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Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Hackintoshes. The primary reason for using a Mac is that you get a unix-like environment, which works without having

Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Hackintoshes. The primary reason for using a Mac is that you get a unix-like environment, which works without having to piss around with drivers and compatibility. Macbooks also have the advantage of having very nice design and battery life. A hackintosh takes away the only advantage macOS has over Linux, in my opinion. You now have the same OS, which is more closed and harder to change to suit your needs than Linux, and you will have the same driver problems that Linux users face.

cocotino 10y ago
OS X is so much more stable than any other Linux desktop I've ever used. Also, apps are much better. Then there's the better design, proper QA, etc. If you're lucky you won't have driver problems so that might not be an issue for you.
- vesak 10y ago
  Odd, I've had the opposite experience. In fact, so much that if I'm forced to work on OS X, I reach for Virtualbox and Vmware and choose to take the performance hit to just get my Linux desktop. I cannot quite put my finger on why Linux feels so much better. Everything just tends to work and is more straightforward and simple. Perhaps it's just about being used to the environment. I usually use Arch Linux and i3, sometimes changing to Gnome. I guess OS X has nothing comparable.
- babuskov 10y ago
  > OS X is so much more stable than any other Linux desktop I've ever used I guess you never used Slackware. ;) I agree that OS X is way more stable than Ubuntu, Fedora and any of their derivatives.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  > OS X is so much more stable than any other Linux desktop I've ever used > I agree that OS X is way more stable than Ubuntu, Fedora and any of their derivatives You guys are doing something seriously wrong. I've been using Debian, Ubuntu CentOS and Fedora for years with no issue whatsoever, from puny Celeron-based laptops to multi-socket Xeon boxes. I love my Macs, but to say they are in any way more stable than the Linux machines is indicative of something odd. To me, the biggest advantage of the Mac is being able to run iTunes and sync my phone.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    On headless servers, yeah Linux is king. From our helpdesk stats at $work, OS X is stabler than Linux for (developer) laptops/desktops. The graphics drivers, while better than they used to be still suck. Apt-get still breaks stuff. Taking into account the larger number of tickets from Linux machines plus not having a single vendor for hardware + software means it can actually be cheaper to support Apple MacBooks vs. Thinkpads + RHEL (not to mention that most of the devs don't want to use RHEL).
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      I really don't know what you are doing, but I can tell you apt hasn't broken anything here since the mid-2000's and all machines in my office are multi-headed and all of them use their GPUs. Even the laptops connect to big monitors when used on the desk. Graphics card drivers are reasonable these days, even though manufacturers still tend to drag their feet. You have to understand these are computers, not gaming consoles. If I wanted to play games, I'd buy a Playstation. Few developers want to use RHEL as their desktops, but that's what VMs and containers are for. My Mac development relies on VMs running Linux.
      - guitarbill 10y ago
        I suspect it's highly hardware dependant. Most of the time laptops are made to run Windows or Mac OS, and Linux is an afterthought. So to me it's a miracle that it even works. But quite frankly, half of the problem is people telling others that it's somehow their fault when it doesn't work. It's not, e.g. NVIDIA Optimus [0] [1]. There are even jokes about ACPI support on Linux [2]. It only takes a few bad experiences for people to shy away from a platform, which is a shame. [0] http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/the-state-of-nvidia-optimus-on-linux http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/the-state-of-nvidia-opt... [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus [2] https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/721134795938357248 https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/721134795938357248
  - jkmcf 10y ago
