Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.
People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was:
> Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
So yes, I may just want to turn the key and have my car work. But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car, so I can better understand what was wrong, and whether I can fix it myself or if I needed a professional.
I run Linux on all my machines, and my family generally uses Mac (both sides), but all those years tinkering with Linux, they still come to me for help with their Mac machines that they insisted would Just Work.
All that out of the way, I agree with your fundamental premise: hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.
I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.
This is a gross misunderstanding of the GP's point though. It's not that they are against doing any of these things. In fact, they said they were more than happy to do it in their youth. I am in full agreement with the GP's sentiment as well.
Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have.
But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it.
your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now
I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value.
I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting.
I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.
The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along.
In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.
All my PCs and servers run Linux, and its certainly not out of some idealism or anything. I'm fundamentally lazy, but I have a high standard for how things should be. As a result, I tend towards the highest quality, lowest cost (time, money, etc.), and thats Linux for me. Specifically, the setup I run on almost all my machines, which is the most optimal way I have found to write and run software, and play games.
If Windows was easier to use, more stable, less of a hassle, easier to fix, I would use it, but its neither of those (for me). When I have a windows problem, I can either try magical incantations to fix it, reinstall, or give up, and each of those takes much longer than most things I could possibly do on my linux systems. Even if my linux box fails to boot, the drivers break and my ssd doesnt mount, all those fixes together take less time and effort than finding a fix for the most trivial of windows problems.
The most trivial problem on Windows has been that the right click menu doesn't fully populate on first right click. I reported the issue, and thats all I can do. Its been a year and nothing has changed.
On linux, a less trivial problem (a calculator crashing with a series of very weird inputs) was solved by me opening it in gdb and fixing the code, making a PR and having it merged.
I guarantee a lot of people are on linux because its easier, and for no other reason. I dont need it to "just work", because I will break it. I need any possible fix to be possible in bounded time.
I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't randomly pop up.
Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that.
Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.
> Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
I have plenty of other things I’d rather tinker with and become an expert on, though. My computer is a tool to let me work with those things. It’s not fun when I have to debug and fix the tool for hours or days before I can even start working on the things I want to work on.
This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)
At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.
> hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.
Part of this might be that making Hackintoshes is so much harder now, but part of it might also be that OOTB desktop Linux is luxuriously good these days compared to where it used to be. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS linux are absolutely on par with MacOS for a user who meets the (admittedly higher) entry requirements for using Linux.
Your comment makes me think of my 3d printing journey. A lot of printers require maintenance and tinkering just to keep them functional. To an extent, since they are targeted towards “makers” who like to play with these things, that’s fine.
But sometimes the thing you’re trying to build is of central importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be exploring your ideas with a machine that’s already fully functional.
This argument makes a lot of sense. I get more upset than I probably should about car issues, likely because I never spent the time to tinker with them, so I feel rather helpless… and I don’t like feeling helpless.
In my youth I did a lot of tinkering with computers and it has paid dividends. It gave me a career.
These days though, I want to be able to tinker on my own schedule. I want my primary computer, phone, and car to “just work”. That means any low level tinkering needs a second thing. That can work fine for computers, because they’re small and relatively cheap. The idea of having a project car isn’t something I ever see myself doing, as it’s big and expensive.
I can still tinker on some things with my primary computer without it being a problem. Tinkering on writing software, running servers, or whatever, isn’t going to kill my ability to do other things on the computer. A lot of tinkering can be done without tinkering with the OS itself.
> the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless
You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise).
> But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car
Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.
There's levels to tinkering though. When I was running Ubuntu, a lot of the tinkering came down to searching for what config files to update. Sure, that freedom is nice if you care to use it, but it's mostly just searching, configuring, experimenting. This is hardly fun or instructive.
A deeper form of tinkering is actually working on the code. I think an instructive example is writing your own X windowing system with xmonad. You get to see exactly how a whole windowing system works.
These days, if you have the skills and tools to swap a transmission you have to tow it into a dealership and beg them to flash the transmission so it will work in your truck. If you want to avoid that you better know where to find the strategy code and match it up before purchasing another transmission. Same goes for touch screens and a whole slew of essential parts. While we weren't looking the rug was completely pulled out from underneath us. Now your family mechanic is beholden to the dealership.
> People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was:
> > Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
But it is exactly why I quit Linux and returned to macOS. I used to run Linux on cheap 2nd hand ThinkPads and for 3 years on Macbook as main system. But after another upgrade destroyed gain all network connectivity I have quit.
macOS isn't perfect but it works in most imposrtant areas and I can tinker with small stuff when I feel like it.
Ubuntu is so easy to use. I enjoyed using Arch before, but got to a point where I also just wanted my PC to work without any tinkering. Ubuntu is very good at that.
Your argument is excellent and made me evolve my point of view about Mac. I use Mac for efficiency, and yet, I was wrong about what kind of efficiency I’ve been developing. Tinkering is so important, even if just for the fun of it.
Do you not have any hobbies to "waste time" with? I would assume that most Hackintosh enthusiasts do this as a hobby, not for a living or even to save money on hardware.
You need to understand the bias of many HN commenters. They are running businesses, aspire to run businesses or employed by businesses that are monetizing the work of tinkerers and packaging it for a mass market where they can sell higher volumes or mine more personal data. There are a lot of people who will recommend spending massive amounts of time and money learning and renting proprietary services over learning fundamental concepts and owning your own stack. I just ignore them along with the crypto bros before them and the AI pumpers now. Renting proprietary closed services to people who don't know better is their bread and butter.
>Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out.
But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago.
[] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.
I don't know about you, but for me it was never about the money. I did this stuff (and still do) because I find it fun, not because I can't afford to buy it. I have my desktop, and I want that to just work, and I have a bunch of computers, hardware, 3D printers, etc etc that I constantly tinker with, because I like it.
I suspect it's the same for you, and it may be the lack of time, but not so much the access to money.
As a teen in the mid-oughties. I played heavily with the OSx86 project/Hackintosh. I learnt about writing kexts and kernel patche and I fondly remember getting a Linksys USB-to-ethernet adapter working on an HP workstation, running Tiger.
My financial circumstances have improved somewhat in the intervening years. Today, I own quite a bit of Apple hardware, most recently Vision purchase overton-shifted my definition of “disposable” into very unfamiliar territory. Even still, about once a year I ensure I can still triple-boot” - just now I do it with ProxMox and Virtual Passthrough. The first iMessage sent from my virtualized “iMac pro” at 2AM and was almost as gratifying as the first Apple Bootscreen on a a Sony Vaio.
Spot on for me, but there's a different argument at play: At the beginning of the OSX on x86 times, Apple had an OS with a stellar user experience, but the hardware was just completely overpriced, so Hackintosh made complete sense.
Fast forward to today and I think Apple managed to pivot this almost to the complete opposite end. I think the hardware is incredible value (that's debatable for sure, but my M1 aluminum machined Macbook with Apple Silicon is blazing fast, completely silent, super sturdy and runs forever — I wouldn't trade it for any other laptop I could buy with money), while the Operating System has really taken a backseat, with hugely annoying bugs unfixed since 10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460
To me, in a world like that, Hackintosh simply doesn't make much sense anymore. Asahi Linux is really the star on the horizon, by doing exactly the opposite: Letting a free and better maintained operating systems run on strictly awesome hardware.
Value was the driving factor for some of my early hackintoshing (Core 2 Duo era), but what pushed me to do it from 2015-2020 was the abysmal state of higher powered Mac hardware.
The Mac Pro was still the un-updated 2012 trash can, the 15” MBPs were too thin for the CPUs they housed (perhaps Intel’s fault for getting stuck on 14nm for so long, but still) and were hot with terrible battery life, and while the 27” iMacs weren’t terrible and probably the best of the lineup, they still weren’t cooled quite as well as they should’ve been. My 6700k + 980Ti tower in a Fractal Define case with a big quiet Noctua cooler was just flat better and made a far better Mac than anything Apple sold at the time.
That said, I did eventually grow tired of the tinkery-ness of it all and in 2020 picked up a refurbed base model iMac Pro, one of the few Macs in that timespan that wasn’t a mistake, for about half its MSRP. It was about as powerful as that tower, surprisingly even more quiet, and of course just worked without the tinkering.
This is the classic "money is time, time is money" conundrum. A teenager doesn't have the money to buy a fancy car or computer but they have the time to tweak and experiment to get the most out of it. Meanwhile an adult has the money but not the time, assuming they have a full time job, kids, etc. So they're willing to spend the money to get products that work and would rather spend their limited time with their family instead.
In my teens I had a group of friends who loved to tinker, from hackintoshes to custom ROMs to homelabbing to electronics repair. Now I'm like the only one left who does this stuff :(
> Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
This resonates with me as well. As a teenager with my first car I spent a lot of time tweaking its appearance, sound, performance, etc., buying what little I could from local auto parts stores. I couldn't wait to get older to have more money so I could do more mods and really make the vehicle how I wanted it.
In the back of my head I wondered why older folks didn't do this though. They have these nice vehicles but they're bone stock! Why not new wheels, tint, a tasteful lower, etc.?
Then I myself got older and found it just isn't as important as it used to be. I still have a slightly modified car, but I'm not rooting around inside the dash with a soldering iron like I once did, haha.
Haha that is a very similar mindset I had when I bought my first house. I was excited about all of the nice improvements I could make and wondered why so many people I knew who were well off never really put much work into their home.
Then I quickly realized that its such a big hassle and also you almost instantly get used to things how they are.
I don't understand. Do you imagine there isn't a young generation of time rich cash poor tinkerers now? Why would the idea of a hackintosh suddenly become obsolete because you can afford one now and don't have time? Nothing about your statement logically follows.
He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.
There are other things that are more interesting to build and make now than a hackintosh (with the added difficulty that trying to make a silicon compatible device may not be feasible).
Combine this with that a Mac mini that might be at the target for a hackintosh device is $600 USD ... and has the advantage that it isn't hacked together and so has better support.
The part of me that wanted to tinker with a hackintosh in my younger days is more satisfied by Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. I've even got an Onion IO over there that could use some love.
Its not that people don't want to tinker, but rather the utility that one gets for hacking together a Mac (again, note the silicon transition) is less than one gets for hacking on single board computers.
As I said in my post, the next generation will find something new to tinker on.
The idea of a hackintosh is obsolete because there are new worlds to conquer, the time of hackintoshes has come and gone. The new generation will find their own challenges, not re-hash challenges of the past.
I guess the commercial success of the platform has increased the offering in the second hand market.
Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the purchase of a mac.
The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy the equivalent-specced Mac.
The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible.
People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)
I started my developer career on Hackintoshes many years ago.
No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop, it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest Xcode.
Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over the years, like crashes and graphical glitches with certain apps, like Photos or Preview, problems with monitor resolutions and refresh rates, and many, many others.
Ultimately, they were a useful tool for a time, but they suffered from death by a thousand cuts in terms of practical usability. So, I bought a basic Mac Mini as soon as I was able to, and never looked back.
I built a hackontosh in 2016, bought all the right mobo with the right driver sets, etc. Used the buyer's guides on tonymacx86.com and purchased the exact hardware, downloaded the drivers, flashed things, etc. It was far from "just working". I had a stable and solid system for about 18 months (after a weekend of tweaking), and then it needed to be reconfigured, and I didn't have the time to spend the weekend getting it to work again....so that machine went back to windows. Even with the proper supported Nvidia card, I had issues, and went through some pains with the wifi.
> It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
Oh JFC. This canard has been floating around the about linux for 30 years, and it's always been a half truth at best.
Inevitably, it always comes down to "Cards with 2361YSE rev 5 chipset" or some other nonsense. Like that makes total sense for a kernel developer, but most people don't know what chipset they have in some peripheral.
So now you're left with assholes saying, "WeLL yOu ShOuLd gEt InFoRmEd. JuSt GoOgLe iT!", and it ain't that easy. If you can even find a brand name to chipset list, it's going to be out of date, or it's going to be something that says "2361Y" or "2361YSE rev 3" or something. Is that close enough to "2361YSE rev 5"? Who knows!
Then the best part? Even when you lookup the hardware with "full compatibility", you'll find that it actually isn't. Then when you ask about it, you'll get, "I just don't use that feature, and you shouldn't use it either."
You guys that grow old forget that there's still younger people in this *world* (not just the US). It's analogous to saying "I worked 9to5 in the 2000s (when wages were acceptable). But now that I have way less energy to work, and made millions off my retirement fund. I don't see why this generation shouldn't equally work as hard today."
Tinkering shouldn't be nostalgia, it should be a right. I'm sure you used to fix the rusty old generational family car with your dad on the weekends. He probably used to do the same with your grandfather on the weekends. I don't think there'll be a car to fix for the next generation.
Just like ramen or office chairs can measure a recession, fixing cars with a father figure could be used as an indicator for the prevalence of greed in society.
I was also that kid. I remember an OSX upgrade breaking my mouse and I couldn't figure out how to get it working again. I was desperate for a Mac, but it was financially unattainable.
I feel the same way with phones. I pre-ordered a Nexus One the day it opened, installed a dozen custom ROMs, etc etc. Upgraded to a Nexus 4, 5. These days I use an iPhone. Don’t miss it, though I’m nostalgic for the excess free time!
