16 ms·

Building a Hackintosh Pro

350 points by milen 10y ago

jrnichols 10y ago
I'm in the same boat this author is. It's disappointing to see the desktop market lagging so far behind. For all of the 68k/PPC years, we could at least say "different architecture" and Intel hadn't caught up. Now we're all Intel, and it's Apple that isn't keeping up. It's frustrating, and I'm not necessarily a "Pro user" anymore at all. I have a current generation Mac Mini, and it's over 2 years old now. What I can buy from the Apple Store right now for the same price is what I got 2 years ago. I wish I know what Apple was thinking. One would have thought that the "iPhone halo effect" was something that they would have wanted to give momentum to. Instead people are looking at Windows units again.
- devNoise 10y ago
  You touch on what I miss about the old days from Apple, the "speed bumps". Apple used to make updates to the Macs a bit more often then they do these days. A lot of the time the updates weren't much more then a slightly faster CPU and maybe a new graphics. I don't expect completely new designs every year, but it boggles my mind why Apple won't put in better CPUs that are pin compatible with their motherboards.
  - cmurf 10y ago
    I think it boggles our mind because of cognitive dissonance. The answer is a George Carlin They Don't Care About You rant, but we don't want to think of Apple as being that crotchety, but are merely distracted.
- CPLX 10y ago
  > I wish I know what Apple was thinking. It's literally incomprehensible. Just make a really good fast desktop computer. They're one of the largest companies in the world now with essentially unlimited financial resources, and decades of core competency in making high end desktop computers. So like why don't they just fucking do it.
  - valuearb 10y ago
    And they clearly make substantial profits on the Mac line, so again why don't they just fucking do it?
    - CPLX 10y ago
      Even if they didn't who cares? For example, every motor vehicle manufacturer has an unprofitable racing effort and generates interesting concept cars and special editions to fill out the line. Apple can have a flagship line that's break even or worse to anchor the high end. It's literally inexplicable, and I think framing it in the rational actor model is a mistake, it's best explained as a fuckup.
      - throwaway55523 10y ago
        I wish I could upvote this (and your other comments) 100 times. Amazing high quality machines will keep the design and dev community on Mac for years to come, churning out the apps that help to make the iPhone ecosystem work. Bleeding power users to alternative systems creates vulnerability. These arguments would be the same for Microsoft circa 2007. Why should Microsoft care if the designers, developers, and tastemakers hate their products? They've got so much lock-in that people will be forced to use their stuff forever. Wheee, we're invincible. We all know how this turned out. I'm running up against low memory issues on my 16gb MBP lately. I absolutely cannot responsibly update my Apple product right now because of the 16gb limitation on the MBP. It does matter! I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and go back to Linux desktop.
    - derefr 10y ago
      My theory is that they strongly believe PCIe-over-Thunderbolt (now -over-USB-C) will obviate all need for internal expandibility/upgradability, and they went all-in on a form-factor (the garbage-can Mac) to take advantage of that... and then the market has stubbornly refused to co-operate by releasing Thunderbolt peripherals equivalent to internal components. So they're playing chicken with said market, probably under Intel's repeated promises to make it happen.
- deleted 10y ago
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jeffjose 10y ago
After years of making fun of Linux folks for having to "know everything about the computer" to get things working, Mac folks seem to be embracing the culture these days.
- danieldk 10y ago
  Sarcasm detected, but this is only a tiny fraction of Mac users. 99.9% will just go to an Apple store, buy a Mac and are sure that everything from power management to Wifi works.
- MrScruff 10y ago
  I can't speak for everyone, but for me there's a big difference from wanting to know everything about the computer and needing to, particularly when I'm not at work.
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    These days setting up a Windows or Apple system means fighting lots of relatively confusing dialogs and options to avoid using cloud services, etc. Modern consumer operating systems want to analyze every bit of your activity they can get their grubby mitts on and you really have to fight them and say "No thanks!" about 15 times on a modern phone and less, but still a lot, on Win/Apple. I care about privacy, like most people, but I am able to control mine far better than the typical, non-technical computer user. I am reaching a point where these operating systems are becoming untenable for day to day computing use. They lure you in with "everything just working" including the privacy invasive "cloud" features. Increasingly these things are using ML to mine your behavior. I can run Linux. I don't even mind paying for a privacy with a little bit of my time and convenience. I don't want to look back 25 years from now and say "I really wish I had not given up this bit of privacy". Alternately, I am hoping when I look back I can say, "It was worth the relatively small time sacrifice to avoid these things." (Not confusing for technically savvy folks, but still, pretty hard).
    - valuearb 10y ago
      Yea, you might be confusing Windows and Macintosh there (or iOS and Android). It's trivial to setup a Mac, there is one dialog to collect crash data you can opt out of, and you don't have to use iCloud. Apple would like you to use iCloud but doesn't make you, doesn't want your private data, and is committed to protecting that data. Windows is a little more frustrating, and I don't think Microsoft has the same level of privacy commitment as Apple does, but I also don't think it's that far behind. Google is a special case, they are an advertising company and have virtually no revenue streams outside of that for Android. I'm sure they'd like to protect your privacy too if they could still serve super targeted ads to you, but they have no way of doing that.
adamnemecek 10y ago
> I've switched off auto-updates in Sierra. While system updates should work just fine, I prefer to hold off until the community over at tonymacx86 have confirmed there are no issues. Does anyone know why some of the updates can brick the machine? Also how often does this happen? Or like what percentage of updates break things.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I ran a Hackintosh for years, but I used the stock/retail ISO along with a couple of custom kexts and the nvidia enabler (the drivers will run other nvidia/ati cards, they're just not officially supported and the stock kernel models have a white-list of the models that were sold with macs). I remember leaving the stock updates on and rarely ran into issues. I think I had video screw up once or twice, which just involved getting some of the latest kexts off the forums.
- deleted 10y ago
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- tumblen 10y ago
  Definitely does not brick the machine. Just that you restart and graphics are weird or audio is having issues, so you have to figure out how to resolve those issues. By waiting a few days and seeing what issues you may encounter in advance, it's easier to avoid issues. (That being said, issues from updates has never actually happened to me)
jwr 10y ago
I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get really weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again... Unfortunately, the information is still very fragmented and it takes a lot of time and effort to get one running. Actually building the thing is the easiest part, it's the booting, installation and OS patches/fixes that eat up time.
- deleted 10y ago
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- nateberkopec 10y ago
  Yeah. I buy Macs because they "just work", so a Hackintosh completely destroys the point of even owning a Mac for me.
  - lisper 10y ago
    Except that Macs don't "just work" any more. At best they "just work" until the day that Apple decides to deprecate a feature or an application that you have come to rely on (for me it's iPhoto) and then it stops working. It doesn't crash, it just says, "Sorry, this application cannot run on this version of MacOS." But from the user's point of view the effect is the same. [UPDATE] Case in point: one of the banking apps on my iPod just stopped working, insisting that I upgrade to the latest version. So I did, but the new version doesn't work either. It just hangs when I try to log in. Granted, this is an iPod, not a Mac, but the iOS philosophy of having Apple control the device is slowly creeping in to the Mac. Every day and every upgrade is a crap shoot in terms of whether or not what worked yesterday will still work today.
    - Nexxxeh 10y ago
      I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth. Ask anyone who gets paid to fix Macs. Sure, I see less of them, but hardly unexpected considering people buy fewer of them (and they're less targetted by malware). On the other hand, I hate dealing with them because they can suffer from the same "it should work but doesn't" crap that Windows machines do but without the critical mass of support via Google. And unless you get your issue escalated, the Apple Geniuses are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.
deleted 10y ago
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taksintikk 10y ago
Wonder why OP didn't use PCIe NVMe drives. Night and day better than standard ssd on homebrew macs.
- deleted 10y ago
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- omgtehlion 10y ago
  May I ask you what kind of work they shine at? Right now I have 2 machines on my desktop, one with SATA SSD (sams 850pro) and another with PCIe SSD (sams 950pro). I see big difference in benchmarks, but do not feel any difference in my day-to-day work. Boot time is shorter on PCIe one, but I reboot these machines maybe once a couple of months.
