Comment by matthewfcarlson
3 months ago
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 ?
Nothing, I'll just stick the last usable version, just like I'm stubbornly sticking to 10.14.6. I'll fight moving up each and every version by narrowing the software I use. Already happening and it's fine.
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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.