    To be fair, I've used both w/ very little unexpected (cough, Linux) issues. On OSX, practically no issues. A few system crashes in 10 years, and some very rare issues w/ keyboard/input (I think it's my company's mandatory security software...) The GUI more than makes up for any perceived cost issue (as much as I'd like them 500-1000 cheaper) and the available apps are generally 2x better than Windows and 10x better than Linux. On Linux GUI, there are a lot of expected problems w/ drivers and such which you can work around with research, but you still end up occasionally having odd audio/graphics issues. X windows is antiquated and holds back the. Gnome/Tk are mediocre replacements, and the other options more so. Some people like twiddling/fighting to get their system setup properly, but I left those feelings 16 years ago. On Linux server, practically no issues, effectively 100% reliable under most conditions. OTOH, I know plenty of people who have recurring issues with their Macs, but I attribute it to them not really knowing what they are doing (this includes my wife on our shared MBP)
unicornporn 10y ago
I built one in 2009 and I used it for about 4 years. My primary reason was: I wanted an OS with an "unix-like environment", but I also wanted to be able to run the Adobe Creative Suite natively (and fully color managed). Last but not least I needed a powerful machine with a dedicated GPU. The alternative to a hack was a pimped out Mac Pro for about thrice the price. I figured it wasn't worth it, and I was right. At work I was running a Mac Pro, at home I was running the hack. I had zero problems with the hack, but every point upgrade naturally meant a moment of prayer. I always did a full mirror of the system disk with dd before upgrading, but never had a problem.
pavs 10y ago
Recently built a Hackintosh. Unless you go out of your way to use non-recommended hardware you won't have driver issues. Been using it for 6 months, faster than my iMac and easily upgradable when I want to. Unlike a lot of people I actually like MacOS. I just wish it wasn't tied down to apple hardware.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I built a couple of different Hackintosh setups when I wanted to experiment with developing for iOS; a netbook specced similarly to the original Air, and a desktop roughly specced like a high end Mac Pro of the time with a 290 GPU. I have no desire to own a Mac, and don't like macOS, but it's the only way to develop for iOS. I also built a macOS VM in Virtualbox about a year ago to see if our server products were workable on macOS (they had been in the past, but a lot has changed, and none of us have Macs to test with). It was never my primary environment and I eventually gave up on the projects. I generally find macOS unpleasant and incompatible with the way I think. So, yeah, the appeal is that if you need to develop for macOS or iOS, and a Mac would be a ridiculous waste of money for someone like me (I don't want the OS, and while the hardware is pretty good, it has a very high Apple tax attached to it, and some other vendors make very good hardware these days). It's also kinda fun to thinker with weird stuff.
lhl 10y ago
I'd say your primary reason for using a Mac is actually a smaller minority than you think. I think the primary appeal of Hackintoshes these days is that you can literally build systems for half the price that perform twice as well as what Apple is offering these days (this is true of the lower end Mac Minis and the high end Mac Pros). The biggest market I've seen recently is probably for indie pros that don't want to change their media workflow (video, graphics etc) but need more price/performance, or increasingly just straight performance than Apple offers. Honestly, the Mac Pro's ancient E5 CPUs and D300 GPUs are sort of pathetic.
- gmac 10y ago
  Yeah, but if you're a pro, the unpredictable half day or more you'll probably have to invest several times a year to keep your Hackintosh running through OS updates totally negates the upfront cost savings. It's also nerdery of a very unrewarding kind (follow some instructions on a forum, which take ages and involve endless reboots, repeat with random other forum instructions when you find they don't work, and so on). I ran an Asus eeePC HackBook a few years ago before concluding it was a mug's game. In a world where software updates were unimportant or infrequent, things might be different. This is not that world.
  - gabemart 10y ago
    >Yeah, but if you're a pro, the unpredictable half day or more you'll probably have to invest several times a year to keep your Hackintosh running through OS updates totally negates the upfront cost savings. If, as claimed in the article, a high-end hackintosh can be $7000 cheaper than the equivalent apple hardware, that outweighs a lot of "half days" for a lot of professionals. How many professionals earn less than $7000 per month? I would guess many.
