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Comment by steve1977

3 months ago

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)

29 comments

steve1977

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bee_rider  3 months ago

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.

  • yieldcrv  3 months ago

    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

sf_rob  3 months ago

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.

  • flkiwi  3 months ago

    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.

dkjaudyeqooe  3 months ago

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.

  • coffeebeqn  3 months ago

    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

    • Spivak  3 months ago

      Yep, Linux will make mid hardware punch well above its weight class so for the right person the value/$ ratio is unbeatable. But if the highest value at any price within reason is your goal then Apple is the go-to.

      Which is typically why your employer who could not give a shit about a $4k expense every five years for an employee costing them a quarter mil annually in total comp opts for them.

  • dmix  3 months ago

    > 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.

golergka  3 months ago

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.

  • steve1977  3 months ago

    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.

    • golergka  3 months ago

      You can, theoretically. In practice, a lot of tools like Logic and specific VSTs are macos-only, and CoreAudio actually "just works" out of the box without having to manually install and setup all kinds of alternative low-latency drivers.

      4 replies →

jillesvangurp  3 months ago

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.

gscott  3 months ago

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.