Comment by zavertnik

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.