- tumblen 10y ago
  I believe hackintoshes are unable to boot from NVMe drives at the moment (this may have changed)
  - nik736 10y ago
    This is false information.
doctorpangloss 10y ago
As a Hackintosh user, I'd recommend an NCASE M1 v5 or the Shuttle SZ170R8 for a significantly better chassis. With the NCASE, you can get a LGA 2011-v3 mini-ITX board and get as fast of a computer as you want. Though truthfully, I don't think there's much of a point. Likewise, an old NVIDIA card for a Hackintosh? Also not much of a point. The web drivers are so bad. Who knows when Apple will ship another NVIDIA chip in a Mac? If you need "CUDA stuff," use Linux or Windows. Software like Octane is so buggy and suffers from worse performance on Mac anyway. Final Cut and After Effects both support OpenCL acceleration. Besides, the RX 480 is $189. If you're doing "VR stuff," well pity on you if you're developing for an Oculus on a Mac. The Vive doesn't, and probably never will, support Mac. Whatever VR solution Apple releases will obviously run great on the video cards they support, so that again strongly points to purchasing an AMD card at this time over your alternatives. With regards to this specific build, a high DPI display will greatly improve the enjoyment of this computer. The Dell P2715Q is the best deal. Mac OS has such good HiDPI support compared to Windows (and especially Linux). Enjoy the features you pay for! Truthfully, I'm hard pressed to see the point of a Hackintosh, and I own one.
- atemerev 10y ago
  CUDA stuff is awful on Windows (try setting up Tensorflow/Keras there — nothing but overwhelming frustration). So I have to use Ubuntu and miss my happy days with macOS.
  - 21 10y ago
    I think that's exaggerating it a bit. I managed to install Tensorflow with CUDA on Windows just by following theirs official installation guides. I also managed to compile Tensorflow with GPU support from source, also by just following the official guide. Sure, it's a bit more work than "sudo apt install".
    - atemerev 10y ago
      It was 5 months ago; perhaps things happened to change since then. :)
finchisko 10y ago
so you're running pirated Windows to?
- finchisko 10y ago
  i've expected nothing but downvotes and it's hapenning. But you guys realise, that macOS is not free in any kind of way?
  - Synaesthesia 10y ago
    Oh yeah! But honestly I still sleep ok at night with Apple making record profits.
djsumdog 10y ago
I had a Hackintosh for years. I used the stock/retail CD from my former mackbook, used some custom kexts and a guide to generate the right plist edit to unlock my nvidia card. I never had issues with updates either. It ran Snow Leopard and I used it for all my development, video editing, photo editing, etc. Eventually I left for Australia and decided to get a real MacBook and unfortunately it had Lion on it. I hated Lion. Gone was Expose. Gone were rows of virtual desktops (Missing Control had one row with multiple columns. I hated that shit). There was no way to get the old functionality back. Eventually I started using Linux again in a VM as my primary OS. Today I'm back on Linux with i3 as my tiling window manager and I don't think I'd ever go back to macos. I think many of their design decisions since Lion and onward have been terrible. I just keep around a Windows laptop or VM for when I need commercial products or to play games.
gfiorav 10y ago
Best mac I ever had is my Hackintosh. I built a fusion drive for it and use Clover instead of Chimera for a boot loader, so I can update from major versions without trouble. I've never had any issues, i just shop for compatible chipsets. I've had tons of issues with Linux on the desktop in comparison to Hackintosh. Never understood how people say it's time consuming to do it!
- NegativeLatency 10y ago
  It's time consuming, depending on the particular hardware you have. The updates usually go smoothly, but then a sound driver or something will break and you have to go and fix it. Which is pretty annoying if you want to spend your time getting something else done with your computer.
elmigranto 10y ago
I'm wondering whether it would be easier to run macOS in VM. No more fear of updates with snapshots, and I imagine ease of installation and less compatibility issues. Anyone does it, how's performance and keyboard "tunneling" (CMD vs CTRL)?
- prodmerc 10y ago
  MacOSX performance inside a VM is terrible, no matter your hardware.
  - squaredpants 10y ago
    How about VFIO using Qemu/KVM? That is the setup I have.
  - xaduha 10y ago
    Nonsense, depends on the VM.
  - bartvk 10y ago
    I'm curious, why do you say so?
- joshgel 10y ago
  Ive found it pretty tough to get macOS up and running in a VM. Anyone know of any easy way?
  - citruspi 10y ago
    I've come across this[0] doc before, but I haven't tried it yet so I can't speak to ease of setup and performance. [0]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - kejaed 10y ago
    If you dont mind downloading a potentially sketchy random VM image from the web, this has worked for me: https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-virtualbox-windows/ https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-virtualbox-wind...
atemerev 10y ago
I have a Ubuntu desktop (i7 6700K, nVidia GTX 1080, like everybody else's), and a recent MacBook Pro. Each time I open the latter, I have a mixed feeling of "how beautiful everything is!" and "how slow everything is!" (I am a Scala software engineer occasionally working with GPU-based machine learning)
redsummer 10y ago
Apple have made some terrible design decisions since Jobs died. A 'thin iMac' - whose thin-ness was absolutely pointless. The MacBook (2 lbs) and MacBook Pro (3 lbs) were designed to weigh arbitrary weights instead of thinking about features: http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&product2=macbook-pro-13 http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&p... And the MacPro was possible the worst shape for upgrades. Jobs inspired people to come up with great machines, but he also had a pragmatism which seems to have been lost at Apple.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore? Size constraints I understand as I fly on airplanes a lot, but weight constraints can really be annoying. At least for higher end machines its okay for a lot of us to have an extra bit of weight for more features. It can be both.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore? Apparently they are. Just read this effete technologist's comment: I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. (...) I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit). -- Linus Torvalds
    - bitexploder 10y ago
      Size and noise I am totally on board with. Just not the obsession with weight. And I am an ultra-light gram obsessed backpacker. I may just be an outlier or unusually strong. (Kidding on the last qualifier :))
softinio 10y ago
Is the motivation to use a hackintosh over linux apps you cant get for Linux mainly?
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Pretty much, and it's a very polished is overall. It's especially good for some niche things like audio, video and media. Photoshop has always run like a dream on macs and I use Logic Pro on my hackintosh for which there's really no alternative on Linux.
amelius 10y ago
Curious: is there a window manager for Linux that behaves much like OSX?
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  The late Gnome Shell is very similar, both in look and in RAM usage (1GB+).
- yoavm 10y ago
  In what way? IMHO window managers is something Linux excels in. What does macOS has in its window manager that Linux lacks? (other than "no you can't maximise easily" feature...)
  - Drdrdrq 10y ago
    I love Linux, but the WMs are not its strong point IMHO. There are many of them and each tries to invent some new desktop paradigm instead of polishing existing experience. It's OK to be boring - just do your job and don't get it my way. I'm currently using Xfce and hope they don't take the KDE4 route for a long time... (not that the experience is bugless or even great, but it's better than alternatives).
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      Huh? Uncustomized Kwin is about as boring as WMs get.
- tyingq 10y ago
  ElementaryOS is probably the closest experience: https://elementary.io https://elementary.io I don't know if the window manager is easily usable on a different Linux distribution though.
binaryapparatus 10y ago
This is both informative and interesting from other angle. If Dan Counsell, well known owner of Realmac Software, has to build hackintosh then wtf is Apple doing?
- coldtea 10y ago
  Catering to the majority (of its niche, which is non-Windows, easy to use, all-in-one, curated experience, upmarket PCs) and not to even further niches?
  - valuearb 10y ago
    Macintosh is 6-7% of worldwide PC units. At an average sales price of $1200 a unit vs. average Windows PC at $500 a unit, Apple has at least 15% of world wide PC revenues. At 15-20% net margins vs. Windows PC makers average 2-3% margins, Apple's Mac profits are as much as, if not more, than all the Windows PC makers combined. Over $20B in annual revenues with at least $3B in net profits, that's a hellofa niche. So the question is, why is Apple not updating/refreshing Mac lineups more often, and why don't they have a decent pro model?
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Because they get to those numbers without a "decent pro model", so it's not like they feel they need one. As for getting to even better numbers, well, they had decent pro models (and even servers) back in the day, and they (presumably) know that they don't sell that much.
  - Drdrdrq 10y ago
    Their niche will soon figure out there are some people (like OP) running the same software on much better hardware for much lower price. How much longer do you think they will keep buying original macs?