Same for me. I spent countless hours recompiling my kernel in slackware, configuring enlightenment window manager. These days I don't even change the desktop wallpaper.
Yeah I spent literally dozens of hours of my life compiling different kernels with OSS and ALSA variations to get my sound card working lol. Really a 'you had to be there' thing.
I have one running in a virtual machine but on hardware that would natively support a Hackitosh which I use only for testing Mac distributions. It's too old to use now but when I built it you could buy Mac OS at Best Buy.
While tinkering for the sake of tinkering is as good of a hobby as any other, the process of tailoring your OS's does not have to be infinite. Maybe it is different for others, but while I did spent a lot of time on writing my Linux dotfiles until they were nearly perfect, for the last 5 years or so, when I have a fresh OS install, it's really just 'git clone; chezmoi apply' and I get a system where every keybind is exactly where it needs to be.
When work banned Linux machines and I had to transition to OS X, I had to do just as much, if not more, tinkering to make it work for me. Perhaps it does 'just works' for those who think exactly like Steve Jobs - but if you want it your way and on your terms, there'd be a lot of tinkering to do, from yabai configs to Karabiner json configs and custom plists, to replacing most of the gelded Apple apps.
I had a similar revelation a few years ago. My giant PC gaming rig blew up again (specifically my 3080 shit itself), a year after having to replace the power supply and requiring the whole thing.
I was just done with faffing around with that kind of thing.
So I bought a (then fairly recently released) Mac Studio, just the plain jane base 32GB model, and couldn’t be happier. So nice to have something virtually silent and energy efficient, instead of jet turbine that drew about 300w at idle.
I 100% do not want a laptop for my primary personal machine, but the big workstation towers are too much.
The Studio is that wonderful Goldilocks zone - performant, bring-your-own input devices, but merely “a bit pricey” and not extravagantly so.
Agree. I used tweaked BlackBerry ROMs for a couple years before getting my first Android device, an HTC One M7 with Android 4.4 KitKat. Spent loads of time getting all the tools working to modify ROMs, bootloaders, recovery/TWRP, and squeeze every drop of performance out of that phone. Then went "backwards" to an iPhone 4S and have been rocking stock iPhones ever since.
Macs are very expensive in some parts of the world, where other computer brands are affordable. A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it for others for money. Not only installing MacOS on PCs, but also installing newer versions of MacOS on Macs that are officially not supported anymore.
> A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it for others for money
Apple thoroughly screwed over Mac developers that the only compelling software that's exclusive to MacOS is developed by Apple themselves[1], IMO. Even those packages have equivalent (or better) alternatives on Windows. Macs used to be the platform for DTP, audio and video production - now all the 3rd party developers have pivoted away to other operating systems. One of the reasons professionals resorted to Hackintoshes in the past was because Apple had periods of neglecting the Mac Pro hardware on and off. Why would anyone go through the paid of setting up a Hackintosh in 2024, outside of being a fan of MacOS aesthetics?
1. Logic Pro likely has the biggest pull; Final Cut isn't the halo app it once was.
With a little preparation setting up a Hackintosh is not much more difficult than setting up an actual Mac. What you're describing is a myth or just out of date.
It really depends if you're tinkering because you have no choice versus tinkering because you like it. People will absolutely tinker on cars for their entire life, but upgrade to more interesting jobs like doing engine swaps rather than just changing their oil.
But it sounds like you were tinkering because you had no other choice, not because you enjoyed it.
To me it was having just one powerful upgradable desktop computer with Windows and MacOS. So I don't have to have devices on my desk.
Now I have solved with PC desktop, MacBook Air, and Apple Display. PC also has usb-c display output so I can just switch which cable connects to the display.
Downside is still that M1 is not as fast, especially something that is GPU intensive as the PC I have.
> this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
You know you’re alive when you log into iCloud from a hackintosh and then Apple notices, you get the ‘unauthorised hardware’ message (I can’t remember the exact phrasing) and your various iCloud services begin to cease functioning. It’s not often your OS is exciting.
I had the same experience with windows 98/2k and my franken pc of randomly upgraded parts. I used to have to reinstall win98 every other month or so because it was so unstable. I had the installer on a separate partition, so I could just wipe the system disk and have a clean install up in 12 minutes.
I find these days the Steak Deck has become a great device for tinkering. I've seen people do some nice unexpected stuff with it, for example making an opening in the back to connect an dedicated GPU or using it to pilot drones in Ukraine.
from around 2008 to 2012 I ran hackintosh, on desktop, it was great and fun in 2012 I bought a first MacBook. The good experience on the hackintosh made me get the MacBook. So I like to think hackintosh helped apple.
> 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
See, that 35 years for me didn't make me stop working on my cars, it just allowed me to have enough money to have a reliable car as well as "toy" cars that I can still tinker with. I drive the Audi, but I still wrench on the Triumph. I used to tinker with Hackintosh stuff as well, and I haven't stopped tinkering, just moved on to other things, like this Rubidium frequency source I just bought to build a high accuracy NTP server from a Raspberry Pi. (Yes, of course, there are already cheap and easy solutions for this, but I want to tinker).
There was a time when hackintosh was practical for everyone who needs macOS and/or can't stand other desktop OSes. It was the tail end of Apple's Intel hardware. It was pathetic in terms of performance (underpowered CPUs and buggy GPU drivers), quality (butterfly keyboards) and thermal design (things would overheat all the time), yet expensive.
I myself was contemplating building a ridiculously overpowered hackintosh machine around 2019. Then the ARM transition was announced. And then the M1 came out with overwhelmingly good reviews from literally everyone. So I decided to wait for the beefed up "professional" version, which did come later, so here I am, typing this on an M1 Max MBP, the best computer I've owned so far.
Also, for me personally, hackintosh was an introduction to macOS. I was a poor student at the time and couldn't afford a real Mac. Of course I bought one about as soon as I could.
As a long time lover of hackintoshes (couldn’t afford a real Mac as a youth but tried to make the netbook macOS dream come true), I’m quite sad to read this. The author has a very valid point that drivers are going to become increasingly complicated and difficult.
I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn’t explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes.
As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a unique source of frustration. I’ll spend hours digging through crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7 MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that shouldn’t be possible. The firmware is a version that we never released. Etc etc.
I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I’ve fixed it.
Now I’ve spent hours chasing something and I can’t help.
I had a Hackintosh and felt that any crash was 99% my fault and probably an edge case for MacOS. But in my defense, CrashReporter is way too permissive and will send a report even when the user doesn't want it done. After a app or hard crash I'll get the window that a bug report was sent and I know damn well some engineer is going to look at it and it won't make any sense that a MacBook has this particular GPU.
I've been using a Hackintosh as my daily driver for nearly 15 years and they have always been rock solid, with months of uptime consistently. It's just a matter of starting with the right hardware.
People are free to look to support the hardware they have but 've always though it's stupid not buying well supported hardware in the first place, of which there is plenty.
I'll add this to reasons why I'm opposed to always-on telemetry. A hackintosh should know that its crash reports will be unhelpful to Apple and not bother sending them. It's a waste of your time to deal with data coming from unsupported configurations.
I installed Snow Leopard on a 2009 MB for kicks and sent in a crash report when Safari died due to something on the modern web. I would love to know whether these still arrive at the fruit company.
I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me.
Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)
just in case anyone is on the fence. Apple’s developer network effects are real and impressive, people updated… nearly everything… so quickly! plus with Rosetta under the hood translations to x86 binaries expand everything runnable to seamlessly
I thought I would miss bootcamo but I dont. I have yet to install ARM Windows but I’m hearing praises about that now from relatively casual users
I’m fairly unaware of the current state of Linux on Apple M hardware, but I’d want a Linux partition on Apple hardware more than a Mac partition on x86. These days I have two devices though.
Writing to you from NixOS on an M2 Air. Aside from a handful of missing packages that aren't available for the architecture, it's shockingly good. My battery is reporting 19 hours remaining, and "setup" took about 20 minutes (not counting the brief time writing a new machine definition in my NixOS config). I don't have any fundamental issues with macos, but it's nice to have a consistent environment across machines, and this hardware is glorious.
Macs do keep their resale value more though. Personally I run Linux on my own machines but I do enjoy the build quality of the MBP I get from work. It’s a whole another universe from my pretty good laptop that creaks and is made of plastic and the screen bends when I move it.. and the screen quality is not even comparable
It’s about the only viable option for professionally working with audio, in either studio or live setting. That's the biggest group of hakintosh users I'm personally familiar with anyway.
You can work professionally with audio in Windows, you’ll probably even get better performance out of the same hardware you’d be using for a Hackintosh.
Same here. Of course, now that we have the M1 and the likely eventual deprecation of x86 for new versions of Mac OS, things like Hackintosh are a bit doomed. If you have an M1, you'd be runnig MacOS (or Linux) and would have no need for it. If you don't, MacOS is not going to run great on it and very soon not at all. So, it's one of those things that you wouldn't use unless you really needed to. And finally, support for running mac os in virtual machines is kind of getting there. It's still made hard by Apple and only supported on their own hardware. But it's not impossible and there are some legitimate use cases (e.g. building IOS apps in the cloud). Maybe eventually somebody will figure out emulation on non Apple hardware. I think there are some efforts on QEMU. Of course the issue will be emulating enough of Apple Silicon properly.
Apple profitability by lock-in is all that matters in the Apple C-Suite now. Juice that stock price, get free stock options, buy new yacht to show off to your friends.
macOS supports running as a paravirtualised guest OS (officially, on an apple-hardware host also running macOS). If there is to be a "next gen" of hackintoshing, I think it'd be based on a cut-down linux host acting as a shim between the real hardware and the paravirt interface.
See also: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amaz... "This patch set introduces a new ARM and HVF specific machine type called "vmapple". It mimicks the device model that Apple's proprietary Virtualization.Framework exposes, but implements it in QEMU."
One thing I've been on the hunt for is a good server hypervisor solution for Apple Silicon. I would like to put an Apple Silicon Mac Mini in my rack, and it would be really nice to have a minimally bootstrapped host OS running a handful of macOS VMs for various purposes.
The best I'm aware of currently is UTM which has some scripting capabilities. But that is very far off from the experience with Proxmox.
It would be interesting to see how feasible it is to run that on an Arm workstation, e.g. an Ampere Altra. Or going the other way and trying to squeeze macOS on to the latest Raspberry Pi.
- there is less alternative hardware I want to use. I want Apple Silicon processors, materials, and there just isn't much high quality competition.
- Because of inflation the Apple premium isn't as high as it used to be. You get a Mac mini or MacBook Air at very competitive prices (RAM is still painful).
- Linux Desktop software is more competitive and fills some of the roles that needed macOS before.
Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
> I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand.
That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a lot of utility in it that hasn't depreciated significantly in the 2 years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the role that it has, it becomes outdated in another 2 or 3 years... and wouldn't be surprised if it lasts another 2 or 3 beyond that.
If you spent $700 on it in 2020 at release, it is still working as well as it did on the day you bought it.
You may be seeing the premium from when it was bought being attached to the current used price - and there are less expensive ones available now - but the device, for what it was when I got it is still providing value and selling it used would mean I'd need to get a new one... at a similar price as what I'd sell it for.
> sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
I will note that for me, in the spot where it is, the "multiple drive bays, pcie, etc." represents a worse device as it doesn't sit nicely under a monitor on a small desk. Part of the choice of the Mac mini for me for that role was its form factor and quiet running.
9th gen intel? According to geekbench 6[0] the m1 is between 2x-5x faster with better battery life, so depending on your workload, it's quite possibly not close enough.
- The icloud webapps are now pretty good, and icloud file storage and password management works well on windows these days
- Windows is also pretty good these days, and obviously if you want to run games, it's the easiest option.
Although I enjoy my macbook and iphone, I don't have a compelling reason to have MacOS on my desktop instead of windows. I think the only thing that I would like to have are clipboard sharing and Universal Control (share mouse and keyboard with macs and ipads), but there are cross-platform software solutions that are good enough
I daily drove a hackintosh for years until I recently pivoted to apple silicon. I was a very enjoyable experience for me. The success and reliability of a hackintosh is really dependent on your hardware configuration. I had lucked out that my desktop tower that I had built years prior just so happened to coincide almost 1:1 with hardware requirements for a golden build. (6700k, 64gb ram, Vega 64, compatible wifi/bluetooth pcie, compatible m.2 controllers, z170 mb which is well known in the hackintosh community, etc.)
Being able to have a modular Mac was really something and I exploited that to tailor my machine to my use case (television/video production). I never had issues with bluetooth or WiFi, nor did I have ever have an issue with Apple's services like iMessage/Facetime.
What sucked about the process was staying current with system updates. Updates within the macOS release went without a hitch, but my hardware was aged out in newer macOS versions which made upgrading a bit too much like surgery, and since this hackintosh was my production device, that wasn't something I wanted to roll the dice on.
Having switched to apple silicon, I do kind of miss that freedom, but I've found that same freedom just by doing things a little less hacky. Instead of a board I can add drives to, I just setup a NAS, instead of using an old PCIE HDMI capture card, I got a more modern USB one, etc.
