8 ms·

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 proble

by 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
[deleted]
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.
    - lisper 10y ago
      > I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth. To a certain extent that is certainly true. But there was a time during the Snow Leopard era when Macs were extraordinarily reliable compared to the then-contemporary competition, and even compared to anything before or since. Things have gone downhill since then because Apple decided to de-emphasize reliability in favor of other things like thinness, and the merging of desktop and mobile environments.
    - askvictor 10y ago
      We had an (recent) iMac that just kept randomly crashing. Apple replaced most of the parts inside it, and it kept doing it. Eventually they have us new one. Kudos for that; random errors are a pain to diagnose and fix, but they did.
  - username223 10y ago
    Agreed -- the new "productivity" applications are a disaster. If you shoot RAW, you have to either stick with an old version of Aperture, or switch to Lightroom (typical Adobe crap), because Photos doesn't do lens profiles. If you want to create a bound book, you can't use Pages, because it doesn't do inner and outer margins, only left and right. For now, it's less work for me to stay than to go, but Apple needs to pay more attention to their software.
  - askvictor 10y ago
    Indeed; I switched to Mac for 6 months after getting sick of trying to get things to work how I want them and be stable, on windows or Linux. Ended up being Just as fiddly, and needing to reboot at least once per week due to some kernel item chewing through increasing CPU. back on windows now; not perfect, but good enough for now. My conjecture is that my hatred for any system will increase the more I use it, to the point of switching to another system, then the cycle repeats.
- nottorp 10y ago
  The trick is to ignore OS updates after the initial setup, until you absolutely need a newer version or at least 6 months have passed and you can reserve a day for troubleshooting. Of course, it helps if you have a macbook pro in addition to your desktop; you can check out the new stuff on the genuine apple machine, and maybe get away with postponing updates on your desktop even more.
- dasil003 10y ago
  I always felt the same way. Even a huge cost premium matters very little to me since it's a machine I use professionally. However I'm starting to give it serious consideration as Apple is signaling pretty hard that they don't give a shit about desktops any more, and MacOS is not seeing much development other than some sloppy seconds and half baked ports of iOS ideas. I'm pretty heavily depend on MacOS for my daily workflow these days, but the writing is on the wall that I've got to start thinking about Linux or even Windows over the next 5-10 years. In that light, the benefit of the hackintosh is not only being able to get current hardware at a fair price, but also being able to hedge my bets and dual boot to Linux to get my feet wet.
  - justinclift 10y ago
    As a data point, I was putting together a super cheap "build server" (for compiling stuff on) recently. Supermicro motherboard, and dual 6 core Xeon cpu's (E5645). Cost of the motherboard and cpu's (from Ebay) was ~$US140.00. 32GB of ECC ram to match was ~US60.00. Everything else needed (power supply, etc), I already had around. Just to see if it would work, I hackintoshed it prior to installing FreeBSD. Apart from the network ports, everything else (Nvidia card, USB, etc) worked. Network connectivity was fixable by just plugging in a USB3<->ethernet adapter (also had one handy), and voila, usable desktop. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00XZQRMRU/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00XZQRMRU/ It wouldn't be surprising (to me), if newer generation Supermicro boards also worked. That would open up possibilities for lots more cpu grunt in an OSX box. :)
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    > MacOS is not seeing much development other than some sloppy seconds and half baked ports of iOS ideas While I may not wholly disagree with this, what OS is doing much better? Linux is still slowly catching up to the macOS graphics compositor from 10 years ago, and Microsoft is busy integrating its own half-baked port of Windows Tablet Edition... True Windows does have some momentum with the new ubuntu subsystem, but that's still catching up when macOS is a real native UNIX from the ground up. There's not much more I want out of my OS... a new filesystem to replace the 30-year-old-design HFS+ is already on the way, and while I'd love a more modern CLI userland, that isn't going to happen due to legal reasons, so I'm fine with homebrew. They just need to fix SMB and clean up bugs and performance issues for me to be totally happy.
tumblen 10y ago
I think things have improved in the Hackintosh community. I built one a few months ago and was up and running in a day. Small issues since, but there's always a solution + guide within 15 minutes of searching (and it's usually just flipping a flag in Clover). When an update comes out, I just wait a week or so to make sure there are no issues and then update (no issues at all so far with that). Having a ridiculously powerful computer running macOS at a great price has been such a joy. If I'm talking to someone who is the kind of person that builds computers and is comfortable with a bit of command-line & config, I always recommend them to look into a hackintosh because a lot of the uncertainty has been removed thanks to the great community around it.
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  it really depends what type of hardware you get.
- rickyc091 10y ago
  Does iMessage work without utilizing a real mac's serial number? I learned my lesson after I used the same serial to get it working on my hackintosh and then I got locked out on my real mac. Ended up resolving it after a few support messages.
  - colept 10y ago
    Yes it works with a spoofed serial
jafingi 10y ago
It's _NOT_ a problem anymore. I just bought a Hackintosh with components from Tonymacx86's guide. It was literally just to assemble everything, create a bootable USB with the Unibeast tool (which uses the Clover bootloader) and then install it. And it just works. OS updates etc. are not an issue, and I do it just like I would on my Macbook Pro. Only thing is iMessage/iCloud. It takes a little to set up correctly, as you'd have to "hack" the serial numbers etc., but once it works, it just works.