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Decades? Most people who buy Macs are not very price-sensitive, and they decidedly buy them so they don't have to personally build that "much better hardware". So, this option does exist, but it's the exact opposite about what they want. Assuming they even need the increased power in the first place, which most (except creatives pros in video and 3D) don't.
tangue 10y ago
I started to build a Hackintosh using this kind of setup but I realized that I no longer love the OS (I already own a Macbook) and that there's no reason for such a hassle.
- hedora 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm hitting this dilemma on the laptop front. It is hardware refresh time at work, and there is a concerning dent near the fan on my MBP, along with a light spot on the panel. I despise MacOS's keyboad shortcuts. I just want a stable linux laptop that is fast enough for emacs + web browsing and has an impeccable screen/keyboard/trackpad/battery. My HW budget is high enough to buy a high end apple laptop and tiny (27"?) apple-ish display from LG. If I move to a overkill-nice PC laptop, and also buy a 43" 4K (non color matched) monitor, I think I'll be able to buy a ryzen cluster with the left over cash. I'm not sure if that will be faster or slower than my xeon VM in the data center, or if I want to spend the time setting up distcc.
  - hedora 10y ago
    The dilemma is the following: do I flush a few thousand bucks of company money down the drain to get a middling, marginally productive setup, or do I deal with the PITA / risk of configuring my described linux setup?
  - jseliger 10y ago
    I just want a stable linux laptop that is fast enough for emacs + web browsing and has an impeccable screen/keyboard/trackpad/battery. Isn't that a Dell XPS? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-c...
Xeoncross 10y ago
One day I want the Adobe suite to run on linux (natively) then I can leave OS X just like Windows. Local Media editing is the last reason for windows/os x to exist. Everything else (games, calculations, social networks, model rendering) is better served by a web or mobile app backed by a server running linux.
- alleycat 10y ago
  What really needs to happen is a big name company with money (like Google), to go all out and get a decent linux distro on the market for professionals that everyone can get behind, and also subsidise the development of big name products from Adobe, drivers, game developers, in the short term get the OS to gain traction.
  - karlshea 10y ago
    But knowing how Google works they will lose interest in it in three years and then that OS would be in the same position as macOS.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  If I were Apple, I'd buy Adobe the very second I even heard a rumor of a Linux Adobe suite. I just wouldn't let it happen. Would be a few billion well spent.
nottorp 10y ago
Problem is, Apple doesn't have anything for power users or developers right now. I'm currently hackintoshing, but with every "dumb it down" decision (like remove the battery life time estimation), hardware mishap (LG monitors not working near wifi, come on) or new hardware announcement that still doesn't serve my demographic i wonder if i shouldn't just switch back to Linux. I used to say that their laptops are fine, and it's only the desktop where i need to hackintosh, but ... touch typing hostile emoji keyboard?
- swah 10y ago
  I'm on Linux now, and people that like design and attention to detail can't really be happy using this... I don't expect massive migration to Linux from OSX. People will go back to Windows and OSX in a few months.
  - nottorp 10y ago
    For the record, I've been using Linux as my main OS for 10 years when I finally decided to switch to OS X about 4 years ago. I have no problem switching back if Apple stops offering me enough flexibility. After all, you don't need to recompile your kernel to install drivers any more :)
    - wingworks 10y ago
      You don't need to deal with drivers period on MacOS. I use Linux every day as a server, and have tried a few times to use it as a desktop platform, but never last longer than a few hours. (I'm a graphics person)
      - dawnerd 10y ago
        My HP printer begs to differ. Wouldn't show up on my mac until I installed their garbage software. On my ubuntu desktop, it works right away without any fiddling. Graphics, on the other hand, are definitely pretty finicky, especially HiDPI
  - 10y ago
coned88 10y ago
My concern with these hackintosh systems is safety. Tools like Unibeast/Clover and whatever else. They manipulate the OSX install image. It all seems to work but then you type in your credentials for the bank or work into a browser and who knows if the OS is compromised. Is it safe? That is the question.
- roblabla 10y ago
  Clover is fully open source. And it's not too complicated to follow along, so it's actually a fairly auditable piece of software. I've been using hackintosh for a while, and it's almost a vanilla OSX with the exception of Clover and FakeSMC. I doubt there's any malware in there...
  - op00to 10y ago
    > I doubt there's any malware in there... Famous last words. Unless the builds are verifiable, they're not trustable. Open source doesn't do you any good if you don't know that the binary that you download and run doesn't do something weird.
    - roblabla 10y ago
      I doubt you verify every bit of binaries you download. Open source gives you the possibility of knowing your binary is good, by compiling it yourself. I chose not to do so, because I couldn't really be bothered. But others who need this kind of security could, and I would hope they do.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Can this be answered by doing a security review of the Hackintosh installation? Would all that is necessary be to put the Hackintosh behind a network inspector, say Wireshark, to check if anything nefarious or unexpected is going on.
  - op00to 10y ago
    What if the traffic was masked - say certain "routine" DNS queries to kick off a request to get further commands to run? I wouldn't be worried about facile root kits, but higher quality attacks that are way harder to detect.
robk 10y ago
Those cases still look really ugly. Reminds me of the look I was going for twenty years ago when i was a teenager w all the neon. The Macs at least look elegant and like something I'd want in my house.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  That's your only criticism? Maybe choose a different case?
  - dom0 10y ago
    Well, and the airflow looks a lot like "uhm, I'm just gonna slap fans all over it, that's probably fastest ^W best, k?".
- hedora 10y ago
  There are plenty of elegant PC cases available. The author went to great pains to put a ridiculous number of LEDs into the build. Even with the LEDs, there is a ~$5k budget difference between the hackintosh and the trash can. That much will buy you a pretty wide range of aesthetic choices. For instance, you could probably have someone cnc something out of aluminum, or commission a hardwood case that matches the period of your office furniture. Personally, I think the build would have been more memorable if it incorporated some strobes, a fog machine and plasma bulb. (Bonus points for replacing the plasma bulb with a tesla coil without sacrificing stablity / safety, and without exceeding the trashcan price)
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  I used to use this for my Hackintosh case: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article163-page1.html http://www.silentpcreview.com/article163-page1.html Lian Li PC-V2000.
bluedino 10y ago
>> Maybe Apple have been waiting for the recently released Ryzen CPUs from AMD? You can't even run the stock kernel on AMD chips. How much QA and other work Apple would have to do, I have no idea.
- adar 10y ago
  The crew over at amd-osx.com figured it out, can't imagine it'd be much more difficult for Apple to do so.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    There's more to it than getting it 'working'. Airplay support, for one.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    There's more to it than just getting AMD to boot the kernel. Features like AirPlay that are Intel-specific.
- ksec 10y ago
  That is when you see the whole tool chain, OSX, Xcode, Compiler all optimized for Ryzen in WWDC. I hope. I honestly dont think any consumer will stop buying Mac just because Intel isn't inside the Mac. And it will save Apple at least $200 BOM per Mac, making final Mac Selling price around ~$250 less. Slightly more affordable. Or more likely, staying within the same pricing and give you double the SSD storage.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    AMD would have to match the current power draw and integrated GPU that Apple can get from Intel before they switched on the portable front.
    - ksec 10y ago
      I think AMD would make more sense on Desktop front. But TB3 is still a roadblock.
ak217 10y ago
Just to provide a counterpoint, I recently did a new desktop build and installed Windows 10. It's not bad, and very different from the Windows 10 beta that I gave up on in frustration two years ago. With the Ubuntu subsystem I can do useful work right away. After turning off some of the annoyances (via the Services and Group Policy control panels), it really does a decent job of just working. You can download and install with a USB stick (no more stupid DVDs). It still demands a license key, but runs indefinitely without registration with a little watermark. If you haven't built a desktop in the past few years, the performance boost from PCIe NVMe SSDs is great, and Intel i5-7600K (now retails for $200) can run at 4.5 GHz reliably and stay cool. I'm impressed.
- rndmio 10y ago
  I came to a similar position recently. Bought a new laptop intending to run Ubuntu on it for personal development work. But the pet management story on the newer Intel CPUs just doesn't compare with Windows 10. WSL is pretty damned good and i don't feel so had using it. I'd objectively prefer to use Linux, but right now i just cant.
- chx 10y ago
  Is there really a difference you can feel (not measure) between NVMe and SATA SSDs? I am just wondering. I myself don't dare to go Windows because of malware. Linux is where it is.