For a long time, Hackintosh was an opportunity to do things my way, and that experience led me to learning experiences that have improved my day to day that I otherwise may not have learned. It was a freeing experience. Today I still do things my way, but these days my way is more focused on convenience for the things that should "just work" so I put my attention on things that matter, rather than things that shouldn't, such as modifying my EFI before a macOS update to trick macOS into thinking I have the iGPU of a newer chipset because Apple dropped support for Skylake on a new release.
Good times, the headaches were worth it in hindsight.
I’ve got a machine pretty similar to what you’re describing in my closet (6700k, mobo reasonably well known in the community, 5700XT GPU) which used to be a hackintosh. Might be worth reviving and trying to find a use for.
Well I can run Mac OS in Proxmox nowadays so that's killed the "bare matel" Hackintosh for me. Yes it takes time to set it up (once!) but I much prefer KVM now than fiddling with hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8
Yep, this is exactly what I do. It's nice to be able to use Messages from my desktop, plus it fulfills an edge case of 2-way backup with Synology Drive and iCloud for me
Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm still surprised this requires special interaction with the hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.
Now it's the other way around: you hack Linux onto Apple Silicon (Asahi Linux).
For me buying a new Macbook Air or Pro is definitely made more palatable knowing I could turn it into a Ubuntu laptop down the line.
And if the Asahi team keeps kicking ass, we may even use Asahi to run Windows games with Proton inside Linux Steam. Thus replacing the Bootcamp partition for those who dual booted to play Windows games.
I don't miss Hackintosh. The one build I made it all looked like it was genuine macOS, but you could feel it wasn't the same. Photoshop felt more laggy. Unless you used an equivalent iMac beforehand as I did you might not notice that something was off. That said this was like ten years ago.
Even if it works well "Hacking" isn't worth it imho, whenevr there is the slightest lag or issue, you just never know. Is it because of the hackintosh, is it a genuine bug in macOS? Is it my hardware? Too many unknowns.
Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance, "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL / Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for years.
> While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...]
Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;)
Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on ARM systems at some point.
Have you read Bob Brant's Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle [1]? The man was a proponent of having the only Apple part in your build be the logic board, and using as many commodity PC parts as possible – I remember one of the builds started with a Macintosh SE logic board that ran "headless" with a (Radius?) video card in a generic AT/XT case, with everything else (drives, PSU, etc.) commodity PC. Pure wizardry, and he somehow managed to make the numbers add up cheaper than first-party Apple even when adding accelerators to your build.
It can still be useful for those looking to run older versions of macOS for some reason or another. If there’s PPC applications that one wants to run for example, you can piece together a Snow Leopard hackintosh from used parts that will run PPC apps through Rosetta faster than any real PPC mac ever could while be also being easier and more cheap to maintain.
From time to time I’ll consider building such a box as a time-frozen “zen machine” that runs OS X 10.6 or 10.9, is disconnected from modern distractions, and will never be subject to the disruptions that software updates can bring.
Now that their MacBooks come with 120hz screens with acceptable response time (unlike their early 120hz screens), the value proposition for hackintosh isn't as alluring for me. Previously, I've been worried about the T2 chip and the trend of Apple locking down MacOS, which also turned out to be less of an issue that I thought. The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.
> The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.
Mac gaming is probably getting better thanks to wine, crossover, GPTK and Whisky [1]. I am not a gamer but I have seen others playing serious Windows games like FF7 remake (not sure if that counts) on mac.
The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games (for now).
I used to tinker with building nforce4.kexts for OSX Leopard. I got everything working including the Realtek HD Audio thanks to a pcid injection. Snow Leopard was the last time I was able to build for nforce4 boards and we moved onto Intel gen 6 LGA1151.
This was back when NVidia and Apple got along. GeForce 900 days. SLI was a thing. And it worked on my drivers. Sadly, I had kids and grew out of it, got old(er), and now only use Linux because aarm64 killed hackintosh.
> Many will tell you that buying Intel-based hardware from Apple is buying obsolete models.
A strength of Intel-based Macs is they can run Wine/CrossOver. This is very good for people who really need a Windows app for their job and also need to minimze risk of a ransomware attack (which is way higher on Windows).
Intel Macs running MacOS 17 also are great for retro gaming through running Win32 games with CrossOver/Wine, also platformer games with OpenEMU.
Bad news for the indie music scene using these, where they just want to be able to run their VSTs and DAWs. Some will switch back to macs, so worth it for apple I guess.
This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad. I spent the last week shopping around for an audio interface and every single model had people complaining about driver issues and latency and "random loud static" or other crazy things when using Windows. Always Windows. Crazy stuff.
> This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad.
I don't know where this is coming from. It certainly doesn't apply to the actual driver latency of higher end and professional interfaces. Most of these actually have a slightly smaller latency for the same buffer size with ASIO then they do with CoreAudio.
The one thing that can cause latency issues are GPU drivers, but there's ways to fix that.
One of things that really annoys me about Windows is that there doesn't seem to be a way to capture audio from a single application even though the audio mixer can clearly change the volume. But if you want to capture, it's only the final mix output for everything (so you better hope that there's no sudden notification sound from anything). Or you'd have to use a virtual sound card like VB's Cable/Voicemeteer, which requires the application to be able to select a specific soundcard.
Arguably this isn't relevant for audio production, but it does make capturing applications a huge pain. (And if I did miss something and there is a way to e.g., have OBS capture the audio of a specific Window/Application, I'm all ears!)
Linux ships with a realtime kernel patchset these days, so the only issues there have to do with hardware- and proprietary VST support. With the newer Pipewire audio server you don't even need to set up JACK.
Except that Apple breaks audio applications with every new release of macOS and has for years. And, it's just a matter of time before Apple kills basically every DAW and VST when they finally kill off OpenGL on macOS.
Edit: What I have said is true here, so I'm unsure why the downvotes.
I used hackintoshes for a long time. I’m done with dealing with kexts and other such nonsense. Life is short I don’t want to spend all of it dealing with some silly technical administration. Windows is good enough for every piece of software I want to run and I have an old MacBook for the odd thing that windows doesn’t support. My windows machine dual boots into Linux for the extra exceptional thing that I can’t
do with windows.
I’m sure Apple doesn’t love the fact that Hackintosh exists but I’ll tell you what. After installing it on my gaming PC 15 years ago, i loved it and bought my first Mac shortly after. It was a previously owned Mac because I was still getting my feet wet and didn’t want to spend a ton. But then I bought a MacBook Air. Then iMac. Then iPhone. Then 5 more Macs. And now, I’m hooked. Hackintosh was a great gateway drug.
For me it's just that macOS isn't a desirable OS anymore. Over the years Apple kept changing things that I preferred the way they were. So I'm done with it. I use KDE now.
No denying that windows these days isn’t stable. Indeed it is. My biggest issue is all the third party crap I never asked for gets installed with it. Not to mention all the Microsoft services that I don’t want to use, but still manage to be there. Like OneDrive. Sure one can uninstall it. But then see the mess it leaves with the way files are saved in the documents directory.
Even when setting up a Windows 11 VM , I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down.
If you set your language to 'English (World)' during the install, none of the crapware is installed.
Or at least it wasn't last year when I installed W11 (I still occasionally need Affinity Photo and Capture One). Microsoft might have realised they're missing out on a few pennies and plugged the gap.
Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Windows. Rock solid, and that was before they broke the search function (when it actually still actually searched in files rather than an incomplete index - thankfully, grepWin can be installed) or when they dumbed down the Control Panel.
Imo, it's much more of a proper Linux experience than MacOS. e.g. all the filesystems stuff is there like /proc, you don't have to deal with BSD/Linux differences, zsh/bash compat issues etc.
macOS Unix compatibility is an oversold feature, and it's unlikely for anything made for Linux to work on it unless it's specifically ported.
That being sad, a lot of the dev community own macs, so this support usually exists.
I mean with Hyper-V why even WSL and just run VMs of whatever other OS'es you want? Tinkering with the OS these days is just so much different than it was in the past. Trying to dual boot Win/Linux back in the day was a interesting challenge that might leave your disk corrupt, now it's a question of why do that at all? Hacking smaller platforms like the pi that are cheap seems to get more attention than PCs these days.
When I first delved into programming, I was under the impression that OSX was necessary because most programming video tutorials were recorded on a Mac. This led to a minor obsession with acquiring one. Unfortunately, financial constraints were a significant barrier, leading me to explore Hackintosh as my sole option. Countless days and nights were invested in making it work properly. Despite the challenges, the learning experience and the satisfaction of eventually getting everything to function smoothly made the entire process immensely rewarding.
10/10 would do again, if I were 14. Now I am way older, 3 macbooks around and wish my job would let me use Linux.
I feel like hackintosh virtualization is a better investment of time. Currently it's onerous to run Apple OSes on anything but Apple hardware. Being able to spin up a hackintosh VM in any cloud provider would be pretty sweet. Of course that probably violates Apple OS terms of use so not sure if AWS would shut you down if they discovered people were doing that.
But actually, as others have pointed out, I'm much more interested in Linux running on M chips than Mac OS running on non Apple hardware. There's nothing particularly compelling about Apple's OSes (except maybe their new VR sorry I mean "spacial computing" OS)
Possible they’ve gotten some “out of spec” capabilities wired in? Trying to imagine what for… Securely bridging local adhoc networks with the internet?
Apple’s always done some unique things with WiFi/Bluetooth. Macs have long been able to keep Apple-branded bluetooth keyboards and mice usable even before the OS initializes for example, and if you use one of a few Broadcom chipset BT/Wifi cards that were used in real Macs in a hackintosh, that capability extends to those too. It feels weird being able to navigate BIOS/UEFI with a Bluetooth keyboard.
While I never jumped on the Hackintosh bandwagon, I had many friends who did for almost a decade. They built systems that ran macOS for considerably less when it came to the price/performance ratio.
Nowadays, those same friends are all using Mac Studios because the price/performance ratio for running macOS is better. I believe this is one of the major factors to why the Hackintosh community is dying today (not just changes to drivers and the macOS codebase as the author suggests).
Running macOS on Apple Silicon is very fast compared to running it Intel. This is due to the RISC architecture and tight integration of the components in the SoC. To run it as fast on Intel would cost more than the price of a Mac Studio.
In the olden times this used to be called the Jade plan:
I don’t really complain. I had a good run which helped me skip over the worst price/performance Mac lineup that I remember. There’re now plenty good choices within the current crop of M1 / M2 / M3 machines and I’ll be following eBay closely for a good used Mac mini / studio models. Or maybe even splurge on something new.
I've been doing it for ages as Apple hardware holds its resale value exceptionally well. You can use the often exaggerated price premium to your advantage - buy brand new default config at an opportune moment in the upgrade cycle, sell just in time for a coveted new release.
This works even better if you happen to be traveling somewhere where Apple devices are unusually expensive.
I'm still on the M1 Air and will likely sell it just before a M4 release 12-18 months from now. Cost of ownership averages out to <$0.25/day.
For a lot of use cases except hardware dev, a VM is sufficient.
Arguably you could (can already) run MacOS via VM on generic hardware, the same way retro systems are (which could be partly in hardware, e.g. FPGA performing functions).
This would only be bad from a performance perspective, from a maintenance perspective it may make life a lot easier as you've moved a hardware compatibility problem into software.
You're no longer having to add compatibility workarounds for hundreds of pieces of hardware, just target one VM.
If you really needed the performance you'd then have 3 options that I see, pay for a real Mac, pay for a machine with x2 the performance of a real Mac (which limits you to mid range machines at the moment), or spin up extra VMs as required on hardware you have lying around that previously you couldn't use.
I think the machine code would run (maybe not Rosetta2, since it uses weird extensions) but the issue is the weird boot sequence. You'd basically have to do the inverse of what Asahi Linux is doing to get it to boot on a machine with ACPI or another bespoke boot system (ala. Raspi).
Perhaps author wants to follow OpenCore guides more closely, especially the hardware buyer's ones - the experience could have been vastly different. There are a lot of (cheap!) wireless PCIE cards that both work on Windows and macOS (they are refurbished Mac Pro parts), I've used one for years and iServices have always been working besides the first hiccup when configuring the system for the first time. Eventually, the setup died as I moved to MacBook Pro and cleared out the NVME storage, but when it did - the experience was flawless (that is, after figuring it out).
The Hackintosh will eventually die with Apple moving away from x86_64 completely.
But that day is not today. Eventually, someone might even manage to continue on the tradition with upcoming ARM64 PC platforms.
I think the switch to their own arm based chips should have been the writing in the wall for the end of the hackintosh.
I think we're at a point where we are going to wind up needing Linux more and more. My kid is running IIRC 2014 rMBP that I passed on to her a few years ago. While it still runs, it's long passed it's last supported update and now even forced unsupported updates are going to stop working. I'm not sure where the gesture support is in Linux at this point. Google maps in Chrome is probably the best demo experience.
I'm looking forward to Cosmic in Pop!OS from System76. I've preferred their take on UX for a while.
