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I run a hackintosh desktop with a i7-6700K, 32GB RAM, GTX960, Samsung 950PRO. It's quite the beast in terms of performance and I've had less trouble with driver
by shaki-dora 10y ago
I run a hackintosh desktop with a i7-6700K, 32GB RAM, GTX960, Samsung 950PRO. It's quite the beast in terms of performance and I've had less trouble with drivers than I had with Linux.
That being said, I have a MacBook Pro as well, and it wouldn't feel right to install macOS on a Dell notebook. Considering the value macOS has for me, and other benefits of MacBooks (build quality, trackpad, possibly screen although I haven't seen the DELL), I feel the price is fair and I don't want to undermine those creating these excellent products – you may even want to consider what today's DELLs would be without Apple. I doubt that we'd have seen retina screens without their lead.
On the Desktop, where I do a lot of work in tensorflow, Apple just doesn't give me a choice. The graphics and CPU options aren't available, and if they were, it'd be almost a 5-digit sticker price. It's probably a net positive for them because it lowers the chances of me leaving Apple to run an illegal copy of macOS.
Note that setting up a hackintosh will probably cost you at least a day the first time, and anything from "it just worked" to another day every time you want to install an update. For a professional with opportunity costs, it's a losing proposition for notebooks. The hackintosh community is also extremely unprofessional, with many tools still on sourceforge, some doing strange things that appeared to me to be attempts to get paid for work incorporating GPL code, documentation being almost exclusively of the walkthrough-type (i. e.: "set uia_exclude=HS12" with no explanation to be found anywhere as to what "uia" or "HS12" are), and the worst user interfaces ever invented by anyone not working for a printer manufacturer.
- widforss 10y agoBuild quality, trackpad and screen are the hallmarks of the XPS13 line. However, it seems very risky to install this on a laptop, since driver support and such will change on Apple's whim.
- mulletbum 10y agoI have to source for it, but I can't imagine any laptop having a better trackpad than MBP. Any idea how good in comparison it is?
- widforss 10y agoI haven't used a MBP myself, but according to head-to-head reviews [1][2] the MBP trackpad is better. The XPS one is really great though. [1] http://www.alphr.com/laptops/1002278/dell-xps-13-vs-macbook-pro-13-which-flagship-ultraportable-laptop-reigns-supreme/page/0/1 http://www.alphr.com/laptops/1002278/dell-xps-13-vs-macbook-... [2] http://www.itpro.co.uk/laptops/21797/macbook-pro-15in-v-dell-xps-15-head-to-head-review-6 http://www.itpro.co.uk/laptops/21797/macbook-pro-15in-v-dell...
- CalRobert 10y agoI use an XPS 13 and 2016 MBP daily. They both have great trackpads. The only place where the XPS 13 is inferior in terms of build quality, so far as I can tell, is coil whine. I believe they've fixed that in the most recent versions. Also, even though it's not a big deal I'd rather not have a touch screen at all as I do on the XPS. It's useless, and registers touches when I close the lid (I prefer not to suspend if I'm just walking from one room to another) Edit: I should note I use Ubuntu exclusively on the XPS 13. I don't know what the trackpad is like in Windows. Presumably it's comparable.
- haspok 10y agoThey did not fix the coil whine. Nor the dynamic screen brightness issue. Just FYI. Oh, and the I2S mode for audio is still broken in the latest kernels (headset microphone not recognized, loud pops at power saving switchoffs), so I have to use Ubuntu to get a HDA-enabled kernel out of the box. Also my XPS13 is 2 years old and the "carbon fiber" cover started to disintegrate along the edges. The screen hinge is a bit loose so it wobbles a bit with movement. Other than that it's fab :)
- compuguy 10y agoThe fix for the dynamic screen brightness is to flash a firmware that dell provides for the HIDPI display. If you have the 1080p display, you are out of luck.
- 10y ago
- IanCal 10y agoAnecdotal, but my XPS13 is nowhere near the quality of a mac. The trackpad has problems jumping about occasionally, the wifi is unreliable to say the least (linux, but I think also on windows) and the fan spins up sounding like it's catching on something. The audio quality is atrocious. Oh and really bad coil whine as well, a problem I've never had with macs. However, it's fairly alright and significantly cheaper.
- ahassan 10y agoI just bought an XPS 13 9360 and returned it due to the coil whine. I've never had that issue on my Macs before so once I get refunded I'm going to buy a MBP instead.
- acomar 10y agoI've been hearing about the coil whine for ages, but I've never heard it over multiple 9550s and a 9360. I'm even in an office right now surrounded by the 9550s which were supposed to be plagued by the issue. Is it that the whine is occurring at a frequency I can't hear?
- mattdotc 10y agoFWIW, I replaced my WiFi/Bluetooth adapter immediately upon receiving my 9343. I had been following the XPS13 developer edition forums for a while, and the adapter that shipped with most XPS13 had a Broadcom chipset with bad Linux support. An Intel card was recommended instead. I actually had my card on-hand hand ready to go the day I received the laptop shipment. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RCZ4I6S/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RCZ4I6S/ref=od_aui_deta...
- e40 10y agoI found the setup far more than a day. It took me weeks to research which hardware to buy, since what hardware you have directly affects your life after the install. And for dot dot releases, I had a terrible time with updates because I really, really wanted a RAID 1 for my system drive (using an approved hw RAID card). Turns out, this is a very rare setup, but one that made upgrades between minor macOS releases very tricky, with the tools provided. And I got almost no help from the forums (because no one there had done it). After two years, I gave up and got a Mac Pro 6,1. And, even though the video card I had was very beefy, Lightroom performance was much better with the nMP, I guess because Adobe supported the standard video card in the nMP but not the one in the hackintosh.