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  - gervase 10y ago
    For me, I didn't notice much of a difference in performance. Ostensibly, the benchmarks say that it is ~5x faster, but on a day-to-day basis, I barely notice this - I rarely transfer files larger than ~10GB. However, what I did appreciate was the (in-the-case) logistics difference of installing an M.2 drive; one screw, no cables, almost as easy as a RAM upgrade. Not having to fuss with SATA was a pleasure, and reminded me of the switch from IDE to SATA (you just... plug it in? Where are the jumpers?).
lisper 10y ago
Has anyone here tried running OS X under Parallels Desktop on Linux? http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallels_Desktop_Users_Guide/22555.htm http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallel...
thyselius 10y ago
I built a crazy fast Hackintosh using the intel 8 core 5960x CPU. 17000 on Cinebench. However I sold it a week ago. Being iOS developer really sucked, as I needed to upgrade OS X for Xcode but the CPU wasn't supported with Sierra for 6 months. Also I spent at least 2 weeks of work on it during the year I had it. So not worth it. But there are slower cpus that are better supported. It was fun the days it worked though:)
- bartvk 10y ago
  > Also I spent at least 2 weeks of work on it during the year I had it To me, this is the most interesting, and the article doesn't really specify it. Excluding the building itself, why did you have to spend time on it? What kind of problems occurred?
haltandsleep 10y ago
I bought my Mac the first month they appeared in 1984. I won't bother you with the ensuing history, but I will raise a question related to it: I remember when Apple could not offer a retail OS, not without cannibalizing hardware sales. If Pro desktops fade, is that still true for that segment? Or could they offer something Xeon only (to keep out commodity laptops) as a legal Hackintosh? Or do certified configurations a la Oculus? If their profit is in mobile, and cloud services, it might help more than hurt. FWIW I like Debian now, and the non-intrusive UI.
mark_elf 10y ago
There are some comments here as to motivation: why go through all this? I make video money using after effects, mainly. I'm chained to the oars. The choice of intermediate codec (ProRes) is surprisingly important, there are other solutions that don't make it for my workflow. And it's not just codec, lots of things about windows 10 make it an unprofessional choice. I was planning to build a windows box anyway, with i7 6900K, 128GB ram, ASRock X99 Taichi, GTX 1080, NVMe, all that. When I overlaid that over a hackintosh, it seemed a bit past what is possible, at least from a cursory look at tonymacx86. It's worth a week of work to me, maybe I'll look harder. Thanks for listening!
UpDownLeftRight 10y ago
Or you can get a Windows 10 machine from a reliable integrator (like Supermicro or ThinkMate) and it will "just work."
mmrr88 10y ago
I have a Toshiba Satellite Radius 11 L15W-... its a cheap 300 dollar laptop runs windows 10. changing the OS is not supported and actually blocked my the manufacturer. I was able to find a few tools to remove some of the counter measures set in place. It is now a Ubuntu Laptop, I would use a Mac for development but Macs are expensive. I have built 2 PC gaming rigs that were more expensive then the 1500 price tag of a hackintosh. Bottom line is you can get any modern OS working on almost any machine. It just starts to get really hacky and information can be hard to find.
xaduha 10y ago
If you're not doing VFIO, you're doing it wrong.
kilroy123 10y ago
While this PC looks great, visually, and spec wise; isn't this missing the point? It seems like a company needs to build a _very_ good linux distro with design first principles. It needs to work on a number of devices. More importantly, it needs to be a paid OS. It can have an open source distro underneath, but the UI needs to be created by people who are paid well.
- wezm 10y ago
  This is pretty much what the elementary folks are trying to do https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/
  - kilroy123 10y ago
    Nice. Thank you for this. I've never heard of this before. I think it shouldn't be optional to pay. I want a high-end distro that's $50-60 and far more polished. Better or equal to macOS.
  - string 10y ago
    I've been using elementaryOS for a while now, and it doesn't really compare to macOS yet unfortunately. It seems to me there is a disconnect between developers and designers. When I ask devs why there isn't a nice looking Linux distro, they ask me why I care about what the UI looks like. Designers don't use or care about Linux because of the lack of decent design software. As much as I love the concept of GIMP, it is not a realistic alternative to Adobe software (especially things like InDesign and XD) or Sketch, for example. As a designer-developer, Linux is still not an easy choice for me, as much as I'd like it to be. elementaryOS is a nice start, but I still end up using macOS if given the choice.
kuon 10y ago
I have been using a similar (a bit lower specs) hackintosh for 2 years. About two weeks ago, I decided to stop and look elsewhere. I started a small serie on my experience if you are interested: https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-motivations-b10accc10889#.k6ccx7dt5 https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-moti... I am still testing my current setup, but I guess I'll soon publish the last bit, with the setup I found and my conclusions on the switch.
- harrygeez 10y ago
  > FUCKING FULL SCREEN MODE WHEN THE GREEN BUTTON IS CLICKED Man this is so me when I updated to El Capitan. What is Apple thinking??? Now I have to hold alt just to increase my window size. At least give us an option to change it! How hard is that, Apple?
  - kuon 10y ago
    I used the Moom to help me with that. Another good point for windows, it has nearly all the features of Moom, at least those I need.
notlisted 10y ago
I'm not a Hackintosh builder, have considered it many times. From the video's I've watched, the big trick, especially if you use Final Cut Pro X with OpenCL, is to avoid NVidia and use AMD Radeon video cards. Supposedly this makes the build process a lot easier/less finicky, and even faster. Can anyone confirm?
wiradikusuma 10y ago
Be careful with OS upgrades. I recently upgraded my hackintosh to macOS (Sierra) and now it can't shutdown/restart.
rallycarre 10y ago
I custom built my PC before knowing of what a hackintosh was so I didn't purchase my hardware specifically for it. According to the compatibility wiki my config was compatible. I remember during college of wanting to do some Ios development but afford a MAC. I spent atleast 20 hours of tweaking kewts settings and trying different distros. I finally got it to boot but it crashed whenever I tried to run the emulator. I haven't touched hackintosh stuff for several years but the grief and time wasted makes it not worth it. It's a shame apple is limiting their development tools to MacOS. They could learn a thing or two from Microsoft.
poyu 10y ago
I'm a Hackintosh user for almost 10 years (from 10.6!), though I do have a MacBook Pro with my when I'm out. As other people stated, yes, it is very time consuming to get it straight. Treat it as a hobby, you'll understand things about the Mac (or computers in general) other people don't, such as DSDT patches, how drivers are loaded, and Mac power management, etc. If you use Clover, and get all the patches right, you can almost get an update-proof setup (Except when you go from say 10.11 to 10.12). But even at the worst case, usually people on the Internet will figure out fast enough for you to apply the new patches. Minor updates are really really easy and fine. I always click Update without batting an eye. It's a tinkerer's hobby. If you like doing researches and being fine with spending time figuring out stuff on the Internet, I will say go for it and try it out! The process is fun and the result is very rewarding.
- baudehlo 10y ago
  So just like using Linux then? /s
jlgaddis 10y ago
I know I could Google and read about some experiences but since this made me think about it... have any of you HN'ers tried to virtualize OS X or run it virtualized (on anything other than an OS X host) on a regular basis? I've got a (still pretty new) high-end MacBook Pro sitting at the end of my desk but -- after putting together a new, extremely over-built workstation a few months ago -- I haven't even turned it on since I don't know when. I've got KVM/qemu, VMware Workstation, and VirtualBox all installed on my workstation, though, and it might be interesting to try to get OS X running under one of them.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  I got Snow Leopard running under VMware a few years back. It 'worked', in that I could do most things, but sound was glitchy, and updates would regularly break things. My ultimate answer was just to give up on Apple on the desktop and stay in the Windows/Linux worlds. I'm just not going to invest any further time on a system that is owned by a company that clearly doesn't care about it, and is actively hostile to attempts (like virtualization) to use the system in a larger context.
- tavert 10y ago
  There are mac vagrant boxes available that work on a linux host. You may need to put vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--usbehci", "off"] in the vagrantfile.
toodlebunions 10y ago
Eventually you'll likely give in and install windows.
flyingfsck 10y ago
This seems reasonable: http://hackintoshmethod.com http://hackintoshmethod.com
crazy5sheep 10y ago
a bit off topic. NVIDIA driver for mac is kind of suck. the bug, which showing a transparent window whenever you try to open an epub file with ibook.app, is been there for a very long time, and still no fix yet.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Still! I was hoping for a fix for that. I hear if you activate your onboard intel grapics it will work but I haven't managed to do that yet
1011_1101 10y ago
Unlocked CPU and Z-Board but no OC? With that config you should be easily able to run that CPU at 4.6GHz