matt4077 10y ago
It's quite easy to do now, but the community is incredibly annoying. The software is usually on sourceforge or something even shadier, it's rarely actually OSS-licensed, and configuration/documentation/interfaces are a nightmare of incomprehensible incoherence. There cannot be a software community less professional. I've seen Minecraft plugins by 8 year olds much better in these categories.
- wmf 10y ago
  Android ROMs are the same way. Maybe something about the semi-illegality of it brings out the old DOS scene culture.
  - Larrikin 10y ago
    Honestly the most annoying thing about that community is that you're expected to wade through hundreds of pages on forums, piecing together information, and people get furious because the answer to your question was on page 63 out of 124. The custom roms will list the very specific things that differentiate them but there are hardly any guides with best practices except maybe if you have the most popular phone out that year.
    - clubm8 10y ago
      So basically the installability of Linux circa 2003, but with the bonus that security updates might brick my system?
    - freshyill 10y ago
      So it's slightly better than trying to find an answer on Apple's support forums. I'm kidding, but only a little. This actually sounds a lot like the state of the Minecraft ecosystem last time I checked, about two years ago.
  - SXX 10y ago
    IMHO this have really little to do with legal status, but more with work atmosphere in community. You can see exactly the same problem on console hacking / homebrew scene. From one side there is huge user base full of people who want to get something working with no effort and usually tend to demand something from developers, but very few can provide even proper bug reports. On other side there is bunch of "experts" some of which tend to leech of others work and even less of actual skilled developers. So it's just stressful to participate those projects. In the end most of enthusiasts that stick there must have very strong personality or be selfish persons that looking for cheap popularity. Also there are humble guys who silently work on their own thing, but they usually work alone or in very small groups and don't communicate with outsiders. And of course most of time they don't ever get credit for their work on BSP reverse engineering and fixes.
rsync 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..." As the owner of an early-2009 octo-mac-pro, I am very interested in learning about how to max that system out to the gills. For instance, I am under the impression that it is now possible to boot from a pci based SSD card on that system. Further, I believe it is possible to add a card that gives me USB3/SATA3 (although if I am booting from PCI, I don't really care if my slow mass storage internal four drives are SATA2). Finally, I think there is some apple-blessed video card that is quite a bit stronger than the original GT120 cards I have in my system. I've seen bits and pieces here and there about maxing out a mac pro and bringing it very close to "modern" but it would be nice if it was all in one place somewhere... FWIW, other than maxing out the ram, I really have no problem with the existing RAM options and the dual-cpus that I already have (which bring me to octo-core). Even 8 years later, the machine is not slowing me down at all in the cpu/ram department (and I only have 6 GB).
- iamacynic 10y ago
  a while ago i paid the premium for the mac sapphire hd 7950 and it works great. it significantly speeds everything up and allows me to run 4k + another display on my cheese grater 2008 pro. i'm sure it's probably very easy to make a non-mac video card work but i can't be bothered.
- haxxorfreak 10y ago
  I have the same Early 2009 octa-core model and have done a few upgrades here and there and I have to say I find the system nearly as responsive as the new 2016 MacBook Pro I use at work. The first thing I added was a CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 SATA3/USB3 card. This gives you two internal SATA3 connectors (bootable) which I'm using for my macOS boot SSD. It also has two eSATA ports and 2x USB 3.0 ports and only takes up a single PCIe slot. They've since come out with a new card that adds a USB 3.1 Type-C port. No drivers needed, it "just works". Next was a NVIDIA GTX 970 card, this works perfectly in 10.11/10.12 once you've used the GT120 card to install the NVIDIA Web Drivers. You don't get the boot screen unless you get the card ROM flashed by macvidcards.com ($$) but I haven't found this to inconvenient as I have left the GT120 in a spare PCIe slot so if I need to use the boot selector for some reason I can just swap the mini-DisplayPort cable over. You can go up to a GTX 980 Ti but you're limited to Maxwell cards as NVIDIA hasn't released macOS drivers for Pascal. Finally I picked up 64GB of DDR3 1333 MHz ECC RAM on eBay that was pulled from server for under $200, this was mainly to fulfill my dreams of being able to say I have 64GB of RAM but I run a lot of VMs for network simulations and it really helps to have the extra memory. I've also flashed the SMC so the machine thinks it's a MacPro5,1 of the 2010+ generation, you'll need to do this if you want to upgrade the CPUs (I haven't yet) but has the added benefit of letting 10.12 install without any hacks or modifications to the OS. If you're on 10.11 now you'll have to disable SIP temporarily to run the firmware update but it was otherwise quick and painless, this is the best place I found with clear instructions: http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.0.html http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.0.html All in all this is the best Mac I've ever owned and it amazes me it works as well as it does being almost 8 years old now.
Cacti 10y ago
If you are trying get OSX on an arbitrary piece of hardware, it could take quite a bit of effort and have any number of weird problems, as you suggest. However, if you stick to known hardware (mainly this means specific motherboards with well supported chipsets) it's quite straight forward and reliable. If you're starting out without existing hardware, just stick to the known MBs and you shouldn't have any issues. Very dependable hardware lists are available at tonymac and osx86 project, just use that. Hardware support has come a long, long way in the past few years.