  - ido 10y ago
    I would gladly pay a 50% price premium on a skylake i7 Mac with a high end discreet gpu if Apple sold one. Unfortunately they do not (I ended up getting a broadwell i7 iMac but would have preferred a discreet GPU if given the choice). It's really not about the apple tax but about current macs being out of date.
jomamaxx 10y ago
"Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Hackintoshes." ... Q: "Why did he risk his life to climb that mountain?" A: "Because it was there" :)
- rbanffy 10y ago
  "Every frozen corpse on the Himalayas was once a highly motivated person"
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    s/Himalayas/El Capitan/g
- unixhero 10y ago
  Because he can
ido 10y ago
You can't (easily) compile for iOS outside of OS X / Xcode. That's the only reason I have a Mac.
noir_lord 10y ago
> A hackintosh takes away the only advantage macOS has over Linux, in my opinion. I'm a massive Linux user (it's on everything, I don't own a Mac) but you can't run Creative Suite on Linux you can on a Hackintosh as well as all the other Mac native applications. It's easy to fall into the trap that "my use case is the only use case" and that's not true. If I was a .Net developer I'd be on Windows, if I was an iOS developer I'd be on a Mac.
nickjj 10y ago
A unix-like environment is great but Linux isn't very good when it comes to screencast recording software and general audio/video/image editing. So as a developer who also dabbles in the above you have 3 options: 1) Hackintosh 2) Pay double/triple the cost for a real Mac with worse hardware 3) Run Windows with a "seamless" Linux based VM and spend 99% of your time in the VM (this is what I do but honestly, it's not ideal because despite having a fast machine it doesn't have that "liquid smooth" feel to it even tho it's fast) If you happen to enjoy games too then generally #3 is your best bet. Btw driver support for Linux isn't that bad anymore. I picked out standard parts (similar to what OP did in his blog post, but not his parts) and everything worked out of the box with Linux.
- brashrat 10y ago
  3) when you want the liquid smooth feel for your 99% time, why don't you boot Linux and run an MSWin in the VM?
  - nickjj 10y ago
    It's not so much it being slow due to the VM, but the distro of Linux I use (xubuntu) just doesn't have a liquid smooth feel to it. Windows and OSX both have an extra layer of superb smoothness added to them. Real time audio processing and screencast recording doesn't lend itself too well to being ran in a VM. Neither do games. Dual booting is also the worst experience ever, even with an SSD. You completely lose your focus and open work, it's the ultimate context switch.
jdietrich 10y ago
Audio engineers use a lot of proprietary software that isn't available on Linux. Windows has no true real-time scheduling[1], so has to be carefully tuned to handle low-latency audio processing without playback glitches. Mac OS will run all the proprietary software we need and has superb real-time scheduling for audio, but the choice of hardware is very limited. Mac Pros are scandalously expensive and aren't passively cooled. iMacs and Mac Minis are very noisy under high CPU load because of the small blower fans. Hackintoshes provide the best of both worlds - you can build a reasonably priced computer with no moving parts[2] and run an OS that is optimised for real-time audio applications. Drivers aren't really an issue if you choose components from an approved list - either It Just Works or it doesn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Procedure_Call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Procedure_Call [2] https://www.quietpc.com/sys-a470s https://www.quietpc.com/sys-a470s
smcl 10y ago
For me and you (presuming you're a software dev too) this is correct. However a friend of mine just built a Hackintosh and his justification was pretty simple - he had thousands of dollars worth of audio engineering software + libraries only usable on OS X. When it came to replacing his current Macbook Pro with a desktop Mac, and the iMac and Mac Pro are so out of date and expensive it's laughable.
- bartvk 10y ago
  > and the iMac and Mac Pro are so out of date and expensive it's laughable The 27" iMac uses a modern Skylake chipset and has an excellent 5K monitor. It's definitely not out of date, but it might be too expensive for your friend though.