- jedrek 10y ago> I've had less trouble with drivers than I had with Linux. My hackintosh (currently on my second one, it's a 2012 i5 machine) has less stability and driver issues than Windows 10 on the same hardware.
- cptskippy 10y agoUpgraded Windows 10, clean install with Manufacturer's drivers, or truely clean install? I've found that only by avoiding drivers direct from the manufacturer do you ever achieve true stability in Windows.
- shaki-dora 10y agoYeah, I've had some trouble with driver availability (the onboard bluetooth doesn't work). But nothing has ever crashed, graphics and SSD performance are what the hardware offers, even sleep works flawlessly. And I had originally planned to use Linux and hadn't even researched the hardware. Made me think about the argument that Windows needs to support so many hardware combinations that <X> which I seem to remember sometimes hearing :) Although, to be fair, I obviously bought rather mainstream components and am not running RAIDs etc.
- kitsunesoba 10y agoI haven't tried newer versions of Windows, but the 2008 Dell workstation laptop I used for a few years was more stable under OS X than under Windows 7 or Linux. Windows 7 had an issue where the laptop's Quadro graphics card would blue screen whenever power management kicked in, that to my knowledge still isn't fixed in driver updates (the community "fix" was to keep the card running at full speed all the time). Under Linux, the graphics was an issue too — nouveau gave lackluster performance and proprietary drivers would periodically lock up. Hackintoshed OS X (10.9 Mavericks in this case) just treats the card as an 9600M GT and runs it without issue. No panics, no lockups, and no performance hit.
- dstroot 10y agoSo well said. This is spot on.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago> I've had less trouble with drivers than I had with Linux. I'd be interested to hear what kind of problems you had with Linux drivers on a desktop, that isn't something most of us, Linux users, had major problems with for almost a decade. Even Pascal GPUs are supported, unlike on a Hackintosh.
- pavanky 10y agoThere's no reasoning with some folks..
- jeron 10y agosomething something mac fanboys
- kkielhofner 10y agoIt would be really nice if there was a stable, maintained, and officially supported virtual machine implementation for OS X. I have an insane desktop running Linux that can do anything and everything I need. However, if my needs suddenly expanded to include occasional Photoshop use (for example) I'd have to pull out my Macbook Pro. Yes, in my case I also have a Windows 10 VM for occasional use (probably Photoshop, don't know) but I'd much prefer OS X. I understand why a Mac OS X virtual machine might not be completely compatible with Apple's overall business model but perhaps something available through the Apple developer program? Something, anything, would be nice.
- thatcat 10y agoThis [0] tracks issues for a vagrant macOS setup. Not official, but its technically allowed if you already own a mac that runs the version you want. [0]https://github.com/AndrewDryga/vagrant-box-osx https://github.com/AndrewDryga/vagrant-box-osx
- bostand 10y agoI can confirm this works reasonably well and includes xcode and some other stuff IIRC.
- zaius 10y agoWhich motherboard are you using?
- SomeHacker44 10y agoI'd love to run MacOS on excellent non-Apple laptop hardware. I have the max-spec new 13" Touch Bar MBP, and it's a terrible laptop. The keyboard is so loud I have been banned from using it in the bedroom at night - a practice I have been doing for the entirety of my marriage. The TouchBar is so useless at night and for development work (where I extensively use ESC and F-keys) that I literally have to put another keyboard on top of the laptop. So, please, give me MacOS running on a similar-spec non-Apple laptop with a proper, quiet keyboard and I will thank you form the bottom of my heart (and my bedroom). I will say that the Track Pad on the latest MBP is really very nice.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoYou're not gonna get a better Mac laptop than a real Mac like yours.
- TheOneTrueKyle 10y agoAs a side note: I have a hackintosh, with an i7 skylake, a Titian Black, 32 GB of ram running macOS Sierra and I am having an issue with sound and USB 3.0 drivers. Every time my computer goes to sleep, USB and sound stop working. Loving the Hackintosh, but I lose a lot of my life anytime I want to change something.
- bdcravens 10y ago> I feel the price is fair > Note that setting up a hackintosh will probably cost you at least a day the first time I think they're fun to tinker with (reminds me of building a Linux machine circa 1999) but unless your time is free they're usually not a cost savings (though in your desktop use case the numbers may work out)
- Synaesthesia 10y agoIt works quite well on Dell laptops. There are some issues with power management but it's worth the trouble if you can do it.
- grecy 10y agoI ran OS X on a Dell Mini 9 laptop as my primary machine for a few years. It was fantastic and I loved it. That being said, the more I used it, the more it made me want Apple hardware. The keyboard, trackpad, screen, magsafe, etc. I'm now using a MBA 12" and could not be happier.
- djdmngz 10y agoWow. I used to run Ubuntu on the Mini 9 almost a decade ago (bought it with Ubuntu preloaded) and used Xmonad. It wouldn't have crossed my mind that OS X would run at all on one, given that by their nature, the Mini 9 was meant to be the least expensive Dell.
- zarex 10y agoHackintosh is a finnicky beast. Price doesn't have anything to do with hardware support :)
- khedoros1 10y agoAround the time that building a Hackintosh became possible, I remember running it on an IBM R32, which I think was released in 2002. It was a useable system, except for wifi (it wouldn't recognize my PCMCIA adapter).