It'll be sad when it dies. I remember running Snow Leopard on my netbook and taking it to WWDC. It was sacrilegious but quite the conversation piece; I remember lots of Apple engineers being amazed it worked so well.
i cant imagine why would anyone want to install macos on their hardware unless they have to. macos built in software is mediocre at best, but most of it is utter crap, take finder or preview as an example
I think this article reaches a valid conclusion based on the wrong evidence. It claims hackintosh is dead because they are dropping Wifi drivers. Hackintosh is dead because the number of major versions that will support x86 are 2-3 at best and after that, the OS will only run on apple silicon. Maybe if we’re lucky an arm chip similar enough will come along but I don’t see many motherboards socketed for arm chips. It is dead, but not because of WiFi driver support.
Was building hackintosh' since 2011, mostly intel based, my i3 h370 is still working strong. I was running macOS till the "M" series came out and the next day i swapped it out. Gifted the hackintosh' to my desinger friend. I do miss the days when i had time to figure out each and every bit of things needed. Nowadays, i am running windows.
Edit: Left building hackintosh' in 2019 before covid hit. Been building them for friend and family.
This article is nonsense. If "I've had compatibility issues with my hardware" is proof of Hackintosh dying then it's been dying from day one.
If there are genuine issues across the board Hackintosh software is generally updated to patch the issue, it's always been like that and only improving over time.
Personally I'm still on 10.14.6 and will probably never upgrade to 11 since it and its successors suck so hard.
Apple never licenced their OS to run on non Apple hardware, with exception of when it was on death bed shortly before the NeXT reverse acquisition, and Steve Jobs killing all agreements with clone makers.
I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now.
Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around.
Now if we could have Windows running on an M3 chip with the nice touchpad and battery, that would be really nice.
I spend most of my time in a shell, so MacOS being POSIX compliant is a huge draw for me.
What difficulty do you have browsing the web? I just click Safari and it works. Though I usually have FireFox and un-Googled Chromium running as well... and they work just fine.
I generally use shell commands to manage files, but, dragging works just fine for copying and moving them. Certainly as well as it does in Windows.
Truly, I can't imagine what you experienced that was "unusably bad".
MacOS has some quirks for sure, it's far from perfect. And I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the changes they've made over the years. But I am a big fan of some of them.
On the other hand, despite massive improvements to Windows security and stability over the years, I do like using Windows. (And yes I realized things like WSL exist).
> it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around
Cannot relate at all. "Move files around" is essentially the same on Windows and Mac, except on the Mac I have a UNIX shell. Browsers also behave exactly the same on every platform, and Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it about?
Have you ever needed to perform a reliable recursive directory copy between two drives on Windows? I have and it turned out to be a comically complicated task. Robocopy helps but als has its edge cases you need to handle. Also long path names become problematic (MAX_PATH etc).
Finder is the same crap software it's always been. Windows Explorer has always been better. Nobody except the nerdiest of nerds would want to use the terminal for "moving files around".
>Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it about?
MacOS is a memory hog in itself. Safari is the laughingstock of browsers, so behind the times and purposely crippled by Apple.
I used to love it when it was still a capable unix with a good UI. At the same time Linux was a horrible mess, none of the desktop environments were passable.
I loved it until Tiger and Snow Leopard. After that it started going downhill. More and more features I really wanted were being deprecated (like the ability to have virtual desktops in a multi-dimensional grid). This was the first big thing that really broke my workflow and I have regretted it ever since. More and more UI things were pushed through I didn't like. The fullscreen mode became (and still is) horribly incompetent. Apps were becoming more iOS-like, dumbed down.
I put up but instead of looking forward to every exciting new OS update, I started worrying about what feature I used would next be removed or mangled beyond recognition. Eventually the negatives added up so much I left the platform entirely. I went to KDE, because that had become a powerful and configurable desktop environment through the years. I finally have my virtual desktop grid back and things are so much better for it. I found that opionated software doesn't work for me (for this reason GNOME won't ever do either). The only reason I thought it worked for me was that OSX's designers had roughly the same opinions as me. But over time this changed.
This was not a coincidence. At the same time Apple changed from a computer company to a lifestyle brand. It started appealing to the masses which started with the iPod but really kicked off in full gear with the iPhone. The Mac is really just an iPhone accessory now. Microsoft has been making attempts at becoming a lifestyle brand too, with hilarious incompetence :') Only their xbox division gets a tiny bit of the way but their main marketeers are such business suits that will never understand 'cool' even if it bites them in the ass.
Oh well.. I still use it for work because it's slightly better than Windows. And our company's Windows desktops are locked down too much.
I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What software do you have issue with, and why?
Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL.
Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck.
There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in macOS. It's bizarre.
Or the fact that macOS doesn't implement basic protocols for external monitors, making macOS work terribly with non-Apple monitors.
Could you elaborate? I find web browsing and moving files around to be practically an equivalent experience between mac os, windows, most linux distros.
I see sentiments very similar to this on Reddit and some other message boards. Generally the user posting them cut their teeth on Linux or Windows, and has an affinity toward the ux conventions you'd see there. Macs have different ux conventions, not bad ones, just different, and it's not what the poster is expecting.
Some call it baby dick syndrome, The user has imprinted the conventions of their first operating system on themselves, and assumes that they are universally considered "best"
> Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around.
I used both Windows and Mac regularly for years, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
Apple released the last major revision of the cheese grater Mac Pro in 2010. If you wanted a Mac with exotic features like a new CPU and more than one internal hard drive in 2013~ then Hackintosh was the way to do it
I'm yet to be convinced there is a single use-case other than iOS development/publishing for someone to want Hackintosh rather than simply installing a well-supported distro like Ubuntu or Fedora.
I tried it a few times and it was always a painful and substandard experience.
Other than trying out the MacOS for the first time to learn how bad it is, why would anyone make a hackintosh? Windows and Linux are infinitely better operating systems, more open, with better backwards compatibility, more hardware support, independence from vendor servers and more available software.
A reminder that with MacOS you need internet connection in order to re-install the OS as it requires activation just like iPads and iPhones. Imagine one day Apple stops supporting your Macbook model, shuts down its activation server and your computer turns into brick after something goes wrong and it requires a factory reset.
One thing to consider is that a lot of what some consider “bad” about macOS is purely subjective and varies depending on the user’s background and mental models. It’s not uncommon for people who grew up on Macs to find operating systems with Windows-esque desktop environments as “bad” as some find macOS.
macOS installs don’t require an internet connection or activation, I’m not sure where that came from. Macs registered with iCloud can be remotely bricked with Find My but that’s completely separate and fully optional.
Yes, Tim Cook could flip a switch and my mac would become activation locked. Considering that Windows 11 has been working really hard to sneak remote attestation below our noses (and other stuff), I think it's safe to cross out Windows as well.
As long as Microsoft wants to keep Windows compatible with user-controllable hardware (like computers that let you disable secure boot and TPM or enroll custom keys), there should always be a way to debloat Windows.
I used to love macOS in the 2000s and 2010s. I never made a Hackintosh but I was always intrigued by them. Before WSL was introduced, the Mac was the best platform for people who needed to use proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite while running Unix. There was (and still is) a lot of native software on the Mac that is well-polished, such as OmniGraffle and Keynote.
Times have changed, though. While macOS still provides a more consistent user experience, IMO, than Windows or Linux, Windows with WSL means I can run Microsoft Office and other proprietary apps alongside a seamlessly integrated Linux environment without needing to SSH into a VM. The popularity of Electron apps undercuts the Mac’s consistency while also making Linux a more viable option since Linux can run the same Electron apps macOS and Windows do. Microsoft Office is now available as a Web app via Microsoft 365; while I prefer the macOS and Windows versions to the in-browser version, the in-browser version gives Linux users access to Office. I also believe macOS’s Unix environment has not kept up with advances made in the BSD and Linux world. Windows can be quite annoying with its notifications, but unfortunately the Mac in recent years also has annoying notifications; I know this because I use a work-issued MacBook Pro regularly.
In my opinion, the most compelling reason for a Hackintosh in 2024 is for Intel Mac users reliant on Mac software tools to still use them without being restricted to Apple’s hardware. The 2019 Mac Pro is still very expensive, and Apple’s ARM lineup requires paying substantial sums of money for RAM upgrades with no workaround since there are no DIMMs.
Even if you try to install it using a flash drive, it still asks you to connect to the internet to "verify" the installation.
https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware... explains how it's ensured on the firmware level that you really connect with Apple servers.
I see your points, but I don't want to make compromises for my daily work based on a scenario that's unlikely to ever occur. If the apocalypse comes, I'll gladly use Ubuntu, but in the meantime I'm ok with not reinstalling my OS when I'm somewhere without internet.
Hardware support, sure. Backwards compatibility is a double edged sword though. While it's awesome to have it's also the reason why parts of Windows feel so dated and inconsistent.
> While it's awesome to have it's also the reason why parts of Windows feel so dated and inconsistent.
I'm not convinced.
What Windows could do is make the old components available for old software, while directing all new software to use new components. Old software will feel dated and inconsistent, but the alternative is that this software would not work at all. If you don't install old software, you'll still have a perfectly seamless experience.
I understand that backwards compatibility is the reason Windows still has two control panels. However, if it was up to me, the legacy control panel would be completely hidden from the UI until the user installs some software that uses a custom control pane (or something).
I mostly don't understand why this hasn't happened.
Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.
People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was:
> Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
So yes, I may just want to turn the key and have my car work. But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car, so I can better understand what was wrong, and whether I can fix it myself or if I needed a professional.
I run Linux on all my machines, and my family generally uses Mac (both sides), but all those years tinkering with Linux, they still come to me for help with their Mac machines that they insisted would Just Work.
All that out of the way, I agree with your fundamental premise: hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.
I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.
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This is a gross misunderstanding of the GP's point though. It's not that they are against doing any of these things. In fact, they said they were more than happy to do it in their youth. I am in full agreement with the GP's sentiment as well.
Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have.
But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it.
your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now
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I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value.
I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting.
I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.
The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along.
In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.
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All my PCs and servers run Linux, and its certainly not out of some idealism or anything. I'm fundamentally lazy, but I have a high standard for how things should be. As a result, I tend towards the highest quality, lowest cost (time, money, etc.), and thats Linux for me. Specifically, the setup I run on almost all my machines, which is the most optimal way I have found to write and run software, and play games.
If Windows was easier to use, more stable, less of a hassle, easier to fix, I would use it, but its neither of those (for me). When I have a windows problem, I can either try magical incantations to fix it, reinstall, or give up, and each of those takes much longer than most things I could possibly do on my linux systems. Even if my linux box fails to boot, the drivers break and my ssd doesnt mount, all those fixes together take less time and effort than finding a fix for the most trivial of windows problems.
The most trivial problem on Windows has been that the right click menu doesn't fully populate on first right click. I reported the issue, and thats all I can do. Its been a year and nothing has changed.
On linux, a less trivial problem (a calculator crashing with a series of very weird inputs) was solved by me opening it in gdb and fixing the code, making a PR and having it merged.
I guarantee a lot of people are on linux because its easier, and for no other reason. I dont need it to "just work", because I will break it. I need any possible fix to be possible in bounded time.
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I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't randomly pop up.
Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that.
Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.
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> Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
I have plenty of other things I’d rather tinker with and become an expert on, though. My computer is a tool to let me work with those things. It’s not fun when I have to debug and fix the tool for hours or days before I can even start working on the things I want to work on.
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> Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)
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At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.
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> hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.
Part of this might be that making Hackintoshes is so much harder now, but part of it might also be that OOTB desktop Linux is luxuriously good these days compared to where it used to be. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS linux are absolutely on par with MacOS for a user who meets the (admittedly higher) entry requirements for using Linux.
Your comment makes me think of my 3d printing journey. A lot of printers require maintenance and tinkering just to keep them functional. To an extent, since they are targeted towards “makers” who like to play with these things, that’s fine.
But sometimes the thing you’re trying to build is of central importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be exploring your ideas with a machine that’s already fully functional.
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This argument makes a lot of sense. I get more upset than I probably should about car issues, likely because I never spent the time to tinker with them, so I feel rather helpless… and I don’t like feeling helpless.
In my youth I did a lot of tinkering with computers and it has paid dividends. It gave me a career.
These days though, I want to be able to tinker on my own schedule. I want my primary computer, phone, and car to “just work”. That means any low level tinkering needs a second thing. That can work fine for computers, because they’re small and relatively cheap. The idea of having a project car isn’t something I ever see myself doing, as it’s big and expensive.
I can still tinker on some things with my primary computer without it being a problem. Tinkering on writing software, running servers, or whatever, isn’t going to kill my ability to do other things on the computer. A lot of tinkering can be done without tinkering with the OS itself.
To be honest, none of that stuff has been true for 15+ years anyway.
Linux just works now. You put in the Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/whatever USB, you install it, it just works.
I can't remember the last time anything broke on any of my desktop machines and it wasn't my fault for intentionally doing breaky things.
> the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless
You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise).
> But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car
Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.
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There's levels to tinkering though. When I was running Ubuntu, a lot of the tinkering came down to searching for what config files to update. Sure, that freedom is nice if you care to use it, but it's mostly just searching, configuring, experimenting. This is hardly fun or instructive.
