Comment by derefr
3 months ago
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 have a need to be able to run macos binaries and xcode from time to time, and it used to be non-trivial to run macos in a unsanctioned vm so I had a mac laptop around.
But these days you can spin up a qemu macos vm without too much effort and that's my virtual hackintosh.
I remember I needed Hackintosh to build an iPhone app on my PC. You must possess a Mac to make apps for iPhones, don't know why.
This really brings me back. My first hackintosh as a kid was on a 1.4ghz Pentium 4 with a ATI Radeon 9600.