350 points by milen 10y ago

I'm in the same boat this author is. It's disappointing to see the desktop market lagging so far behind. For all of the 68k/PPC years, we could at least say "different architecture" and Intel hadn't caught up. Now we're all Intel, and it's Apple that isn't keeping up. It's frustrating, and I'm not necessarily a "Pro user" anymore at all. I have a current generation Mac Mini, and it's over 2 years old now. What I can buy from the Apple Store right now for the same price is what I got 2 years ago. I wish I know what Apple was thinking. One would have thought that the "iPhone halo effect" was something that they would have wanted to give momentum to. Instead people are looking at Windows units again.

devNoise 10y ago
You touch on what I miss about the old days from Apple, the "speed bumps". Apple used to make updates to the Macs a bit more often then they do these days. A lot of the time the updates weren't much more then a slightly faster CPU and maybe a new graphics. I don't expect completely new designs every year, but it boggles my mind why Apple won't put in better CPUs that are pin compatible with their motherboards.
- cmurf 10y ago
  I think it boggles our mind because of cognitive dissonance. The answer is a George Carlin They Don't Care About You rant, but we don't want to think of Apple as being that crotchety, but are merely distracted.
CPLX 10y ago
> I wish I know what Apple was thinking. It's literally incomprehensible. Just make a really good fast desktop computer. They're one of the largest companies in the world now with essentially unlimited financial resources, and decades of core competency in making high end desktop computers. So like why don't they just fucking do it.
- valuearb 10y ago
  And they clearly make substantial profits on the Mac line, so again why don't they just fucking do it?
  - CPLX 10y ago
    Even if they didn't who cares? For example, every motor vehicle manufacturer has an unprofitable racing effort and generates interesting concept cars and special editions to fill out the line. Apple can have a flagship line that's break even or worse to anchor the high end. It's literally inexplicable, and I think framing it in the rational actor model is a mistake, it's best explained as a fuckup.
    - throwaway55523 10y ago
      I wish I could upvote this (and your other comments) 100 times. Amazing high quality machines will keep the design and dev community on Mac for years to come, churning out the apps that help to make the iPhone ecosystem work. Bleeding power users to alternative systems creates vulnerability. These arguments would be the same for Microsoft circa 2007. Why should Microsoft care if the designers, developers, and tastemakers hate their products? They've got so much lock-in that people will be forced to use their stuff forever. Wheee, we're invincible. We all know how this turned out. I'm running up against low memory issues on my 16gb MBP lately. I absolutely cannot responsibly update my Apple product right now because of the 16gb limitation on the MBP. It does matter! I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and go back to Linux desktop.
  - derefr 10y ago
    My theory is that they strongly believe PCIe-over-Thunderbolt (now -over-USB-C) will obviate all need for internal expandibility/upgradability, and they went all-in on a form-factor (the garbage-can Mac) to take advantage of that... and then the market has stubbornly refused to co-operate by releasing Thunderbolt peripherals equivalent to internal components. So they're playing chicken with said market, probably under Intel's repeated promises to make it happen.
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jeffjose 10y ago

After years of making fun of Linux folks for having to "know everything about the computer" to get things working, Mac folks seem to be embracing the culture these days.

danieldk 10y ago
Sarcasm detected, but this is only a tiny fraction of Mac users. 99.9% will just go to an Apple store, buy a Mac and are sure that everything from power management to Wifi works.
MrScruff 10y ago
I can't speak for everyone, but for me there's a big difference from wanting to know everything about the computer and needing to, particularly when I'm not at work.
- bitexploder 10y ago
  These days setting up a Windows or Apple system means fighting lots of relatively confusing dialogs and options to avoid using cloud services, etc. Modern consumer operating systems want to analyze every bit of your activity they can get their grubby mitts on and you really have to fight them and say "No thanks!" about 15 times on a modern phone and less, but still a lot, on Win/Apple. I care about privacy, like most people, but I am able to control mine far better than the typical, non-technical computer user. I am reaching a point where these operating systems are becoming untenable for day to day computing use. They lure you in with "everything just working" including the privacy invasive "cloud" features. Increasingly these things are using ML to mine your behavior. I can run Linux. I don't even mind paying for a privacy with a little bit of my time and convenience. I don't want to look back 25 years from now and say "I really wish I had not given up this bit of privacy". Alternately, I am hoping when I look back I can say, "It was worth the relatively small time sacrifice to avoid these things." (Not confusing for technically savvy folks, but still, pretty hard).
  - valuearb 10y ago
    Yea, you might be confusing Windows and Macintosh there (or iOS and Android). It's trivial to setup a Mac, there is one dialog to collect crash data you can opt out of, and you don't have to use iCloud. Apple would like you to use iCloud but doesn't make you, doesn't want your private data, and is committed to protecting that data. Windows is a little more frustrating, and I don't think Microsoft has the same level of privacy commitment as Apple does, but I also don't think it's that far behind. Google is a special case, they are an advertising company and have virtually no revenue streams outside of that for Android. I'm sure they'd like to protect your privacy too if they could still serve super targeted ads to you, but they have no way of doing that.

adamnemecek 10y ago

> I've switched off auto-updates in Sierra. While system updates should work just fine, I prefer to hold off until the community over at tonymacx86 have confirmed there are no issues. Does anyone know why some of the updates can brick the machine? Also how often does this happen? Or like what percentage of updates break things.

djsumdog 10y ago
I ran a Hackintosh for years, but I used the stock/retail ISO along with a couple of custom kexts and the nvidia enabler (the drivers will run other nvidia/ati cards, they're just not officially supported and the stock kernel models have a white-list of the models that were sold with macs). I remember leaving the stock updates on and rarely ran into issues. I think I had video screw up once or twice, which just involved getting some of the latest kexts off the forums.
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tumblen 10y ago
Definitely does not brick the machine. Just that you restart and graphics are weird or audio is having issues, so you have to figure out how to resolve those issues. By waiting a few days and seeing what issues you may encounter in advance, it's easier to avoid issues. (That being said, issues from updates has never actually happened to me)

jwr 10y ago

I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get really weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again... Unfortunately, the information is still very fragmented and it takes a lot of time and effort to get one running. Actually building the thing is the easiest part, it's the booting, installation and OS patches/fixes that eat up time.

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nateberkopec 10y ago
Yeah. I buy Macs because they "just work", so a Hackintosh completely destroys the point of even owning a Mac for me.
- lisper 10y ago
  Except that Macs don't "just work" any more. At best they "just work" until the day that Apple decides to deprecate a feature or an application that you have come to rely on (for me it's iPhoto) and then it stops working. It doesn't crash, it just says, "Sorry, this application cannot run on this version of MacOS." But from the user's point of view the effect is the same. [UPDATE] Case in point: one of the banking apps on my iPod just stopped working, insisting that I upgrade to the latest version. So I did, but the new version doesn't work either. It just hangs when I try to log in. Granted, this is an iPod, not a Mac, but the iOS philosophy of having Apple control the device is slowly creeping in to the Mac. Every day and every upgrade is a crap shoot in terms of whether or not what worked yesterday will still work today.
  - Nexxxeh 10y ago
    I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth. Ask anyone who gets paid to fix Macs. Sure, I see less of them, but hardly unexpected considering people buy fewer of them (and they're less targetted by malware). On the other hand, I hate dealing with them because they can suffer from the same "it should work but doesn't" crap that Windows machines do but without the critical mass of support via Google. And unless you get your issue escalated, the Apple Geniuses are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

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taksintikk 10y ago

Wonder why OP didn't use PCIe NVMe drives. Night and day better than standard ssd on homebrew macs.

deleted 10y ago
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omgtehlion 10y ago
May I ask you what kind of work they shine at? Right now I have 2 machines on my desktop, one with SATA SSD (sams 850pro) and another with PCIe SSD (sams 950pro). I see big difference in benchmarks, but do not feel any difference in my day-to-day work. Boot time is shorter on PCIe one, but I reboot these machines maybe once a couple of months.
tumblen 10y ago
I believe hackintoshes are unable to boot from NVMe drives at the moment (this may have changed)
- nik736 10y ago
  This is false information.