by jwr 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

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.
  - lisper 10y ago
    > I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth. To a certain extent that is certainly true. But there was a time during the Snow Leopard era when Macs were extraordinarily reliable compared to the then-contemporary competition, and even compared to anything before or since. Things have gone downhill since then because Apple decided to de-emphasize reliability in favor of other things like thinness, and the merging of desktop and mobile environments.
  - askvictor 10y ago
    We had an (recent) iMac that just kept randomly crashing. Apple replaced most of the parts inside it, and it kept doing it. Eventually they have us new one. Kudos for that; random errors are a pain to diagnose and fix, but they did.
- username223 10y ago
  Agreed -- the new "productivity" applications are a disaster. If you shoot RAW, you have to either stick with an old version of Aperture, or switch to Lightroom (typical Adobe crap), because Photos doesn't do lens profiles. If you want to create a bound book, you can't use Pages, because it doesn't do inner and outer margins, only left and right. For now, it's less work for me to stay than to go, but Apple needs to pay more attention to their software.
- askvictor 10y ago
  Indeed; I switched to Mac for 6 months after getting sick of trying to get things to work how I want them and be stable, on windows or Linux. Ended up being Just as fiddly, and needing to reboot at least once per week due to some kernel item chewing through increasing CPU. back on windows now; not perfect, but good enough for now. My conjecture is that my hatred for any system will increase the more I use it, to the point of switching to another system, then the cycle repeats.
nottorp 10y ago
The trick is to ignore OS updates after the initial setup, until you absolutely need a newer version or at least 6 months have passed and you can reserve a day for troubleshooting. Of course, it helps if you have a macbook pro in addition to your desktop; you can check out the new stuff on the genuine apple machine, and maybe get away with postponing updates on your desktop even more.
dasil003 10y ago
I always felt the same way. Even a huge cost premium matters very little to me since it's a machine I use professionally. However I'm starting to give it serious consideration as Apple is signaling pretty hard that they don't give a shit about desktops any more, and MacOS is not seeing much development other than some sloppy seconds and half baked ports of iOS ideas. I'm pretty heavily depend on MacOS for my daily workflow these days, but the writing is on the wall that I've got to start thinking about Linux or even Windows over the next 5-10 years. In that light, the benefit of the hackintosh is not only being able to get current hardware at a fair price, but also being able to hedge my bets and dual boot to Linux to get my feet wet.
- justinclift 10y ago
  As a data point, I was putting together a super cheap "build server" (for compiling stuff on) recently. Supermicro motherboard, and dual 6 core Xeon cpu's (E5645). Cost of the motherboard and cpu's (from Ebay) was ~$US140.00. 32GB of ECC ram to match was ~US60.00. Everything else needed (power supply, etc), I already had around. Just to see if it would work, I hackintoshed it prior to installing FreeBSD. Apart from the network ports, everything else (Nvidia card, USB, etc) worked. Network connectivity was fixable by just plugging in a USB3<->ethernet adapter (also had one handy), and voila, usable desktop. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00XZQRMRU/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00XZQRMRU/ It wouldn't be surprising (to me), if newer generation Supermicro boards also worked. That would open up possibilities for lots more cpu grunt in an OSX box. :)
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > MacOS is not seeing much development other than some sloppy seconds and half baked ports of iOS ideas While I may not wholly disagree with this, what OS is doing much better? Linux is still slowly catching up to the macOS graphics compositor from 10 years ago, and Microsoft is busy integrating its own half-baked port of Windows Tablet Edition... True Windows does have some momentum with the new ubuntu subsystem, but that's still catching up when macOS is a real native UNIX from the ground up. There's not much more I want out of my OS... a new filesystem to replace the 30-year-old-design HFS+ is already on the way, and while I'd love a more modern CLI userland, that isn't going to happen due to legal reasons, so I'm fine with homebrew. They just need to fix SMB and clean up bugs and performance issues for me to be totally happy.