cocotino 10y ago

OS X is so much more stable than any other Linux desktop I've ever used. Also, apps are much better. Then there's the better design, proper QA, etc. If you're lucky you won't have driver problems so that might not be an issue for you.

vesak 10y ago
Odd, I've had the opposite experience. In fact, so much that if I'm forced to work on OS X, I reach for Virtualbox and Vmware and choose to take the performance hit to just get my Linux desktop. I cannot quite put my finger on why Linux feels so much better. Everything just tends to work and is more straightforward and simple. Perhaps it's just about being used to the environment. I usually use Arch Linux and i3, sometimes changing to Gnome. I guess OS X has nothing comparable.
babuskov 10y ago
> OS X is so much more stable than any other Linux desktop I've ever used I guess you never used Slackware. ;) I agree that OS X is way more stable than Ubuntu, Fedora and any of their derivatives.
rbanffy 10y ago
> OS X is so much more stable than any other Linux desktop I've ever used > I agree that OS X is way more stable than Ubuntu, Fedora and any of their derivatives You guys are doing something seriously wrong. I've been using Debian, Ubuntu CentOS and Fedora for years with no issue whatsoever, from puny Celeron-based laptops to multi-socket Xeon boxes. I love my Macs, but to say they are in any way more stable than the Linux machines is indicative of something odd. To me, the biggest advantage of the Mac is being able to run iTunes and sync my phone.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  On headless servers, yeah Linux is king. From our helpdesk stats at $work, OS X is stabler than Linux for (developer) laptops/desktops. The graphics drivers, while better than they used to be still suck. Apt-get still breaks stuff. Taking into account the larger number of tickets from Linux machines plus not having a single vendor for hardware + software means it can actually be cheaper to support Apple MacBooks vs. Thinkpads + RHEL (not to mention that most of the devs don't want to use RHEL).
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    I really don't know what you are doing, but I can tell you apt hasn't broken anything here since the mid-2000's and all machines in my office are multi-headed and all of them use their GPUs. Even the laptops connect to big monitors when used on the desk. Graphics card drivers are reasonable these days, even though manufacturers still tend to drag their feet. You have to understand these are computers, not gaming consoles. If I wanted to play games, I'd buy a Playstation. Few developers want to use RHEL as their desktops, but that's what VMs and containers are for. My Mac development relies on VMs running Linux.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      I suspect it's highly hardware dependant. Most of the time laptops are made to run Windows or Mac OS, and Linux is an afterthought. So to me it's a miracle that it even works. But quite frankly, half of the problem is people telling others that it's somehow their fault when it doesn't work. It's not, e.g. NVIDIA Optimus [0] [1]. There are even jokes about ACPI support on Linux [2]. It only takes a few bad experiences for people to shy away from a platform, which is a shame. [0] http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/the-state-of-nvidia-optimus-on-linux http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/the-state-of-nvidia-opt... [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA_Optimus [2] https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/721134795938357248 https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/721134795938357248
- jkmcf 10y ago
  To be fair, I've used both w/ very little unexpected (cough, Linux) issues. On OSX, practically no issues. A few system crashes in 10 years, and some very rare issues w/ keyboard/input (I think it's my company's mandatory security software...) The GUI more than makes up for any perceived cost issue (as much as I'd like them 500-1000 cheaper) and the available apps are generally 2x better than Windows and 10x better than Linux. On Linux GUI, there are a lot of expected problems w/ drivers and such which you can work around with research, but you still end up occasionally having odd audio/graphics issues. X windows is antiquated and holds back the. Gnome/Tk are mediocre replacements, and the other options more so. Some people like twiddling/fighting to get their system setup properly, but I left those feelings 16 years ago. On Linux server, practically no issues, effectively 100% reliable under most conditions. OTOH, I know plenty of people who have recurring issues with their Macs, but I attribute it to them not really knowing what they are doing (this includes my wife on our shared MBP)

unicornporn 10y ago

I built one in 2009 and I used it for about 4 years. My primary reason was: I wanted an OS with an "unix-like environment", but I also wanted to be able to run the Adobe Creative Suite natively (and fully color managed). Last but not least I needed a powerful machine with a dedicated GPU. The alternative to a hack was a pimped out Mac Pro for about thrice the price. I figured it wasn't worth it, and I was right. At work I was running a Mac Pro, at home I was running the hack. I had zero problems with the hack, but every point upgrade naturally meant a moment of prayer. I always did a full mirror of the system disk with dd before upgrading, but never had a problem.

pavs 10y ago

Recently built a Hackintosh. Unless you go out of your way to use non-recommended hardware you won't have driver issues. Been using it for 6 months, faster than my iMac and easily upgradable when I want to. Unlike a lot of people I actually like MacOS. I just wish it wasn't tied down to apple hardware.

SwellJoe 10y ago

I built a couple of different Hackintosh setups when I wanted to experiment with developing for iOS; a netbook specced similarly to the original Air, and a desktop roughly specced like a high end Mac Pro of the time with a 290 GPU. I have no desire to own a Mac, and don't like macOS, but it's the only way to develop for iOS. I also built a macOS VM in Virtualbox about a year ago to see if our server products were workable on macOS (they had been in the past, but a lot has changed, and none of us have Macs to test with). It was never my primary environment and I eventually gave up on the projects. I generally find macOS unpleasant and incompatible with the way I think. So, yeah, the appeal is that if you need to develop for macOS or iOS, and a Mac would be a ridiculous waste of money for someone like me (I don't want the OS, and while the hardware is pretty good, it has a very high Apple tax attached to it, and some other vendors make very good hardware these days). It's also kinda fun to thinker with weird stuff.

lhl 10y ago

I'd say your primary reason for using a Mac is actually a smaller minority than you think. I think the primary appeal of Hackintoshes these days is that you can literally build systems for half the price that perform twice as well as what Apple is offering these days (this is true of the lower end Mac Minis and the high end Mac Pros). The biggest market I've seen recently is probably for indie pros that don't want to change their media workflow (video, graphics etc) but need more price/performance, or increasingly just straight performance than Apple offers. Honestly, the Mac Pro's ancient E5 CPUs and D300 GPUs are sort of pathetic.

