Depends on how much computing power and expansion ability you need. If a Mac Mini has enough for your needs then it's hard to beat the ease of just buying one o

Depends on how much computing power and expansion ability you need. If a Mac Mini has enough for your needs then it's hard to beat the ease of just buying one of those. OTOH, I built a Hackintosh because I wanted lots of CPU, drive bays, etc., and an equivalently spec'd Mac Pro would have cost more than twice as much. (This was before the current trash can version of the Mac Pro came out — not sure what the price differential is now.) Getting my Hackintosh up and running was a breeze. Assembled it in an hour, installed OS X, everything ran perfectly. I have had zero problems upgrading from OS X 10.8 to 10.9 and 10.10. It's slightly more involved than just clicking the upgrade button in the app store, but not too bad (i.e., it'll take you about an hour to create a bootable installer on a thumb drive, etc.). Point version upgrades (e.g., from 10.10.4 to 10.10.5) are not an issue — you can just upgrade through the app store as usual. You do have to wait a few weeks for the Hackintosh community to work out the kinks for new major versions of OS X, e.g., I don't think you can upgrade to El Capitan right now unless you're really brave, instead you'll have to wait a month or two. (That hasn't bothered me, since I'd never consider upgrading a Mac to a .0 release anyway.) I'm not planning to build a Hackintosh again -- my next desktop will either be a standard Mac Pro or retina iMac -- but it's really not a headache at all to build and maintain a Hackintosh, if that's what you want to do.