A deeper form of tinkering is actually working on the code. I think an instructive example is writing your own X windowing system with xmonad. You get to see exactly how a whole windowing system works.
These days, if you have the skills and tools to swap a transmission you have to tow it into a dealership and beg them to flash the transmission so it will work in your truck. If you want to avoid that you better know where to find the strategy code and match it up before purchasing another transmission. Same goes for touch screens and a whole slew of essential parts. While we weren't looking the rug was completely pulled out from underneath us. Now your family mechanic is beholden to the dealership.
> People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was:
> > Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
But it is exactly why I quit Linux and returned to macOS. I used to run Linux on cheap 2nd hand ThinkPads and for 3 years on Macbook as main system. But after another upgrade destroyed gain all network connectivity I have quit.
macOS isn't perfect but it works in most imposrtant areas and I can tinker with small stuff when I feel like it.
Ubuntu is so easy to use. I enjoyed using Arch before, but got to a point where I also just wanted my PC to work without any tinkering. Ubuntu is very good at that.
Your argument is excellent and made me evolve my point of view about Mac. I use Mac for efficiency, and yet, I was wrong about what kind of efficiency I’ve been developing. Tinkering is so important, even if just for the fun of it.
Do you not have any hobbies to "waste time" with? I would assume that most Hackintosh enthusiasts do this as a hobby, not for a living or even to save money on hardware.
On my days we used to tinker in proprietary 8 and 16 bit home computer systems, The Way of Linux (TM) is not the only path to enlightment.
Linux is for work. I wouldn’t consider running anything else (Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, etc.) for my services.
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You need to understand the bias of many HN commenters. They are running businesses, aspire to run businesses or employed by businesses that are monetizing the work of tinkerers and packaging it for a mass market where they can sell higher volumes or mine more personal data. There are a lot of people who will recommend spending massive amounts of time and money learning and renting proprietary services over learning fundamental concepts and owning your own stack. I just ignore them along with the crypto bros before them and the AI pumpers now. Renting proprietary closed services to people who don't know better is their bread and butter.
I really like the way you put that.
That was a beautiful analogy.
a frustrating freely accessible experience being priceless is not mutually exclusive from your time being worthless
but I’m sure your point will inspire someone
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For you, me, other people on HN who generally make a living by understanding computers, definitely.
For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No.
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>Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.
Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out.
But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago.
[] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.
I don't know about you, but for me it was never about the money. I did this stuff (and still do) because I find it fun, not because I can't afford to buy it. I have my desktop, and I want that to just work, and I have a bunch of computers, hardware, 3D printers, etc etc that I constantly tinker with, because I like it.
I suspect it's the same for you, and it may be the lack of time, but not so much the access to money.
As a teen in the mid-oughties. I played heavily with the OSx86 project/Hackintosh. I learnt about writing kexts and kernel patche and I fondly remember getting a Linksys USB-to-ethernet adapter working on an HP workstation, running Tiger.
My financial circumstances have improved somewhat in the intervening years. Today, I own quite a bit of Apple hardware, most recently Vision purchase overton-shifted my definition of “disposable” into very unfamiliar territory. Even still, about once a year I ensure I can still triple-boot” - just now I do it with ProxMox and Virtual Passthrough. The first iMessage sent from my virtualized “iMac pro” at 2AM and was almost as gratifying as the first Apple Bootscreen on a a Sony Vaio.
May we never lose whatever that is.
Spot on for me, but there's a different argument at play: At the beginning of the OSX on x86 times, Apple had an OS with a stellar user experience, but the hardware was just completely overpriced, so Hackintosh made complete sense.
Fast forward to today and I think Apple managed to pivot this almost to the complete opposite end. I think the hardware is incredible value (that's debatable for sure, but my M1 aluminum machined Macbook with Apple Silicon is blazing fast, completely silent, super sturdy and runs forever — I wouldn't trade it for any other laptop I could buy with money), while the Operating System has really taken a backseat, with hugely annoying bugs unfixed since 10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460
To me, in a world like that, Hackintosh simply doesn't make much sense anymore. Asahi Linux is really the star on the horizon, by doing exactly the opposite: Letting a free and better maintained operating systems run on strictly awesome hardware.
Value was the driving factor for some of my early hackintoshing (Core 2 Duo era), but what pushed me to do it from 2015-2020 was the abysmal state of higher powered Mac hardware.
The Mac Pro was still the un-updated 2012 trash can, the 15” MBPs were too thin for the CPUs they housed (perhaps Intel’s fault for getting stuck on 14nm for so long, but still) and were hot with terrible battery life, and while the 27” iMacs weren’t terrible and probably the best of the lineup, they still weren’t cooled quite as well as they should’ve been. My 6700k + 980Ti tower in a Fractal Define case with a big quiet Noctua cooler was just flat better and made a far better Mac than anything Apple sold at the time.
That said, I did eventually grow tired of the tinkery-ness of it all and in 2020 picked up a refurbed base model iMac Pro, one of the few Macs in that timespan that wasn’t a mistake, for about half its MSRP. It was about as powerful as that tower, surprisingly even more quiet, and of course just worked without the tinkering.
This is the classic "money is time, time is money" conundrum. A teenager doesn't have the money to buy a fancy car or computer but they have the time to tweak and experiment to get the most out of it. Meanwhile an adult has the money but not the time, assuming they have a full time job, kids, etc. So they're willing to spend the money to get products that work and would rather spend their limited time with their family instead.
In my teens I had a group of friends who loved to tinker, from hackintoshes to custom ROMs to homelabbing to electronics repair. Now I'm like the only one left who does this stuff :(
When you're young you have all the time, all the energy, but none of the money.
When you're an adult you have all the energy, all the money, but none of the time.
When you're a retiree you have all of the money, all of the time, but none of the energy.
A generalisation of course, but quite apt!
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> Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
This resonates with me as well. As a teenager with my first car I spent a lot of time tweaking its appearance, sound, performance, etc., buying what little I could from local auto parts stores. I couldn't wait to get older to have more money so I could do more mods and really make the vehicle how I wanted it.
In the back of my head I wondered why older folks didn't do this though. They have these nice vehicles but they're bone stock! Why not new wheels, tint, a tasteful lower, etc.?
Then I myself got older and found it just isn't as important as it used to be. I still have a slightly modified car, but I'm not rooting around inside the dash with a soldering iron like I once did, haha.
Haha that is a very similar mindset I had when I bought my first house. I was excited about all of the nice improvements I could make and wondered why so many people I knew who were well off never really put much work into their home.
Then I quickly realized that its such a big hassle and also you almost instantly get used to things how they are.
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I don't understand. Do you imagine there isn't a young generation of time rich cash poor tinkerers now? Why would the idea of a hackintosh suddenly become obsolete because you can afford one now and don't have time? Nothing about your statement logically follows.
He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.
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There are other things that are more interesting to build and make now than a hackintosh (with the added difficulty that trying to make a silicon compatible device may not be feasible).
Combine this with that a Mac mini that might be at the target for a hackintosh device is $600 USD ... and has the advantage that it isn't hacked together and so has better support.
The part of me that wanted to tinker with a hackintosh in my younger days is more satisfied by Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. I've even got an Onion IO over there that could use some love.
Its not that people don't want to tinker, but rather the utility that one gets for hacking together a Mac (again, note the silicon transition) is less than one gets for hacking on single board computers.
As I said in my post, the next generation will find something new to tinker on.
The idea of a hackintosh is obsolete because there are new worlds to conquer, the time of hackintoshes has come and gone. The new generation will find their own challenges, not re-hash challenges of the past.
I guess the commercial success of the platform has increased the offering in the second hand market.
Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the purchase of a mac.
It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy the equivalent-specced Mac.
The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible.
People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)
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I started my developer career on Hackintoshes many years ago.
No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop, it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest Xcode.
Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over the years, like crashes and graphical glitches with certain apps, like Photos or Preview, problems with monitor resolutions and refresh rates, and many, many others.
Ultimately, they were a useful tool for a time, but they suffered from death by a thousand cuts in terms of practical usability. So, I bought a basic Mac Mini as soon as I was able to, and never looked back.
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I built a hackontosh in 2016, bought all the right mobo with the right driver sets, etc. Used the buyer's guides on tonymacx86.com and purchased the exact hardware, downloaded the drivers, flashed things, etc. It was far from "just working". I had a stable and solid system for about 18 months (after a weekend of tweaking), and then it needed to be reconfigured, and I didn't have the time to spend the weekend getting it to work again....so that machine went back to windows. Even with the proper supported Nvidia card, I had issues, and went through some pains with the wifi.
Cost of ownership of an M3 MacBook Pro is like $300-400 a year. Even if you have the time, it's just not worth it anymore like it used to be.
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> It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
Oh JFC. This canard has been floating around the about linux for 30 years, and it's always been a half truth at best.
Inevitably, it always comes down to "Cards with 2361YSE rev 5 chipset" or some other nonsense. Like that makes total sense for a kernel developer, but most people don't know what chipset they have in some peripheral.
So now you're left with assholes saying, "WeLL yOu ShOuLd gEt InFoRmEd. JuSt GoOgLe iT!", and it ain't that easy. If you can even find a brand name to chipset list, it's going to be out of date, or it's going to be something that says "2361Y" or "2361YSE rev 3" or something. Is that close enough to "2361YSE rev 5"? Who knows!
Then the best part? Even when you lookup the hardware with "full compatibility", you'll find that it actually isn't. Then when you ask about it, you'll get, "I just don't use that feature, and you shouldn't use it either."
You guys that grow old forget that there's still younger people in this *world* (not just the US). It's analogous to saying "I worked 9to5 in the 2000s (when wages were acceptable). But now that I have way less energy to work, and made millions off my retirement fund. I don't see why this generation shouldn't equally work as hard today."
Tinkering shouldn't be nostalgia, it should be a right. I'm sure you used to fix the rusty old generational family car with your dad on the weekends. He probably used to do the same with your grandfather on the weekends. I don't think there'll be a car to fix for the next generation.
Just like ramen or office chairs can measure a recession, fixing cars with a father figure could be used as an indicator for the prevalence of greed in society.
I was also that kid. I remember an OSX upgrade breaking my mouse and I couldn't figure out how to get it working again. I was desperate for a Mac, but it was financially unattainable.
I feel the same way with phones. I pre-ordered a Nexus One the day it opened, installed a dozen custom ROMs, etc etc. Upgraded to a Nexus 4, 5. These days I use an iPhone. Don’t miss it, though I’m nostalgic for the excess free time!
Same for me. I spent countless hours recompiling my kernel in slackware, configuring enlightenment window manager. These days I don't even change the desktop wallpaper.
Yeah I spent literally dozens of hours of my life compiling different kernels with OSS and ALSA variations to get my sound card working lol. Really a 'you had to be there' thing.
I have one running in a virtual machine but on hardware that would natively support a Hackitosh which I use only for testing Mac distributions. It's too old to use now but when I built it you could buy Mac OS at Best Buy.
While tinkering for the sake of tinkering is as good of a hobby as any other, the process of tailoring your OS's does not have to be infinite. Maybe it is different for others, but while I did spent a lot of time on writing my Linux dotfiles until they were nearly perfect, for the last 5 years or so, when I have a fresh OS install, it's really just 'git clone; chezmoi apply' and I get a system where every keybind is exactly where it needs to be.
When work banned Linux machines and I had to transition to OS X, I had to do just as much, if not more, tinkering to make it work for me. Perhaps it does 'just works' for those who think exactly like Steve Jobs - but if you want it your way and on your terms, there'd be a lot of tinkering to do, from yabai configs to Karabiner json configs and custom plists, to replacing most of the gelded Apple apps.
I had a similar revelation a few years ago. My giant PC gaming rig blew up again (specifically my 3080 shit itself), a year after having to replace the power supply and requiring the whole thing.
I was just done with faffing around with that kind of thing.
So I bought a (then fairly recently released) Mac Studio, just the plain jane base 32GB model, and couldn’t be happier. So nice to have something virtually silent and energy efficient, instead of jet turbine that drew about 300w at idle.
I 100% do not want a laptop for my primary personal machine, but the big workstation towers are too much.
The Studio is that wonderful Goldilocks zone - performant, bring-your-own input devices, but merely “a bit pricey” and not extravagantly so.
Same story but with custom Android ROMs
Agree. I used tweaked BlackBerry ROMs for a couple years before getting my first Android device, an HTC One M7 with Android 4.4 KitKat. Spent loads of time getting all the tools working to modify ROMs, bootloaders, recovery/TWRP, and squeeze every drop of performance out of that phone. Then went "backwards" to an iPhone 4S and have been rocking stock iPhones ever since.
those were the days. Nowadays it alls feels same-ish and boring. Can't wait for a new kind of device where not everything has been figured out yet.
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Yea but thats how you learn.
These ipad kids dont know anything because it all works now for games and netflix. No need for drivers, windows installs etc
Macs are very expensive in some parts of the world, where other computer brands are affordable. A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it for others for money. Not only installing MacOS on PCs, but also installing newer versions of MacOS on Macs that are officially not supported anymore.
