>Yeah, but if you're a pro, the unpredictable half day or more you'll probably have to invest several times a year to keep your Hackintosh running through OS updates totally negates the upfront cost savings.

If, as claimed in the article, a high-end hackintosh can be $7000 cheaper than the equivalent apple hardware, that outweighs a lot of "half days" for a lot of professionals. How many professionals earn less than $7000 per month? I would guess many.

I would gladly pay a 50% price premium on a skylake i7 Mac with a high end discreet gpu if Apple sold one.

Unfortunately they do not (I ended up getting a broadwell i7 iMac but would have preferred a discreet GPU if given the choice). It's really not about the apple tax but about current macs being out of date.

Having done a hackintosh myself, I'll chime in and say the cost of upkeep wasn't worth it in the long run. Not being able to do patch updates was fine, but XCode and a number of software always needed the latest OS. This meant doing several days of research / debugging, getting all the right software to update versus clicking one button and knowing it'll work. The second and probably most frustrating them about the hackintosh was when it spontaneously stopped working. I would reboot the computer and it would get stuck on the bootloader. After fiddling around for 5 minutes (if I'm lucky) to an average of 30 minutes, by trying to boot into recovery mode / different configurations, I'd be able to get back into the OS. It was definitely fun as a pet project, but I've learned my lesson. The time to tinker around with it just wasn't worth it for me.

As the author stated, a lot of functionality doesn't work out of the box. iMessage being the largest one. Onboard wifi / bluetooth might not work either, you'll probably need a third party adapter. Audio is a bit finicky, it'll go in and out. Even with video drivers, it might glitch up every once in a while.

The nerd in me wants to build my own Hackintosh.

But I know I can't waste the time with an unpredictable OS when there is no large ROI. Especially when there is a predictable OS is available...albeit at a premium.