doctorpangloss 10y ago

As a Hackintosh user, I'd recommend an NCASE M1 v5 or the Shuttle SZ170R8 for a significantly better chassis. With the NCASE, you can get a LGA 2011-v3 mini-ITX board and get as fast of a computer as you want. Though truthfully, I don't think there's much of a point. Likewise, an old NVIDIA card for a Hackintosh? Also not much of a point. The web drivers are so bad. Who knows when Apple will ship another NVIDIA chip in a Mac? If you need "CUDA stuff," use Linux or Windows. Software like Octane is so buggy and suffers from worse performance on Mac anyway. Final Cut and After Effects both support OpenCL acceleration. Besides, the RX 480 is $189. If you're doing "VR stuff," well pity on you if you're developing for an Oculus on a Mac. The Vive doesn't, and probably never will, support Mac. Whatever VR solution Apple releases will obviously run great on the video cards they support, so that again strongly points to purchasing an AMD card at this time over your alternatives. With regards to this specific build, a high DPI display will greatly improve the enjoyment of this computer. The Dell P2715Q is the best deal. Mac OS has such good HiDPI support compared to Windows (and especially Linux). Enjoy the features you pay for! Truthfully, I'm hard pressed to see the point of a Hackintosh, and I own one.

atemerev 10y ago
CUDA stuff is awful on Windows (try setting up Tensorflow/Keras there — nothing but overwhelming frustration). So I have to use Ubuntu and miss my happy days with macOS.
- 21 10y ago
  I think that's exaggerating it a bit. I managed to install Tensorflow with CUDA on Windows just by following theirs official installation guides. I also managed to compile Tensorflow with GPU support from source, also by just following the official guide. Sure, it's a bit more work than "sudo apt install".
  - atemerev 10y ago
    It was 5 months ago; perhaps things happened to change since then. :)

finchisko 10y ago

so you're running pirated Windows to?

finchisko 10y ago
i've expected nothing but downvotes and it's hapenning. But you guys realise, that macOS is not free in any kind of way?
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Oh yeah! But honestly I still sleep ok at night with Apple making record profits.

djsumdog 10y ago

I had a Hackintosh for years. I used the stock/retail CD from my former mackbook, used some custom kexts and a guide to generate the right plist edit to unlock my nvidia card. I never had issues with updates either. It ran Snow Leopard and I used it for all my development, video editing, photo editing, etc. Eventually I left for Australia and decided to get a real MacBook and unfortunately it had Lion on it. I hated Lion. Gone was Expose. Gone were rows of virtual desktops (Missing Control had one row with multiple columns. I hated that shit). There was no way to get the old functionality back. Eventually I started using Linux again in a VM as my primary OS. Today I'm back on Linux with i3 as my tiling window manager and I don't think I'd ever go back to macos. I think many of their design decisions since Lion and onward have been terrible. I just keep around a Windows laptop or VM for when I need commercial products or to play games.

gfiorav 10y ago

Best mac I ever had is my Hackintosh. I built a fusion drive for it and use Clover instead of Chimera for a boot loader, so I can update from major versions without trouble. I've never had any issues, i just shop for compatible chipsets. I've had tons of issues with Linux on the desktop in comparison to Hackintosh. Never understood how people say it's time consuming to do it!

NegativeLatency 10y ago
It's time consuming, depending on the particular hardware you have. The updates usually go smoothly, but then a sound driver or something will break and you have to go and fix it. Which is pretty annoying if you want to spend your time getting something else done with your computer.

elmigranto 10y ago

I'm wondering whether it would be easier to run macOS in VM. No more fear of updates with snapshots, and I imagine ease of installation and less compatibility issues. Anyone does it, how's performance and keyboard "tunneling" (CMD vs CTRL)?

prodmerc 10y ago
MacOSX performance inside a VM is terrible, no matter your hardware.
- squaredpants 10y ago
  How about VFIO using Qemu/KVM? That is the setup I have.
- xaduha 10y ago
  Nonsense, depends on the VM.
- bartvk 10y ago
  I'm curious, why do you say so?
joshgel 10y ago
Ive found it pretty tough to get macOS up and running in a VM. Anyone know of any easy way?
- citruspi 10y ago
  I've come across this[0] doc before, but I haven't tried it yet so I can't speak to ease of setup and performance. [0]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm https://github.com/geerlingguy/macos-virtualbox-vm
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kejaed 10y ago
  If you dont mind downloading a potentially sketchy random VM image from the web, this has worked for me: https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-virtualbox-windows/ https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-virtualbox-wind...

atemerev 10y ago

I have a Ubuntu desktop (i7 6700K, nVidia GTX 1080, like everybody else's), and a recent MacBook Pro. Each time I open the latter, I have a mixed feeling of "how beautiful everything is!" and "how slow everything is!" (I am a Scala software engineer occasionally working with GPU-based machine learning)

redsummer 10y ago

Apple have made some terrible design decisions since Jobs died. A 'thin iMac' - whose thin-ness was absolutely pointless. The MacBook (2 lbs) and MacBook Pro (3 lbs) were designed to weigh arbitrary weights instead of thinking about features: http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&product2=macbook-pro-13 http://www.apple.com/mac/compare/results/?product1=macbook&p... And the MacPro was possible the worst shape for upgrades. Jobs inspired people to come up with great machines, but he also had a pragmatism which seems to have been lost at Apple.

bitexploder 10y ago
Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore? Size constraints I understand as I fly on airplanes a lot, but weight constraints can really be annoying. At least for higher end machines its okay for a lot of us to have an extra bit of weight for more features. It can be both.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore? Apparently they are. Just read this effete technologist's comment: I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. (...) I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit). -- Linus Torvalds
  - bitexploder 10y ago
    Size and noise I am totally on board with. Just not the obsession with weight. And I am an ultra-light gram obsessed backpacker. I may just be an outlier or unusually strong. (Kidding on the last qualifier :))

softinio 10y ago

Is the motivation to use a hackintosh over linux apps you cant get for Linux mainly?

Synaesthesia 10y ago
Pretty much, and it's a very polished is overall. It's especially good for some niche things like audio, video and media. Photoshop has always run like a dream on macs and I use Logic Pro on my hackintosh for which there's really no alternative on Linux.

amelius 10y ago

Curious: is there a window manager for Linux that behaves much like OSX?

forgotpwtomain 10y ago
The late Gnome Shell is very similar, both in look and in RAM usage (1GB+).
yoavm 10y ago
In what way? IMHO window managers is something Linux excels in. What does macOS has in its window manager that Linux lacks? (other than "no you can't maximise easily" feature...)
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  I love Linux, but the WMs are not its strong point IMHO. There are many of them and each tries to invent some new desktop paradigm instead of polishing existing experience. It's OK to be boring - just do your job and don't get it my way. I'm currently using Xfce and hope they don't take the KDE4 route for a long time... (not that the experience is bugless or even great, but it's better than alternatives).
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    Huh? Uncustomized Kwin is about as boring as WMs get.
tyingq 10y ago
ElementaryOS is probably the closest experience: https://elementary.io https://elementary.io I don't know if the window manager is easily usable on a different Linux distribution though.

binaryapparatus 10y ago

This is both informative and interesting from other angle. If Dan Counsell, well known owner of Realmac Software, has to build hackintosh then wtf is Apple doing?

coldtea 10y ago
Catering to the majority (of its niche, which is non-Windows, easy to use, all-in-one, curated experience, upmarket PCs) and not to even further niches?
- valuearb 10y ago
  Macintosh is 6-7% of worldwide PC units. At an average sales price of $1200 a unit vs. average Windows PC at $500 a unit, Apple has at least 15% of world wide PC revenues. At 15-20% net margins vs. Windows PC makers average 2-3% margins, Apple's Mac profits are as much as, if not more, than all the Windows PC makers combined. Over $20B in annual revenues with at least $3B in net profits, that's a hellofa niche. So the question is, why is Apple not updating/refreshing Mac lineups more often, and why don't they have a decent pro model?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Because they get to those numbers without a "decent pro model", so it's not like they feel they need one. As for getting to even better numbers, well, they had decent pro models (and even servers) back in the day, and they (presumably) know that they don't sell that much.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  Their niche will soon figure out there are some people (like OP) running the same software on much better hardware for much lower price. How much longer do you think they will keep buying original macs?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Decades? Most people who buy Macs are not very price-sensitive, and they decidedly buy them so they don't have to personally build that "much better hardware". So, this option does exist, but it's the exact opposite about what they want. Assuming they even need the increased power in the first place, which most (except creatives pros in video and 3D) don't.

tangue 10y ago

I started to build a Hackintosh using this kind of setup but I realized that I no longer love the OS (I already own a Macbook) and that there's no reason for such a hassle.

hedora 10y ago
Yeah, I'm hitting this dilemma on the laptop front. It is hardware refresh time at work, and there is a concerning dent near the fan on my MBP, along with a light spot on the panel. I despise MacOS's keyboad shortcuts. I just want a stable linux laptop that is fast enough for emacs + web browsing and has an impeccable screen/keyboard/trackpad/battery. My HW budget is high enough to buy a high end apple laptop and tiny (27"?) apple-ish display from LG. If I move to a overkill-nice PC laptop, and also buy a 43" 4K (non color matched) monitor, I think I'll be able to buy a ryzen cluster with the left over cash. I'm not sure if that will be faster or slower than my xeon VM in the data center, or if I want to spend the time setting up distcc.
- hedora 10y ago
  The dilemma is the following: do I flush a few thousand bucks of company money down the drain to get a middling, marginally productive setup, or do I deal with the PITA / risk of configuring my described linux setup?
- jseliger 10y ago
  I just want a stable linux laptop that is fast enough for emacs + web browsing and has an impeccable screen/keyboard/trackpad/battery. Isn't that a Dell XPS? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-c...