> A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it for others for money
Apple thoroughly screwed over Mac developers that the only compelling software that's exclusive to MacOS is developed by Apple themselves[1], IMO. Even those packages have equivalent (or better) alternatives on Windows. Macs used to be the platform for DTP, audio and video production - now all the 3rd party developers have pivoted away to other operating systems. One of the reasons professionals resorted to Hackintoshes in the past was because Apple had periods of neglecting the Mac Pro hardware on and off. Why would anyone go through the paid of setting up a Hackintosh in 2024, outside of being a fan of MacOS aesthetics?
1. Logic Pro likely has the biggest pull; Final Cut isn't the halo app it once was.
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With a little preparation setting up a Hackintosh is not much more difficult than setting up an actual Mac. What you're describing is a myth or just out of date.
It really depends if you're tinkering because you have no choice versus tinkering because you like it. People will absolutely tinker on cars for their entire life, but upgrade to more interesting jobs like doing engine swaps rather than just changing their oil.
But it sounds like you were tinkering because you had no other choice, not because you enjoyed it.
To me it was having just one powerful upgradable desktop computer with Windows and MacOS. So I don't have to have devices on my desk.
Now I have solved with PC desktop, MacBook Air, and Apple Display. PC also has usb-c display output so I can just switch which cable connects to the display.
Downside is still that M1 is not as fast, especially something that is GPU intensive as the PC I have.
> this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
You know you’re alive when you log into iCloud from a hackintosh and then Apple notices, you get the ‘unauthorised hardware’ message (I can’t remember the exact phrasing) and your various iCloud services begin to cease functioning. It’s not often your OS is exciting.
I had the same experience with windows 98/2k and my franken pc of randomly upgraded parts. I used to have to reinstall win98 every other month or so because it was so unstable. I had the installer on a separate partition, so I could just wipe the system disk and have a clean install up in 12 minutes.
> These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work
Me too. But it seems i'm out of luck. Everyday i have to fix something. Today "quality" means how much user data we steal, not if a system works.
I find these days the Steak Deck has become a great device for tinkering. I've seen people do some nice unexpected stuff with it, for example making an opening in the back to connect an dedicated GPU or using it to pilot drones in Ukraine.
*I meant "Steam Deck", autocorrect strikes again...
There are new generations of cash poor tinkerers though, including the 3rd world.
from around 2008 to 2012 I ran hackintosh, on desktop, it was great and fun in 2012 I bought a first MacBook. The good experience on the hackintosh made me get the MacBook. So I like to think hackintosh helped apple.
> These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
I have said this same thing about Android vs iPhone. Also, if I cannot tinker with Android then I might as well have an iPhone.
I agree your first three paragraphs, but why won’t they want to continue to hack?
It was my obsession with worthless endeavors that got me the kind of job that made my time valuable in the first place
> 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
See, that 35 years for me didn't make me stop working on my cars, it just allowed me to have enough money to have a reliable car as well as "toy" cars that I can still tinker with. I drive the Audi, but I still wrench on the Triumph. I used to tinker with Hackintosh stuff as well, and I haven't stopped tinkering, just moved on to other things, like this Rubidium frequency source I just bought to build a high accuracy NTP server from a Raspberry Pi. (Yes, of course, there are already cheap and easy solutions for this, but I want to tinker).
Either OP doesn't consider tinkering an enjoyable past-time activity or they've no free time to do something they enjoy. Both quite sad to be honest.
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>These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
This but with LLMs lol.
Same here with Emacs. Tinkering-vs-doing. Opportunity costs too high.
There was a time when hackintosh was practical for everyone who needs macOS and/or can't stand other desktop OSes. It was the tail end of Apple's Intel hardware. It was pathetic in terms of performance (underpowered CPUs and buggy GPU drivers), quality (butterfly keyboards) and thermal design (things would overheat all the time), yet expensive.
I myself was contemplating building a ridiculously overpowered hackintosh machine around 2019. Then the ARM transition was announced. And then the M1 came out with overwhelmingly good reviews from literally everyone. So I decided to wait for the beefed up "professional" version, which did come later, so here I am, typing this on an M1 Max MBP, the best computer I've owned so far.
Also, for me personally, hackintosh was an introduction to macOS. I was a poor student at the time and couldn't afford a real Mac. Of course I bought one about as soon as I could.
went from hackingtosh to mac, never had enough to afford a car. (I think)
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As a long time lover of hackintoshes (couldn’t afford a real Mac as a youth but tried to make the netbook macOS dream come true), I’m quite sad to read this. The author has a very valid point that drivers are going to become increasingly complicated and difficult.
I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn’t explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes.
As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a unique source of frustration. I’ll spend hours digging through crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7 MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that shouldn’t be possible. The firmware is a version that we never released. Etc etc.
I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I’ve fixed it.
Now I’ve spent hours chasing something and I can’t help.
(Opinions are my own, etc etc).
Sorry, that must have been me. LOL.
I had a Hackintosh and felt that any crash was 99% my fault and probably an edge case for MacOS. But in my defense, CrashReporter is way too permissive and will send a report even when the user doesn't want it done. After a app or hard crash I'll get the window that a bug report was sent and I know damn well some engineer is going to look at it and it won't make any sense that a MacBook has this particular GPU.
I've been using a Hackintosh as my daily driver for nearly 15 years and they have always been rock solid, with months of uptime consistently. It's just a matter of starting with the right hardware.
People are free to look to support the hardware they have but 've always though it's stupid not buying well supported hardware in the first place, of which there is plenty.
What are you going to do once Intel is no longer supported ?
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I'll add this to reasons why I'm opposed to always-on telemetry. A hackintosh should know that its crash reports will be unhelpful to Apple and not bother sending them. It's a waste of your time to deal with data coming from unsupported configurations.
I installed Snow Leopard on a 2009 MB for kicks and sent in a crash report when Safari died due to something on the modern web. I would love to know whether these still arrive at the fruit company.
I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me.
Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)
It is a bit funny, the hacker energy once was there for running OSX on anything, now it is there for running anything else on M1, haha.
amusing but that hasn’t been my experience
just in case anyone is on the fence. Apple’s developer network effects are real and impressive, people updated… nearly everything… so quickly! plus with Rosetta under the hood translations to x86 binaries expand everything runnable to seamlessly
I thought I would miss bootcamo but I dont. I have yet to install ARM Windows but I’m hearing praises about that now from relatively casual users
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Apple's whole strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266
I’m fairly unaware of the current state of Linux on Apple M hardware, but I’d want a Linux partition on Apple hardware more than a Mac partition on x86. These days I have two devices though.
Writing to you from NixOS on an M2 Air. Aside from a handful of missing packages that aren't available for the architecture, it's shockingly good. My battery is reporting 19 hours remaining, and "setup" took about 20 minutes (not counting the brief time writing a new machine definition in my NixOS config). I don't have any fundamental issues with macos, but it's nice to have a consistent environment across machines, and this hardware is glorious.
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Its pretty good!
For me it's always been about repairability and expandability and Apple has gotten worse in that respect over time.
It's essentially impossible to repair Apple hardware yourself, but Hackintosh is very easy to maintain in that regard.
I have endless expansion options compared to Apple hardware. Hackintoshes are just a better choice.
Macs do keep their resale value more though. Personally I run Linux on my own machines but I do enjoy the build quality of the MBP I get from work. It’s a whole another universe from my pretty good laptop that creaks and is made of plastic and the screen bends when I move it.. and the screen quality is not even comparable
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> For me it's always been about repairability and expandability and Apple has gotten worse in that respect over time.
Apple Plus is amazing, I broke my macbook and they gave me a loner on the spot and I got it back in full working order later.
I wouldn't buy any Apple product without it. Had a similar experience with an iPhone where they just gave me a new one straight up.
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It’s about the only viable option for professionally working with audio, in either studio or live setting. That's the biggest group of hakintosh users I'm personally familiar with anyway.
You can work professionally with audio in Windows, you’ll probably even get better performance out of the same hardware you’d be using for a Hackintosh.
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Same here. Of course, now that we have the M1 and the likely eventual deprecation of x86 for new versions of Mac OS, things like Hackintosh are a bit doomed. If you have an M1, you'd be runnig MacOS (or Linux) and would have no need for it. If you don't, MacOS is not going to run great on it and very soon not at all. So, it's one of those things that you wouldn't use unless you really needed to. And finally, support for running mac os in virtual machines is kind of getting there. It's still made hard by Apple and only supported on their own hardware. But it's not impossible and there are some legitimate use cases (e.g. building IOS apps in the cloud). Maybe eventually somebody will figure out emulation on non Apple hardware. I think there are some efforts on QEMU. Of course the issue will be emulating enough of Apple Silicon properly.
Apple profitability by lock-in is all that matters in the Apple C-Suite now. Juice that stock price, get free stock options, buy new yacht to show off to your friends.
macOS supports running as a paravirtualised guest OS (officially, on an apple-hardware host also running macOS). If there is to be a "next gen" of hackintoshing, I think it'd be based on a cut-down linux host acting as a shim between the real hardware and the paravirt interface.
See also: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amaz... "This patch set introduces a new ARM and HVF specific machine type called "vmapple". It mimicks the device model that Apple's proprietary Virtualization.Framework exposes, but implements it in QEMU."
One thing I've been on the hunt for is a good server hypervisor solution for Apple Silicon. I would like to put an Apple Silicon Mac Mini in my rack, and it would be really nice to have a minimally bootstrapped host OS running a handful of macOS VMs for various purposes.
The best I'm aware of currently is UTM which has some scripting capabilities. But that is very far off from the experience with Proxmox.
I know Cirrus CI uses (and I think developed(?) Tart^1 as a scriptable VMM for macOS CI.
[1]: https://tart.run/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8&themeRefresh=1
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It would be interesting to see how feasible it is to run that on an Arm workstation, e.g. an Ampere Altra. Or going the other way and trying to squeeze macOS on to the latest Raspberry Pi.
Would be cool and ironic to get the full Macos on Android hardware.
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I was about to say that VMs will always be wanted.
Came here to write what the parent is saying: exploit the virtualization route to trick MacOS into running on the target hardware.
Additional reasons:
- there is less alternative hardware I want to use. I want Apple Silicon processors, materials, and there just isn't much high quality competition.
- Because of inflation the Apple premium isn't as high as it used to be. You get a Mac mini or MacBook Air at very competitive prices (RAM is still painful).
- Linux Desktop software is more competitive and fills some of the roles that needed macOS before.
RAM and storage are both incredibly painful.
$200 to add 8GB RAM to the base 8GB (16GB total).
$400 to add 16GB RAM to the base (24GB total).
$200 to add 256GB storage to the base 256GB (512GB total).
$400 to add 768GB storage to the base 256GB (1TB total).
$800 to add 1768GB storage to the base 256GB (2TB total).
For comparison, a faster 2TB nvme PCIE4 SSD is a bit over $100.
Right, but you can add storage without soldering.
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Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
> I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand.
That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a lot of utility in it that hasn't depreciated significantly in the 2 years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the role that it has, it becomes outdated in another 2 or 3 years... and wouldn't be surprised if it lasts another 2 or 3 beyond that.
If you spent $700 on it in 2020 at release, it is still working as well as it did on the day you bought it.
You may be seeing the premium from when it was bought being attached to the current used price - and there are less expensive ones available now - but the device, for what it was when I got it is still providing value and selling it used would mean I'd need to get a new one... at a similar price as what I'd sell it for.
> sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
I will note that for me, in the spot where it is, the "multiple drive bays, pcie, etc." represents a worse device as it doesn't sit nicely under a monitor on a small desk. Part of the choice of the Mac mini for me for that role was its form factor and quiet running.
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$500 for a Mac is great! $100 for an Intel is great too. PCs used to cost thousands of dollars! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT
9th gen intel? According to geekbench 6[0] the m1 is between 2x-5x faster with better battery life, so depending on your workload, it's quite possibly not close enough.
[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks/
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A couple more for me:
- The icloud webapps are now pretty good, and icloud file storage and password management works well on windows these days
- Windows is also pretty good these days, and obviously if you want to run games, it's the easiest option.
Although I enjoy my macbook and iphone, I don't have a compelling reason to have MacOS on my desktop instead of windows. I think the only thing that I would like to have are clipboard sharing and Universal Control (share mouse and keyboard with macs and ipads), but there are cross-platform software solutions that are good enough
It wasn't too bad a few years ago but right now you can buy two Ryzen 7840U 64G/1TB with OLED display for the price of one similar specced MacBook.
I daily drove a hackintosh for years until I recently pivoted to apple silicon. I was a very enjoyable experience for me. The success and reliability of a hackintosh is really dependent on your hardware configuration. I had lucked out that my desktop tower that I had built years prior just so happened to coincide almost 1:1 with hardware requirements for a golden build. (6700k, 64gb ram, Vega 64, compatible wifi/bluetooth pcie, compatible m.2 controllers, z170 mb which is well known in the hackintosh community, etc.)
Being able to have a modular Mac was really something and I exploited that to tailor my machine to my use case (television/video production). I never had issues with bluetooth or WiFi, nor did I have ever have an issue with Apple's services like iMessage/Facetime.