tumblen 10y ago

I think things have improved in the Hackintosh community. I built one a few months ago and was up and running in a day. Small issues since, but there's always a solution + guide within 15 minutes of searching (and it's usually just flipping a flag in Clover). When an update comes out, I just wait a week or so to make sure there are no issues and then update (no issues at all so far with that). Having a ridiculously powerful computer running macOS at a great price has been such a joy. If I'm talking to someone who is the kind of person that builds computers and is comfortable with a bit of command-line & config, I always recommend them to look into a hackintosh because a lot of the uncertainty has been removed thanks to the great community around it.

oculusthrift 10y ago
it really depends what type of hardware you get.
rickyc091 10y ago
Does iMessage work without utilizing a real mac's serial number? I learned my lesson after I used the same serial to get it working on my hackintosh and then I got locked out on my real mac. Ended up resolving it after a few support messages.
- colept 10y ago
  Yes it works with a spoofed serial

jafingi 10y ago

It's _NOT_ a problem anymore. I just bought a Hackintosh with components from Tonymacx86's guide. It was literally just to assemble everything, create a bootable USB with the Unibeast tool (which uses the Clover bootloader) and then install it. And it just works. OS updates etc. are not an issue, and I do it just like I would on my Macbook Pro. Only thing is iMessage/iCloud. It takes a little to set up correctly, as you'd have to "hack" the serial numbers etc., but once it works, it just works.

matt4077 10y ago

It's quite easy to do now, but the community is incredibly annoying. The software is usually on sourceforge or something even shadier, it's rarely actually OSS-licensed, and configuration/documentation/interfaces are a nightmare of incomprehensible incoherence. There cannot be a software community less professional. I've seen Minecraft plugins by 8 year olds much better in these categories.