Xeoncross 10y ago

One day I want the Adobe suite to run on linux (natively) then I can leave OS X just like Windows. Local Media editing is the last reason for windows/os x to exist. Everything else (games, calculations, social networks, model rendering) is better served by a web or mobile app backed by a server running linux.

alleycat 10y ago
What really needs to happen is a big name company with money (like Google), to go all out and get a decent linux distro on the market for professionals that everyone can get behind, and also subsidise the development of big name products from Adobe, drivers, game developers, in the short term get the OS to gain traction.
- karlshea 10y ago
  But knowing how Google works they will lose interest in it in three years and then that OS would be in the same position as macOS.
alkonaut 10y ago
If I were Apple, I'd buy Adobe the very second I even heard a rumor of a Linux Adobe suite. I just wouldn't let it happen. Would be a few billion well spent.

nottorp 10y ago

Problem is, Apple doesn't have anything for power users or developers right now. I'm currently hackintoshing, but with every "dumb it down" decision (like remove the battery life time estimation), hardware mishap (LG monitors not working near wifi, come on) or new hardware announcement that still doesn't serve my demographic i wonder if i shouldn't just switch back to Linux. I used to say that their laptops are fine, and it's only the desktop where i need to hackintosh, but ... touch typing hostile emoji keyboard?

swah 10y ago
I'm on Linux now, and people that like design and attention to detail can't really be happy using this... I don't expect massive migration to Linux from OSX. People will go back to Windows and OSX in a few months.
- nottorp 10y ago
  For the record, I've been using Linux as my main OS for 10 years when I finally decided to switch to OS X about 4 years ago. I have no problem switching back if Apple stops offering me enough flexibility. After all, you don't need to recompile your kernel to install drivers any more :)
  - wingworks 10y ago
    You don't need to deal with drivers period on MacOS. I use Linux every day as a server, and have tried a few times to use it as a desktop platform, but never last longer than a few hours. (I'm a graphics person)
    - dawnerd 10y ago
      My HP printer begs to differ. Wouldn't show up on my mac until I installed their garbage software. On my ubuntu desktop, it works right away without any fiddling. Graphics, on the other hand, are definitely pretty finicky, especially HiDPI
- 10y ago

coned88 10y ago

My concern with these hackintosh systems is safety. Tools like Unibeast/Clover and whatever else. They manipulate the OSX install image. It all seems to work but then you type in your credentials for the bank or work into a browser and who knows if the OS is compromised. Is it safe? That is the question.

roblabla 10y ago
Clover is fully open source. And it's not too complicated to follow along, so it's actually a fairly auditable piece of software. I've been using hackintosh for a while, and it's almost a vanilla OSX with the exception of Clover and FakeSMC. I doubt there's any malware in there...
- op00to 10y ago
  > I doubt there's any malware in there... Famous last words. Unless the builds are verifiable, they're not trustable. Open source doesn't do you any good if you don't know that the binary that you download and run doesn't do something weird.
  - roblabla 10y ago
    I doubt you verify every bit of binaries you download. Open source gives you the possibility of knowing your binary is good, by compiling it yourself. I chose not to do so, because I couldn't really be bothered. But others who need this kind of security could, and I would hope they do.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Can this be answered by doing a security review of the Hackintosh installation? Would all that is necessary be to put the Hackintosh behind a network inspector, say Wireshark, to check if anything nefarious or unexpected is going on.
- op00to 10y ago
  What if the traffic was masked - say certain "routine" DNS queries to kick off a request to get further commands to run? I wouldn't be worried about facile root kits, but higher quality attacks that are way harder to detect.

robk 10y ago

Those cases still look really ugly. Reminds me of the look I was going for twenty years ago when i was a teenager w all the neon. The Macs at least look elegant and like something I'd want in my house.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
That's your only criticism? Maybe choose a different case?
- dom0 10y ago
  Well, and the airflow looks a lot like "uhm, I'm just gonna slap fans all over it, that's probably fastest ^W best, k?".
hedora 10y ago
There are plenty of elegant PC cases available. The author went to great pains to put a ridiculous number of LEDs into the build. Even with the LEDs, there is a ~$5k budget difference between the hackintosh and the trash can. That much will buy you a pretty wide range of aesthetic choices. For instance, you could probably have someone cnc something out of aluminum, or commission a hardwood case that matches the period of your office furniture. Personally, I think the build would have been more memorable if it incorporated some strobes, a fog machine and plasma bulb. (Bonus points for replacing the plasma bulb with a tesla coil without sacrificing stablity / safety, and without exceeding the trashcan price)
FireBeyond 10y ago
I used to use this for my Hackintosh case: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article163-page1.html http://www.silentpcreview.com/article163-page1.html Lian Li PC-V2000.

bluedino 10y ago

>> Maybe Apple have been waiting for the recently released Ryzen CPUs from AMD? You can't even run the stock kernel on AMD chips. How much QA and other work Apple would have to do, I have no idea.

adar 10y ago
The crew over at amd-osx.com figured it out, can't imagine it'd be much more difficult for Apple to do so.
- bluedino 10y ago
  There's more to it than getting it 'working'. Airplay support, for one.
- bluedino 10y ago
  There's more to it than just getting AMD to boot the kernel. Features like AirPlay that are Intel-specific.
ksec 10y ago
That is when you see the whole tool chain, OSX, Xcode, Compiler all optimized for Ryzen in WWDC. I hope. I honestly dont think any consumer will stop buying Mac just because Intel isn't inside the Mac. And it will save Apple at least $200 BOM per Mac, making final Mac Selling price around ~$250 less. Slightly more affordable. Or more likely, staying within the same pricing and give you double the SSD storage.
- bluedino 10y ago
  AMD would have to match the current power draw and integrated GPU that Apple can get from Intel before they switched on the portable front.
  - ksec 10y ago
    I think AMD would make more sense on Desktop front. But TB3 is still a roadblock.

ak217 10y ago

Just to provide a counterpoint, I recently did a new desktop build and installed Windows 10. It's not bad, and very different from the Windows 10 beta that I gave up on in frustration two years ago. With the Ubuntu subsystem I can do useful work right away. After turning off some of the annoyances (via the Services and Group Policy control panels), it really does a decent job of just working. You can download and install with a USB stick (no more stupid DVDs). It still demands a license key, but runs indefinitely without registration with a little watermark. If you haven't built a desktop in the past few years, the performance boost from PCIe NVMe SSDs is great, and Intel i5-7600K (now retails for $200) can run at 4.5 GHz reliably and stay cool. I'm impressed.

rndmio 10y ago
I came to a similar position recently. Bought a new laptop intending to run Ubuntu on it for personal development work. But the pet management story on the newer Intel CPUs just doesn't compare with Windows 10. WSL is pretty damned good and i don't feel so had using it. I'd objectively prefer to use Linux, but right now i just cant.
chx 10y ago
Is there really a difference you can feel (not measure) between NVMe and SATA SSDs? I am just wondering. I myself don't dare to go Windows because of malware. Linux is where it is.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gervase 10y ago
  For me, I didn't notice much of a difference in performance. Ostensibly, the benchmarks say that it is ~5x faster, but on a day-to-day basis, I barely notice this - I rarely transfer files larger than ~10GB. However, what I did appreciate was the (in-the-case) logistics difference of installing an M.2 drive; one screw, no cables, almost as easy as a RAM upgrade. Not having to fuss with SATA was a pleasure, and reminded me of the switch from IDE to SATA (you just... plug it in? Where are the jumpers?).