What sucked about the process was staying current with system updates. Updates within the macOS release went without a hitch, but my hardware was aged out in newer macOS versions which made upgrading a bit too much like surgery, and since this hackintosh was my production device, that wasn't something I wanted to roll the dice on.
Having switched to apple silicon, I do kind of miss that freedom, but I've found that same freedom just by doing things a little less hacky. Instead of a board I can add drives to, I just setup a NAS, instead of using an old PCIE HDMI capture card, I got a more modern USB one, etc.
For a long time, Hackintosh was an opportunity to do things my way, and that experience led me to learning experiences that have improved my day to day that I otherwise may not have learned. It was a freeing experience. Today I still do things my way, but these days my way is more focused on convenience for the things that should "just work" so I put my attention on things that matter, rather than things that shouldn't, such as modifying my EFI before a macOS update to trick macOS into thinking I have the iGPU of a newer chipset because Apple dropped support for Skylake on a new release.
Good times, the headaches were worth it in hindsight.
I’ve got a machine pretty similar to what you’re describing in my closet (6700k, mobo reasonably well known in the community, 5700XT GPU) which used to be a hackintosh. Might be worth reviving and trying to find a use for.
Well I can run Mac OS in Proxmox nowadays so that's killed the "bare matel" Hackintosh for me. Yes it takes time to set it up (once!) but I much prefer KVM now than fiddling with hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8
this. A lot of the ground hackintosh broke like opencore is directly in use with VMs
Why are you using Proxmox instead of just kvm? Are you running more than just Mac?
Yep, this is exactly what I do. It's nice to be able to use Messages from my desktop, plus it fulfills an edge case of 2-way backup with Synology Drive and iCloud for me
There's no GPU acceleration is there?
There can be if you’ve got a spare PCI-E slot to plug a supported AMD GPU into and pass through to the VM.
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Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm still surprised this requires special interaction with the hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.
> doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.
Why should it? Apple only supports their own hardware so the software should never run into this problem.
Custom drivers trip some security features and "taint" the kernel.
How does that impact iMessage? Are parts of it implemented in the kernel?
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Now it's the other way around: you hack Linux onto Apple Silicon (Asahi Linux).
For me buying a new Macbook Air or Pro is definitely made more palatable knowing I could turn it into a Ubuntu laptop down the line.
And if the Asahi team keeps kicking ass, we may even use Asahi to run Windows games with Proton inside Linux Steam. Thus replacing the Bootcamp partition for those who dual booted to play Windows games.
I don't miss Hackintosh. The one build I made it all looked like it was genuine macOS, but you could feel it wasn't the same. Photoshop felt more laggy. Unless you used an equivalent iMac beforehand as I did you might not notice that something was off. That said this was like ten years ago.
Even if it works well "Hacking" isn't worth it imho, whenevr there is the slightest lag or issue, you just never know. Is it because of the hackintosh, is it a genuine bug in macOS? Is it my hardware? Too many unknowns.
Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance, "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL / Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for years.
> While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...]
Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;)
Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on ARM systems at some point.
Have you read Bob Brant's Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle [1]? The man was a proponent of having the only Apple part in your build be the logic board, and using as many commodity PC parts as possible – I remember one of the builds started with a Macintosh SE logic board that ran "headless" with a (Radius?) video card in a generic AT/XT case, with everything else (drives, PSU, etc.) commodity PC. Pure wizardry, and he somehow managed to make the numbers add up cheaper than first-party Apple even when adding accelerators to your build.
[1] https://vintageapple.org/macbooks/pdf/Build_Your_Own_Macinto...
I had my library get that book, and it helped with all sorts of projects. What an awesome book :D
It can still be useful for those looking to run older versions of macOS for some reason or another. If there’s PPC applications that one wants to run for example, you can piece together a Snow Leopard hackintosh from used parts that will run PPC apps through Rosetta faster than any real PPC mac ever could while be also being easier and more cheap to maintain.
From time to time I’ll consider building such a box as a time-frozen “zen machine” that runs OS X 10.6 or 10.9, is disconnected from modern distractions, and will never be subject to the disruptions that software updates can bring.
Now that their MacBooks come with 120hz screens with acceptable response time (unlike their early 120hz screens), the value proposition for hackintosh isn't as alluring for me. Previously, I've been worried about the T2 chip and the trend of Apple locking down MacOS, which also turned out to be less of an issue that I thought. The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.
> The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.
Mac gaming is probably getting better thanks to wine, crossover, GPTK and Whisky [1]. I am not a gamer but I have seen others playing serious Windows games like FF7 remake (not sure if that counts) on mac.
[1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games (for now).
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I used to tinker with building nforce4.kexts for OSX Leopard. I got everything working including the Realtek HD Audio thanks to a pcid injection. Snow Leopard was the last time I was able to build for nforce4 boards and we moved onto Intel gen 6 LGA1151.
This was back when NVidia and Apple got along. GeForce 900 days. SLI was a thing. And it worked on my drivers. Sadly, I had kids and grew out of it, got old(er), and now only use Linux because aarm64 killed hackintosh.
> Many will tell you that buying Intel-based hardware from Apple is buying obsolete models.
A strength of Intel-based Macs is they can run Wine/CrossOver. This is very good for people who really need a Windows app for their job and also need to minimze risk of a ransomware attack (which is way higher on Windows).
Intel Macs running MacOS 17 also are great for retro gaming through running Win32 games with CrossOver/Wine, also platformer games with OpenEMU.
Bad news for the indie music scene using these, where they just want to be able to run their VSTs and DAWs. Some will switch back to macs, so worth it for apple I guess.
This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad. I spent the last week shopping around for an audio interface and every single model had people complaining about driver issues and latency and "random loud static" or other crazy things when using Windows. Always Windows. Crazy stuff.
> This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad.
I don't know where this is coming from. It certainly doesn't apply to the actual driver latency of higher end and professional interfaces. Most of these actually have a slightly smaller latency for the same buffer size with ASIO then they do with CoreAudio.
The one thing that can cause latency issues are GPU drivers, but there's ways to fix that.
One of things that really annoys me about Windows is that there doesn't seem to be a way to capture audio from a single application even though the audio mixer can clearly change the volume. But if you want to capture, it's only the final mix output for everything (so you better hope that there's no sudden notification sound from anything). Or you'd have to use a virtual sound card like VB's Cable/Voicemeteer, which requires the application to be able to select a specific soundcard.
Arguably this isn't relevant for audio production, but it does make capturing applications a huge pain. (And if I did miss something and there is a way to e.g., have OBS capture the audio of a specific Window/Application, I'm all ears!)
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As someone who does quite some audio stuff on Windows, using Focusrite Scarlett interfaces - I never encountered issues like that.
On Linux however..
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Linux ships with a realtime kernel patchset these days, so the only issues there have to do with hardware- and proprietary VST support. With the newer Pipewire audio server you don't even need to set up JACK.
Except that Apple breaks audio applications with every new release of macOS and has for years. And, it's just a matter of time before Apple kills basically every DAW and VST when they finally kill off OpenGL on macOS.
Edit: What I have said is true here, so I'm unsure why the downvotes.
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I used hackintoshes for a long time. I’m done with dealing with kexts and other such nonsense. Life is short I don’t want to spend all of it dealing with some silly technical administration. Windows is good enough for every piece of software I want to run and I have an old MacBook for the odd thing that windows doesn’t support. My windows machine dual boots into Linux for the extra exceptional thing that I can’t do with windows.
I’m sure Apple doesn’t love the fact that Hackintosh exists but I’ll tell you what. After installing it on my gaming PC 15 years ago, i loved it and bought my first Mac shortly after. It was a previously owned Mac because I was still getting my feet wet and didn’t want to spend a ton. But then I bought a MacBook Air. Then iMac. Then iPhone. Then 5 more Macs. And now, I’m hooked. Hackintosh was a great gateway drug.
For me it's just that macOS isn't a desirable OS anymore. Over the years Apple kept changing things that I preferred the way they were. So I'm done with it. I use KDE now.
I'd give Windows some credit - it is actually quite good and stable these days.
No denying that windows these days isn’t stable. Indeed it is. My biggest issue is all the third party crap I never asked for gets installed with it. Not to mention all the Microsoft services that I don’t want to use, but still manage to be there. Like OneDrive. Sure one can uninstall it. But then see the mess it leaves with the way files are saved in the documents directory.
Even when setting up a Windows 11 VM , I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down.
> I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down.
All of that is automated now. https://atlasos.net
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If you set your language to 'English (World)' during the install, none of the crapware is installed.
Or at least it wasn't last year when I installed W11 (I still occasionally need Affinity Photo and Capture One). Microsoft might have realised they're missing out on a few pennies and plugged the gap.
Good is relative. Windows 2000 never reset your preferences on an update of the OS.
Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Windows. Rock solid, and that was before they broke the search function (when it actually still actually searched in files rather than an incomplete index - thankfully, grepWin can be installed) or when they dumbed down the Control Panel.
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WSL still doesn't have the proper UNIX like experience of macOS.
And there is no decent equivalent to homebrew.
Imo, it's much more of a proper Linux experience than MacOS. e.g. all the filesystems stuff is there like /proc, you don't have to deal with BSD/Linux differences, zsh/bash compat issues etc.
macOS Unix compatibility is an oversold feature, and it's unlikely for anything made for Linux to work on it unless it's specifically ported.
That being sad, a lot of the dev community own macs, so this support usually exists.
I mean with Hyper-V why even WSL and just run VMs of whatever other OS'es you want? Tinkering with the OS these days is just so much different than it was in the past. Trying to dual boot Win/Linux back in the day was a interesting challenge that might leave your disk corrupt, now it's a question of why do that at all? Hacking smaller platforms like the pi that are cheap seems to get more attention than PCs these days.
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Yep, I don’t think I’ve had windows crash in atleast 2-3 years and I do a lot of strange, processor heavy things.
When I first delved into programming, I was under the impression that OSX was necessary because most programming video tutorials were recorded on a Mac. This led to a minor obsession with acquiring one. Unfortunately, financial constraints were a significant barrier, leading me to explore Hackintosh as my sole option. Countless days and nights were invested in making it work properly. Despite the challenges, the learning experience and the satisfaction of eventually getting everything to function smoothly made the entire process immensely rewarding.
10/10 would do again, if I were 14. Now I am way older, 3 macbooks around and wish my job would let me use Linux.
I feel like hackintosh virtualization is a better investment of time. Currently it's onerous to run Apple OSes on anything but Apple hardware. Being able to spin up a hackintosh VM in any cloud provider would be pretty sweet. Of course that probably violates Apple OS terms of use so not sure if AWS would shut you down if they discovered people were doing that.
But actually, as others have pointed out, I'm much more interested in Linux running on M chips than Mac OS running on non Apple hardware. There's nothing particularly compelling about Apple's OSes (except maybe their new VR sorry I mean "spacial computing" OS)
No speculation in the article or thread yet what Apple is doing with the WiFi stack that creates such a fragile coupling with its services.
Per iFixit, they’re using an obscure WiFi / Bluetooth module from USI in the new MacBook Pros:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+M...
Possible they’ve gotten some “out of spec” capabilities wired in? Trying to imagine what for… Securely bridging local adhoc networks with the internet?
Apple’s always done some unique things with WiFi/Bluetooth. Macs have long been able to keep Apple-branded bluetooth keyboards and mice usable even before the OS initializes for example, and if you use one of a few Broadcom chipset BT/Wifi cards that were used in real Macs in a hackintosh, that capability extends to those too. It feels weird being able to navigate BIOS/UEFI with a Bluetooth keyboard.
While I never jumped on the Hackintosh bandwagon, I had many friends who did for almost a decade. They built systems that ran macOS for considerably less when it came to the price/performance ratio.
Nowadays, those same friends are all using Mac Studios because the price/performance ratio for running macOS is better. I believe this is one of the major factors to why the Hackintosh community is dying today (not just changes to drivers and the macOS codebase as the author suggests).
I don’t get the point about the price/performance ratio being better. Mac Studio are really expensive compared to a powerful PC
Running macOS on Apple Silicon is very fast compared to running it Intel. This is due to the RISC architecture and tight integration of the components in the SoC. To run it as fast on Intel would cost more than the price of a Mac Studio.
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In the olden times this used to be called the Jade plan:
I've been doing it for ages as Apple hardware holds its resale value exceptionally well. You can use the often exaggerated price premium to your advantage - buy brand new default config at an opportune moment in the upgrade cycle, sell just in time for a coveted new release.
This works even better if you happen to be traveling somewhere where Apple devices are unusually expensive.
I'm still on the M1 Air and will likely sell it just before a M4 release 12-18 months from now. Cost of ownership averages out to <$0.25/day.
For a lot of use cases except hardware dev, a VM is sufficient.
Arguably you could (can already) run MacOS via VM on generic hardware, the same way retro systems are (which could be partly in hardware, e.g. FPGA performing functions). This would only be bad from a performance perspective, from a maintenance perspective it may make life a lot easier as you've moved a hardware compatibility problem into software.
You're no longer having to add compatibility workarounds for hundreds of pieces of hardware, just target one VM.
If you really needed the performance you'd then have 3 options that I see, pay for a real Mac, pay for a machine with x2 the performance of a real Mac (which limits you to mid range machines at the moment), or spin up extra VMs as required on hardware you have lying around that previously you couldn't use.