gmac 10y ago
Yeah, but if you're a pro, the unpredictable half day or more you'll probably have to invest several times a year to keep your Hackintosh running through OS updates totally negates the upfront cost savings. It's also nerdery of a very unrewarding kind (follow some instructions on a forum, which take ages and involve endless reboots, repeat with random other forum instructions when you find they don't work, and so on). I ran an Asus eeePC HackBook a few years ago before concluding it was a mug's game. In a world where software updates were unimportant or infrequent, things might be different. This is not that world.
- gabemart 10y ago
  >Yeah, but if you're a pro, the unpredictable half day or more you'll probably have to invest several times a year to keep your Hackintosh running through OS updates totally negates the upfront cost savings. If, as claimed in the article, a high-end hackintosh can be $7000 cheaper than the equivalent apple hardware, that outweighs a lot of "half days" for a lot of professionals. How many professionals earn less than $7000 per month? I would guess many.
- ido 10y ago
  I would gladly pay a 50% price premium on a skylake i7 Mac with a high end discreet gpu if Apple sold one. Unfortunately they do not (I ended up getting a broadwell i7 iMac but would have preferred a discreet GPU if given the choice). It's really not about the apple tax but about current macs being out of date.

jomamaxx 10y ago

"Personally, I've never seen the appeal of Hackintoshes." ... Q: "Why did he risk his life to climb that mountain?" A: "Because it was there" :)

rbanffy 10y ago
"Every frozen corpse on the Himalayas was once a highly motivated person"
- chris_wot 10y ago
  s/Himalayas/El Capitan/g
unixhero 10y ago
Because he can

ido 10y ago

You can't (easily) compile for iOS outside of OS X / Xcode. That's the only reason I have a Mac.

noir_lord 10y ago

> A hackintosh takes away the only advantage macOS has over Linux, in my opinion. I'm a massive Linux user (it's on everything, I don't own a Mac) but you can't run Creative Suite on Linux you can on a Hackintosh as well as all the other Mac native applications. It's easy to fall into the trap that "my use case is the only use case" and that's not true. If I was a .Net developer I'd be on Windows, if I was an iOS developer I'd be on a Mac.

nickjj 10y ago

A unix-like environment is great but Linux isn't very good when it comes to screencast recording software and general audio/video/image editing. So as a developer who also dabbles in the above you have 3 options: 1) Hackintosh 2) Pay double/triple the cost for a real Mac with worse hardware 3) Run Windows with a "seamless" Linux based VM and spend 99% of your time in the VM (this is what I do but honestly, it's not ideal because despite having a fast machine it doesn't have that "liquid smooth" feel to it even tho it's fast) If you happen to enjoy games too then generally #3 is your best bet. Btw driver support for Linux isn't that bad anymore. I picked out standard parts (similar to what OP did in his blog post, but not his parts) and everything worked out of the box with Linux.

brashrat 10y ago
3) when you want the liquid smooth feel for your 99% time, why don't you boot Linux and run an MSWin in the VM?
- nickjj 10y ago
  It's not so much it being slow due to the VM, but the distro of Linux I use (xubuntu) just doesn't have a liquid smooth feel to it. Windows and OSX both have an extra layer of superb smoothness added to them. Real time audio processing and screencast recording doesn't lend itself too well to being ran in a VM. Neither do games. Dual booting is also the worst experience ever, even with an SSD. You completely lose your focus and open work, it's the ultimate context switch.

jdietrich 10y ago

Audio engineers use a lot of proprietary software that isn't available on Linux. Windows has no true real-time scheduling[1], so has to be carefully tuned to handle low-latency audio processing without playback glitches. Mac OS will run all the proprietary software we need and has superb real-time scheduling for audio, but the choice of hardware is very limited. Mac Pros are scandalously expensive and aren't passively cooled. iMacs and Mac Minis are very noisy under high CPU load because of the small blower fans. Hackintoshes provide the best of both worlds - you can build a reasonably priced computer with no moving parts[2] and run an OS that is optimised for real-time audio applications. Drivers aren't really an issue if you choose components from an approved list - either It Just Works or it doesn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Procedure_Call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Procedure_Call [2] https://www.quietpc.com/sys-a470s https://www.quietpc.com/sys-a470s

smcl 10y ago

For me and you (presuming you're a software dev too) this is correct. However a friend of mine just built a Hackintosh and his justification was pretty simple - he had thousands of dollars worth of audio engineering software + libraries only usable on OS X. When it came to replacing his current Macbook Pro with a desktop Mac, and the iMac and Mac Pro are so out of date and expensive it's laughable.

bartvk 10y ago
> and the iMac and Mac Pro are so out of date and expensive it's laughable The 27" iMac uses a modern Skylake chipset and has an excellent 5K monitor. It's definitely not out of date, but it might be too expensive for your friend though.