account they control the hardware they sell.
They learned the lesson from how IBM failed to maintain its 'walled garden' around the original IBM PC by neglecting to take ownership of DOS, which allowed their market to be swamped by PC clones, usually technically superior, all running DOS.
Why buy an Apple computer if I can develop for iOS in my X86 machine?
I have thought about building a Hackintosh multiple times over, but the continuity (I'm not referring to the marketing term of one specific feature) is something that most Hackintosh builds lack. In the end I realized that if I want a Hackintosh, I want it to be the same as a real Mac. If not, I can just stick with Linux and not be constrained in any way.
edit: I am being downvoted for pointing out a blatant license terms violation? Really?
I'm actually curious what the minimum viable Apple hardware one needs to legitimately follow Apple's license. Is it the motherboard? The case? A few custom chips? What if you could purchase just thoes parts (eg: as repair parts) in order to be fully license compliant, then build your Mac up around those? You would get to be legit and you're also able to customize all the license agnostic parts to obtain whatever specs you're after.
Not making a judgement in this case, but just being clear.
Lighten up. It's not like manufacturing hackintoshes and selling them.
Then I present to you the Quicksilver: http://imgur.com/w1mLAm0&CMjGhkA
I think Intel desktop CPUs are overpriced and do not offer some important features (ECC). Haswell Xeons are pretty cheap, only downside is lack of NVMe and higher electricity bill.
I will probably go with this:
- 2 x 12 core Xeon based on Haswell
- dual CPU motherboard
- 256GB ECC DDR2 RAM
That said entry level Xeons are not that expensive an E3-1220 v5 costs 200$...
But if you are going for your machine it doesn't look like money is an issue. But that said if you need that much computing power why even bother building a machine? You can get used rackmount servers on the cheap these days, and if you live near a place that does foreclosure auctions you can get them ridiculously cheaply even if they are new in box.
Here is a server with 2 x 8 core CPU's and 192GB RAM for 1200$ and with B/O you can probably get it closer to 1000.... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-2-x-E5-2670-CPU-192GB-RAM...
If you don't want to stick it in a closet then a 10-15U rack is also 100-150$.
And just remote to the server from anywhere you want....
It was great, I loved it and used it every single day for years.
That being said, the longer I owned it, the more I realized it's shortcomings. Sometimes it wouldn't wake from sleep. It's trackpad was crap. The keyboard keys had a crappy feel. I couldn't update OS X. Ironically a friend tripped over the power cord, pulling it onto concrete and smashing the screen - if I had a real Apple laptop the magsafe connector would have saved it. (though I replaced it for $35)
After years of use, that hackintosh taught me one thing - I really wanted a genuine Apple laptop, so I went and bought my first one - a 2012 MBA, which I'm using right now.
Hacktoshes are close, but not the real thing.
Stating your hackintosh and this hackintosh as the same isn't fair.
The part that makes OSX and Apple in general so good is that it just works. It really does. It never crashes, never locks up and works year after year.
A hackintosh does not do that, and is only a close second.
All in all, things are vastly improved these days. Apple tends to use more off-the-shelf hardware, which means there's a lot less hacking going on if you hand-pick components (like a few others here, I ran OS X on a Dell Mini 9, but I also did that on Toshiba laptops, Dell desktops and a number of 'near-Macs' which had compatible motherboards and video cards). You can keep such a machine stable for years if you know what you're doing, but yes, things can go spectacularly wrong.
Then again, considering that I mostly did nuke & pave upgrades of most of my Linux machines due to accumulation of various kinds of cruft, a couple of those hacks were probably easier to maintain.
Problem solved...
Let's say having the ability to run Mac software enables you to increase your monthly revenue by $5K (and that is a very generous overestimation), how much of your time is worth assembling and fixing your own versus buying a reasonable iMac or a MacPro?
I'm curious why you need a Mac to get things done? Unless your work involves iOS development or a lot of Photoshopping, a standard Ubuntu Desktop installation should do just fine.
This should be somewhere near the top of the article.
While I respect Apple for their stance on privacy, this side disgusts me. I understand profits, but this is pure greed.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/AcademicComputing/images/next....
Is there such a thing as a mobile, macbook-compatible motherboard that you can buy? Or is that a really ridiculous thing to ask? I rather suspect the latter actually.
http://techsviewer.com/how-to-install-mac-os-x-el-capitan-on...
This is 'king maker' stuff.
Love it.