wmf 10y ago
Android ROMs are the same way. Maybe something about the semi-illegality of it brings out the old DOS scene culture.
- Larrikin 10y ago
  Honestly the most annoying thing about that community is that you're expected to wade through hundreds of pages on forums, piecing together information, and people get furious because the answer to your question was on page 63 out of 124. The custom roms will list the very specific things that differentiate them but there are hardly any guides with best practices except maybe if you have the most popular phone out that year.
  - clubm8 10y ago
    So basically the installability of Linux circa 2003, but with the bonus that security updates might brick my system?
  - freshyill 10y ago
    So it's slightly better than trying to find an answer on Apple's support forums. I'm kidding, but only a little. This actually sounds a lot like the state of the Minecraft ecosystem last time I checked, about two years ago.
- SXX 10y ago
  IMHO this have really little to do with legal status, but more with work atmosphere in community. You can see exactly the same problem on console hacking / homebrew scene. From one side there is huge user base full of people who want to get something working with no effort and usually tend to demand something from developers, but very few can provide even proper bug reports. On other side there is bunch of "experts" some of which tend to leech of others work and even less of actual skilled developers. So it's just stressful to participate those projects. In the end most of enthusiasts that stick there must have very strong personality or be selfish persons that looking for cheap popularity. Also there are humble guys who silently work on their own thing, but they usually work alone or in very small groups and don't communicate with outsiders. And of course most of time they don't ever get credit for their work on BSP reverse engineering and fixes.

rsync 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..." As the owner of an early-2009 octo-mac-pro, I am very interested in learning about how to max that system out to the gills. For instance, I am under the impression that it is now possible to boot from a pci based SSD card on that system. Further, I believe it is possible to add a card that gives me USB3/SATA3 (although if I am booting from PCI, I don't really care if my slow mass storage internal four drives are SATA2). Finally, I think there is some apple-blessed video card that is quite a bit stronger than the original GT120 cards I have in my system. I've seen bits and pieces here and there about maxing out a mac pro and bringing it very close to "modern" but it would be nice if it was all in one place somewhere... FWIW, other than maxing out the ram, I really have no problem with the existing RAM options and the dual-cpus that I already have (which bring me to octo-core). Even 8 years later, the machine is not slowing me down at all in the cpu/ram department (and I only have 6 GB).

iamacynic 10y ago
a while ago i paid the premium for the mac sapphire hd 7950 and it works great. it significantly speeds everything up and allows me to run 4k + another display on my cheese grater 2008 pro. i'm sure it's probably very easy to make a non-mac video card work but i can't be bothered.
haxxorfreak 10y ago
I have the same Early 2009 octa-core model and have done a few upgrades here and there and I have to say I find the system nearly as responsive as the new 2016 MacBook Pro I use at work. The first thing I added was a CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 SATA3/USB3 card. This gives you two internal SATA3 connectors (bootable) which I'm using for my macOS boot SSD. It also has two eSATA ports and 2x USB 3.0 ports and only takes up a single PCIe slot. They've since come out with a new card that adds a USB 3.1 Type-C port. No drivers needed, it "just works". Next was a NVIDIA GTX 970 card, this works perfectly in 10.11/10.12 once you've used the GT120 card to install the NVIDIA Web Drivers. You don't get the boot screen unless you get the card ROM flashed by macvidcards.com ($$) but I haven't found this to inconvenient as I have left the GT120 in a spare PCIe slot so if I need to use the boot selector for some reason I can just swap the mini-DisplayPort cable over. You can go up to a GTX 980 Ti but you're limited to Maxwell cards as NVIDIA hasn't released macOS drivers for Pascal. Finally I picked up 64GB of DDR3 1333 MHz ECC RAM on eBay that was pulled from server for under $200, this was mainly to fulfill my dreams of being able to say I have 64GB of RAM but I run a lot of VMs for network simulations and it really helps to have the extra memory. I've also flashed the SMC so the machine thinks it's a MacPro5,1 of the 2010+ generation, you'll need to do this if you want to upgrade the CPUs (I haven't yet) but has the added benefit of letting 10.12 install without any hacks or modifications to the OS. If you're on 10.11 now you'll have to disable SIP temporarily to run the firmware update but it was otherwise quick and painless, this is the best place I found with clear instructions: http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.0.html http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.0.html All in all this is the best Mac I've ever owned and it amazes me it works as well as it does being almost 8 years old now.

Cacti 10y ago

If you are trying get OSX on an arbitrary piece of hardware, it could take quite a bit of effort and have any number of weird problems, as you suggest. However, if you stick to known hardware (mainly this means specific motherboards with well supported chipsets) it's quite straight forward and reliable. If you're starting out without existing hardware, just stick to the known MBs and you shouldn't have any issues. Very dependable hardware lists are available at tonymac and osx86 project, just use that. Hardware support has come a long, long way in the past few years.