It was pretty smart of Apple to switch to a proprietary architecture. I can’t imagine MacOS running on standard Arm.
I think the machine code would run (maybe not Rosetta2, since it uses weird extensions) but the issue is the weird boot sequence. You'd basically have to do the inverse of what Asahi Linux is doing to get it to boot on a machine with ACPI or another bespoke boot system (ala. Raspi).
Perhaps author wants to follow OpenCore guides more closely, especially the hardware buyer's ones - the experience could have been vastly different. There are a lot of (cheap!) wireless PCIE cards that both work on Windows and macOS (they are refurbished Mac Pro parts), I've used one for years and iServices have always been working besides the first hiccup when configuring the system for the first time. Eventually, the setup died as I moved to MacBook Pro and cleared out the NVME storage, but when it did - the experience was flawless (that is, after figuring it out).
The Hackintosh will eventually die with Apple moving away from x86_64 completely.
But that day is not today. Eventually, someone might even manage to continue on the tradition with upcoming ARM64 PC platforms.
I think the switch to their own arm based chips should have been the writing in the wall for the end of the hackintosh.
I think we're at a point where we are going to wind up needing Linux more and more. My kid is running IIRC 2014 rMBP that I passed on to her a few years ago. While it still runs, it's long passed it's last supported update and now even forced unsupported updates are going to stop working. I'm not sure where the gesture support is in Linux at this point. Google maps in Chrome is probably the best demo experience.
I'm looking forward to Cosmic in Pop!OS from System76. I've preferred their take on UX for a while.
It'll be sad when it dies. I remember running Snow Leopard on my netbook and taking it to WWDC. It was sacrilegious but quite the conversation piece; I remember lots of Apple engineers being amazed it worked so well.
i cant imagine why would anyone want to install macos on their hardware unless they have to. macos built in software is mediocre at best, but most of it is utter crap, take finder or preview as an example
I think this article reaches a valid conclusion based on the wrong evidence. It claims hackintosh is dead because they are dropping Wifi drivers. Hackintosh is dead because the number of major versions that will support x86 are 2-3 at best and after that, the OS will only run on apple silicon. Maybe if we’re lucky an arm chip similar enough will come along but I don’t see many motherboards socketed for arm chips. It is dead, but not because of WiFi driver support.
_Many_ moons ago, before I had a job, I remember that Hackintosh seemed like the only way I could enjoy a Mac OS.
These days I have literally piles of old Macs that I have fun trying different Linux distros on.
Was building hackintosh' since 2011, mostly intel based, my i3 h370 is still working strong. I was running macOS till the "M" series came out and the next day i swapped it out. Gifted the hackintosh' to my desinger friend. I do miss the days when i had time to figure out each and every bit of things needed. Nowadays, i am running windows.
Edit: Left building hackintosh' in 2019 before covid hit. Been building them for friend and family.
> WiFi works fantastic, iCloud is perfect but Messages/FaceTime wouldn’t connect at all.
This stuff is just bizarre. Are those apps not using the OS for network services or something?
I don't know, but reading on v2ex shows that there is still a sizable community in China. It's called 黑苹果. (Black Apple)
Well, surprisingly Macbooks are competitively priced now and not that much more than Windows laptops.
Why anyone would go through such effort to have such a user-hostile operating system is beyond me. But I respect the hack
Im pretty sure it was fun for everyone involved but the idea of using a patchwork of custom hacks never looked attractive to me.
A Hackintosh was my entry point to the Apple ecosystem and I'm still here 15yrs later both at home and at work.
With Arm CPUs becoming more common I wonder whether we’ll see rebirth of the Hackintosh in a couple of years.
Virtual machine and GPU pass through is still a nice way to go for hackintosh.
This article is nonsense. If "I've had compatibility issues with my hardware" is proof of Hackintosh dying then it's been dying from day one.
If there are genuine issues across the board Hackintosh software is generally updated to patch the issue, it's always been like that and only improving over time.
Personally I'm still on 10.14.6 and will probably never upgrade to 11 since it and its successors suck so hard.
A $9 USB to WiFi dongle addresses my networking needs.
Not the iServices though?
Not all of them, no.
In exchange for giving up a few minor bells and whistles I gain what I’m looking for.
If only this Dockerfile were real. It would greatly help app developers and publishers:
FROM apple/mac-os-slim:latest ...
Please, Apple, please let your developers use more virtualization or containerization.
https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX
Next in the series: EU mandates Apple to sign 3rd party hobbyist drivers to enable Hackintosh enthusiasts.
Apple never licenced their OS to run on non Apple hardware, with exception of when it was on death bed shortly before the NeXT reverse acquisition, and Steve Jobs killing all agreements with clone makers.
Hardly the same of the current DMA requirements.
They are always one step away from another regulation even if the current one doesn’t apply in this way.
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I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now.
Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around.
Now if we could have Windows running on an M3 chip with the nice touchpad and battery, that would be really nice.
I like MacOS.
I spend most of my time in a shell, so MacOS being POSIX compliant is a huge draw for me.
What difficulty do you have browsing the web? I just click Safari and it works. Though I usually have FireFox and un-Googled Chromium running as well... and they work just fine.
I generally use shell commands to manage files, but, dragging works just fine for copying and moving them. Certainly as well as it does in Windows.
Truly, I can't imagine what you experienced that was "unusably bad".
MacOS has some quirks for sure, it's far from perfect. And I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the changes they've made over the years. But I am a big fan of some of them.
On the other hand, despite massive improvements to Windows security and stability over the years, I do like using Windows. (And yes I realized things like WSL exist).
> it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around
Cannot relate at all. "Move files around" is essentially the same on Windows and Mac, except on the Mac I have a UNIX shell. Browsers also behave exactly the same on every platform, and Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it about?
Have you ever needed to perform a reliable recursive directory copy between two drives on Windows? I have and it turned out to be a comically complicated task. Robocopy helps but als has its edge cases you need to handle. Also long path names become problematic (MAX_PATH etc).
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I daily both macOS and Linux, and have for over a decade. I think Dolphin is significantly better than Finder.
Finder is the same crap software it's always been. Windows Explorer has always been better. Nobody except the nerdiest of nerds would want to use the terminal for "moving files around".
>Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it about?
MacOS is a memory hog in itself. Safari is the laughingstock of browsers, so behind the times and purposely crippled by Apple.
I used to love it when it was still a capable unix with a good UI. At the same time Linux was a horrible mess, none of the desktop environments were passable.
I loved it until Tiger and Snow Leopard. After that it started going downhill. More and more features I really wanted were being deprecated (like the ability to have virtual desktops in a multi-dimensional grid). This was the first big thing that really broke my workflow and I have regretted it ever since. More and more UI things were pushed through I didn't like. The fullscreen mode became (and still is) horribly incompetent. Apps were becoming more iOS-like, dumbed down.
I put up but instead of looking forward to every exciting new OS update, I started worrying about what feature I used would next be removed or mangled beyond recognition. Eventually the negatives added up so much I left the platform entirely. I went to KDE, because that had become a powerful and configurable desktop environment through the years. I finally have my virtual desktop grid back and things are so much better for it. I found that opionated software doesn't work for me (for this reason GNOME won't ever do either). The only reason I thought it worked for me was that OSX's designers had roughly the same opinions as me. But over time this changed.
This was not a coincidence. At the same time Apple changed from a computer company to a lifestyle brand. It started appealing to the masses which started with the iPod but really kicked off in full gear with the iPhone. The Mac is really just an iPhone accessory now. Microsoft has been making attempts at becoming a lifestyle brand too, with hilarious incompetence :') Only their xbox division gets a tiny bit of the way but their main marketeers are such business suits that will never understand 'cool' even if it bites them in the ass.
Oh well.. I still use it for work because it's slightly better than Windows. And our company's Windows desktops are locked down too much.
I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What software do you have issue with, and why?
I think he's missing the forced advertisements in the macOS startmenu. Or the forced restarts/updates :)
Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL.
Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck.
There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in macOS. It's bizarre.
Or the fact that macOS doesn't implement basic protocols for external monitors, making macOS work terribly with non-Apple monitors.
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Could you elaborate? I find web browsing and moving files around to be practically an equivalent experience between mac os, windows, most linux distros.
I see sentiments very similar to this on Reddit and some other message boards. Generally the user posting them cut their teeth on Linux or Windows, and has an affinity toward the ux conventions you'd see there. Macs have different ux conventions, not bad ones, just different, and it's not what the poster is expecting.
Some call it baby dick syndrome, The user has imprinted the conventions of their first operating system on themselves, and assumes that they are universally considered "best"
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What’s wrong with the web. You just use chrome or safari and everything just works.
> Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around.
I used both Windows and Mac regularly for years, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
Apple released the last major revision of the cheese grater Mac Pro in 2010. If you wanted a Mac with exotic features like a new CPU and more than one internal hard drive in 2013~ then Hackintosh was the way to do it
I'm yet to be convinced there is a single use-case other than iOS development/publishing for someone to want Hackintosh rather than simply installing a well-supported distro like Ubuntu or Fedora.
I tried it a few times and it was always a painful and substandard experience.
Other than trying out the MacOS for the first time to learn how bad it is, why would anyone make a hackintosh? Windows and Linux are infinitely better operating systems, more open, with better backwards compatibility, more hardware support, independence from vendor servers and more available software.
A reminder that with MacOS you need internet connection in order to re-install the OS as it requires activation just like iPads and iPhones. Imagine one day Apple stops supporting your Macbook model, shuts down its activation server and your computer turns into brick after something goes wrong and it requires a factory reset.
One thing to consider is that a lot of what some consider “bad” about macOS is purely subjective and varies depending on the user’s background and mental models. It’s not uncommon for people who grew up on Macs to find operating systems with Windows-esque desktop environments as “bad” as some find macOS.
macOS installs don’t require an internet connection or activation, I’m not sure where that came from. Macs registered with iCloud can be remotely bricked with Find My but that’s completely separate and fully optional.
Yes, Tim Cook could flip a switch and my mac would become activation locked. Considering that Windows 11 has been working really hard to sneak remote attestation below our noses (and other stuff), I think it's safe to cross out Windows as well.
As long as Microsoft wants to keep Windows compatible with user-controllable hardware (like computers that let you disable secure boot and TPM or enroll custom keys), there should always be a way to debloat Windows.
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I used to love macOS in the 2000s and 2010s. I never made a Hackintosh but I was always intrigued by them. Before WSL was introduced, the Mac was the best platform for people who needed to use proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite while running Unix. There was (and still is) a lot of native software on the Mac that is well-polished, such as OmniGraffle and Keynote.
Times have changed, though. While macOS still provides a more consistent user experience, IMO, than Windows or Linux, Windows with WSL means I can run Microsoft Office and other proprietary apps alongside a seamlessly integrated Linux environment without needing to SSH into a VM. The popularity of Electron apps undercuts the Mac’s consistency while also making Linux a more viable option since Linux can run the same Electron apps macOS and Windows do. Microsoft Office is now available as a Web app via Microsoft 365; while I prefer the macOS and Windows versions to the in-browser version, the in-browser version gives Linux users access to Office. I also believe macOS’s Unix environment has not kept up with advances made in the BSD and Linux world. Windows can be quite annoying with its notifications, but unfortunately the Mac in recent years also has annoying notifications; I know this because I use a work-issued MacBook Pro regularly.
In my opinion, the most compelling reason for a Hackintosh in 2024 is for Intel Mac users reliant on Mac software tools to still use them without being restricted to Apple’s hardware. The 2019 Mac Pro is still very expensive, and Apple’s ARM lineup requires paying substantial sums of money for RAM upgrades with no workaround since there are no DIMMs.
You can always install macOS using a Flash drive.
That way it doesn't require an internet connection.
Even if you try to install it using a flash drive, it still asks you to connect to the internet to "verify" the installation. https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware... explains how it's ensured on the firmware level that you really connect with Apple servers.
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Some people just prefer MacOS over Windows.
By the time they shut down activation servers the hardware will be so worn out and obsolete no one will care. Also you can run Linux on Mac.
I'd recommend spending a few years on macOS. It doesn't sound like you have much experience with it.
I see your points, but I don't want to make compromises for my daily work based on a scenario that's unlikely to ever occur. If the apocalypse comes, I'll gladly use Ubuntu, but in the meantime I'm ok with not reinstalling my OS when I'm somewhere without internet.
When was the last time you used Windows?
Or Mac...
now
Hardware support, sure. Backwards compatibility is a double edged sword though. While it's awesome to have it's also the reason why parts of Windows feel so dated and inconsistent.
> While it's awesome to have it's also the reason why parts of Windows feel so dated and inconsistent.
I'm not convinced.
What Windows could do is make the old components available for old software, while directing all new software to use new components. Old software will feel dated and inconsistent, but the alternative is that this software would not work at all. If you don't install old software, you'll still have a perfectly seamless experience.
I understand that backwards compatibility is the reason Windows still has two control panels. However, if it was up to me, the legacy control panel would be completely hidden from the UI until the user installs some software that uses a custom control pane (or something).
I mostly don't understand why this hasn't happened.