lisper 10y ago

Has anyone here tried running OS X under Parallels Desktop on Linux? http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallels_Desktop_Users_Guide/22555.htm http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/wl/docs/en/Parallel...

thyselius 10y ago

I built a crazy fast Hackintosh using the intel 8 core 5960x CPU. 17000 on Cinebench. However I sold it a week ago. Being iOS developer really sucked, as I needed to upgrade OS X for Xcode but the CPU wasn't supported with Sierra for 6 months. Also I spent at least 2 weeks of work on it during the year I had it. So not worth it. But there are slower cpus that are better supported. It was fun the days it worked though:)

bartvk 10y ago
> Also I spent at least 2 weeks of work on it during the year I had it To me, this is the most interesting, and the article doesn't really specify it. Excluding the building itself, why did you have to spend time on it? What kind of problems occurred?

haltandsleep 10y ago

I bought my Mac the first month they appeared in 1984. I won't bother you with the ensuing history, but I will raise a question related to it: I remember when Apple could not offer a retail OS, not without cannibalizing hardware sales. If Pro desktops fade, is that still true for that segment? Or could they offer something Xeon only (to keep out commodity laptops) as a legal Hackintosh? Or do certified configurations a la Oculus? If their profit is in mobile, and cloud services, it might help more than hurt. FWIW I like Debian now, and the non-intrusive UI.

mark_elf 10y ago

There are some comments here as to motivation: why go through all this? I make video money using after effects, mainly. I'm chained to the oars. The choice of intermediate codec (ProRes) is surprisingly important, there are other solutions that don't make it for my workflow. And it's not just codec, lots of things about windows 10 make it an unprofessional choice. I was planning to build a windows box anyway, with i7 6900K, 128GB ram, ASRock X99 Taichi, GTX 1080, NVMe, all that. When I overlaid that over a hackintosh, it seemed a bit past what is possible, at least from a cursory look at tonymacx86. It's worth a week of work to me, maybe I'll look harder. Thanks for listening!

UpDownLeftRight 10y ago

Or you can get a Windows 10 machine from a reliable integrator (like Supermicro or ThinkMate) and it will "just work."

mmrr88 10y ago

I have a Toshiba Satellite Radius 11 L15W-... its a cheap 300 dollar laptop runs windows 10. changing the OS is not supported and actually blocked my the manufacturer. I was able to find a few tools to remove some of the counter measures set in place. It is now a Ubuntu Laptop, I would use a Mac for development but Macs are expensive. I have built 2 PC gaming rigs that were more expensive then the 1500 price tag of a hackintosh. Bottom line is you can get any modern OS working on almost any machine. It just starts to get really hacky and information can be hard to find.

xaduha 10y ago

If you're not doing VFIO, you're doing it wrong.

kilroy123 10y ago

While this PC looks great, visually, and spec wise; isn't this missing the point? It seems like a company needs to build a _very_ good linux distro with design first principles. It needs to work on a number of devices. More importantly, it needs to be a paid OS. It can have an open source distro underneath, but the UI needs to be created by people who are paid well.

wezm 10y ago
This is pretty much what the elementary folks are trying to do https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/
- kilroy123 10y ago
  Nice. Thank you for this. I've never heard of this before. I think it shouldn't be optional to pay. I want a high-end distro that's $50-60 and far more polished. Better or equal to macOS.
- string 10y ago
  I've been using elementaryOS for a while now, and it doesn't really compare to macOS yet unfortunately. It seems to me there is a disconnect between developers and designers. When I ask devs why there isn't a nice looking Linux distro, they ask me why I care about what the UI looks like. Designers don't use or care about Linux because of the lack of decent design software. As much as I love the concept of GIMP, it is not a realistic alternative to Adobe software (especially things like InDesign and XD) or Sketch, for example. As a designer-developer, Linux is still not an easy choice for me, as much as I'd like it to be. elementaryOS is a nice start, but I still end up using macOS if given the choice.

kuon 10y ago

I have been using a similar (a bit lower specs) hackintosh for 2 years. About two weeks ago, I decided to stop and look elsewhere. I started a small serie on my experience if you are interested: https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-motivations-b10accc10889#.k6ccx7dt5 https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-moti... I am still testing my current setup, but I guess I'll soon publish the last bit, with the setup I found and my conclusions on the switch.

harrygeez 10y ago
> FUCKING FULL SCREEN MODE WHEN THE GREEN BUTTON IS CLICKED Man this is so me when I updated to El Capitan. What is Apple thinking??? Now I have to hold alt just to increase my window size. At least give us an option to change it! How hard is that, Apple?
- kuon 10y ago
  I used the Moom to help me with that. Another good point for windows, it has nearly all the features of Moom, at least those I need.

notlisted 10y ago

I'm not a Hackintosh builder, have considered it many times. From the video's I've watched, the big trick, especially if you use Final Cut Pro X with OpenCL, is to avoid NVidia and use AMD Radeon video cards. Supposedly this makes the build process a lot easier/less finicky, and even faster. Can anyone confirm?

wiradikusuma 10y ago

Be careful with OS upgrades. I recently upgraded my hackintosh to macOS (Sierra) and now it can't shutdown/restart.

rallycarre 10y ago

I custom built my PC before knowing of what a hackintosh was so I didn't purchase my hardware specifically for it. According to the compatibility wiki my config was compatible. I remember during college of wanting to do some Ios development but afford a MAC. I spent atleast 20 hours of tweaking kewts settings and trying different distros. I finally got it to boot but it crashed whenever I tried to run the emulator. I haven't touched hackintosh stuff for several years but the grief and time wasted makes it not worth it. It's a shame apple is limiting their development tools to MacOS. They could learn a thing or two from Microsoft.

poyu 10y ago

I'm a Hackintosh user for almost 10 years (from 10.6!), though I do have a MacBook Pro with my when I'm out. As other people stated, yes, it is very time consuming to get it straight. Treat it as a hobby, you'll understand things about the Mac (or computers in general) other people don't, such as DSDT patches, how drivers are loaded, and Mac power management, etc. If you use Clover, and get all the patches right, you can almost get an update-proof setup (Except when you go from say 10.11 to 10.12). But even at the worst case, usually people on the Internet will figure out fast enough for you to apply the new patches. Minor updates are really really easy and fine. I always click Update without batting an eye. It's a tinkerer's hobby. If you like doing researches and being fine with spending time figuring out stuff on the Internet, I will say go for it and try it out! The process is fun and the result is very rewarding.

baudehlo 10y ago
So just like using Linux then? /s

jlgaddis 10y ago

I know I could Google and read about some experiences but since this made me think about it... have any of you HN'ers tried to virtualize OS X or run it virtualized (on anything other than an OS X host) on a regular basis? I've got a (still pretty new) high-end MacBook Pro sitting at the end of my desk but -- after putting together a new, extremely over-built workstation a few months ago -- I haven't even turned it on since I don't know when. I've got KVM/qemu, VMware Workstation, and VirtualBox all installed on my workstation, though, and it might be interesting to try to get OS X running under one of them.

Baeocystin 10y ago
I got Snow Leopard running under VMware a few years back. It 'worked', in that I could do most things, but sound was glitchy, and updates would regularly break things. My ultimate answer was just to give up on Apple on the desktop and stay in the Windows/Linux worlds. I'm just not going to invest any further time on a system that is owned by a company that clearly doesn't care about it, and is actively hostile to attempts (like virtualization) to use the system in a larger context.
tavert 10y ago
There are mac vagrant boxes available that work on a linux host. You may need to put vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--usbehci", "off"] in the vagrantfile.

toodlebunions 10y ago

Eventually you'll likely give in and install windows.

flyingfsck 10y ago

This seems reasonable: http://hackintoshmethod.com http://hackintoshmethod.com

crazy5sheep 10y ago

a bit off topic. NVIDIA driver for mac is kind of suck. the bug, which showing a transparent window whenever you try to open an epub file with ibook.app, is been there for a very long time, and still no fix yet.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
Still! I was hoping for a fix for that. I hear if you activate your onboard intel grapics it will work but I haven't managed to do that yet

1011_1101 10y ago

Unlocked CPU and Z-Board but no OC? With that config you should be easily able to run that CPU at 4.6GHz