5 ms·

"Here's what people who don't buy Macs want Apple to do"

smacktoward 10y ago
Yeah, that was my first thought too. Has Apple ever seen a single dime from the "Hackintosh community"? Why would they care about what people who by defintion are not customers want?
- elsurudo 10y ago
  Might be an opportunity to make them into customers. A lot of these people are probably people they alienated with their last Mac Pro generation.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    I don't know. I know some Hackintosh users, who do Hackintosh because real Macs are too expensive for them. I think for many people (including me), the Mac Mini was the next logical step, since it was affordable. Especially when it was still expandable (memory and disk). I think they make a mistake with making the Mini so unattractive. It may not be a blip on their radar, but I think it was a gateway machine for many people who later buy more Macs. However, now it's so unattractive that I can't see anyone buying them.
- xor1 10y ago
  >Has Apple ever seen a single dime from the "Hackintosh community"? My first three Mac systems as a poor student were Hackintoshes. Couldn't afford a real Macbook. The first one was a Dell Mini 9, which was a $200 netboook that could somehow run Snow Leopard flawlessly (with significant contributions from the community of course). As a working professional, I have spent close to $10k on Apple hardware in the past two years. I've also helped them make quite a bit of money through their App Store cut. I recently put together a dual-booting Windows 10/OSX system for usage at home, used for both gaming and development. I spent about $1200 on it, and I couldn't even get an equivalent desktop from Apple no matter how much I spent. My ceiling would have probably been around $3k.
  - jsz0 10y ago
    > My ceiling would have probably been around $3k. That gets you real close to buying an iMac for development and a PC for gaming. I think this is part of the reason Apple has pulled back from the high end. Hardware is cheap enough that we can use different devices for different purposes now. There are often some good advantages to doing it too. I like having my workstation in the office, my gaming PC in the living room, and a tiny little laptop for travel. That would have cost me close to $10k a decade ago!
- pekk 10y ago
  Nobody would run a Hackintosh unless they were enthusiastic about Apple's software and Apple in general. Otherwise, why put up with the trouble? I think that most of these people have a long history of buying things from Apple and really are customers. The issue here isn't piracy, but whether Apple is willing to listen to people who use non-Apple hardware. And since Apple's PCs aren't selling all that well, why refuse to consider input from people who love your stuff and can suggest slightly different approaches? Even people who never bought anything from Apple before are customers by definition the moment they do buy something from Apple. If Apple is trying to make money, it doesn't seem smart to take a dogmatic stance that the money of new customers isn't worth having. Everyone is by definition a possible future customer. Apple has a long history with tactics like gluing things shut, obfuscating software, enforcing walled gardens, banning the GPL, and an unusual degree of legal aggression toward people trying to interoperate with their products. There seems to be a well-established groupthink among Apple and its fans that this is the only possible future for Apple. But when Apple is more extreme on these tactics than almost any company that's still in the PC business, yet is not selling all that well, it really proves the viability of softer approaches. Apple can make money, depending on its execution maybe even a lot more money, by leaving this playbook behind. They could end Windows, taking all their existing fans, and adding new ones. But they can't do it until they can learn some humility from their epic steamrolling by the IBM PC clone market in the 80s and 90s. Apple swallowed their pride about PowerPC and started using the "Intel" from "Wintel" so why does it have to keep re-enacting the anticompetitive tactics from the dawn of the personal computer? If Apple's products really are the best on merit, it shouldn't be necessary for Apple to lock everything down at a technical level or at a licensing level or to use the law aggressively against people who just want to interact with Apple products.
- rorosaurus 10y ago
  Back when I built a Hackintosh in 2007/8, all the tutorials I saw encouraged people to buy a legitimate copy of OSX (and I did - $79 seemed fair to support the OS I wanted to use). Do I can definitely answer "yes" to this question.
- stordoff 10y ago
  Doesn't that assume they'll never be customers? If Apple provide the hardware they want, I don't see why that would be the case.
- chongli 10y ago
  You could say the same thing about people who pirate Adobe software as teenagers/young adults. If they're using the software all the time they're likely to get good enough with it that they'll want to make a job or a business out of it. At that point they become a customer. If Adobe software were somehow impossible to pirate then maybe they would've used and learned with an alternative.
megablast 10y ago
These people would probably be buying macs if they could get more out of the hardware. Macs are losing the power race, which is fine for most people, but not for some.
- ryan-allen 10y ago
  I didn't find it very difficult to make the switch from OS X to Windows. It's not like Apple have built some hyper revolutionary operating system that is years ahead of the competition. They're all similar and people complain about the little differences, like driving on one side of the road or the other. Really it's just minor things and you get used to it. It's so much better being on the side of the fence where you have more control of your hardware. I don't think I could ever go back to a Mac desktop now I'm used to having so much control.
  - cr__ 10y ago
    What extra control did you get?
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      Being able to use both major brands of gpu, being able to adopt tech when it comes out not when Apple rolls it out. Alternatively how about being able to get a flexible modular upgradable desktop starting at 500 instead of starting at 3500. This list could easily be a mile long.
edko 10y ago
I am waiting to see what iMacs Apple announces. I'd rather pay a premium and buy a legitimate Mac, but, if they don't announce anything for a few more months, or if the specs disappoint, I might build a Hackintosh.
- ryan-allen 10y ago
  Give Windows 10 a try, it's pretty good.
  - edko 10y ago
    That's what I have now. Windows 10 is OK-ish, but I miss macOS a lot. My plan is to buy a very strong iMac for my home office, and keep my Dell XPS 13 laptop with Windows 10 for when I am mobile.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  me too. one of the things I'd like to see them do with the iMac is offer overclocking and better cooling (i do a lot of work that doesn't benefit much from multiple cores. i need single-thread speed.) i doubt they will though.

Yeah, that was my first thought too. Has Apple ever seen a single dime from the "Hackintosh community"? Why would they care about what people who by defintion are not customers want?

elsurudo 10y ago
Might be an opportunity to make them into customers. A lot of these people are probably people they alienated with their last Mac Pro generation.
- danieldk 10y ago
  I don't know. I know some Hackintosh users, who do Hackintosh because real Macs are too expensive for them. I think for many people (including me), the Mac Mini was the next logical step, since it was affordable. Especially when it was still expandable (memory and disk). I think they make a mistake with making the Mini so unattractive. It may not be a blip on their radar, but I think it was a gateway machine for many people who later buy more Macs. However, now it's so unattractive that I can't see anyone buying them.
xor1 10y ago
>Has Apple ever seen a single dime from the "Hackintosh community"? My first three Mac systems as a poor student were Hackintoshes. Couldn't afford a real Macbook. The first one was a Dell Mini 9, which was a $200 netboook that could somehow run Snow Leopard flawlessly (with significant contributions from the community of course). As a working professional, I have spent close to $10k on Apple hardware in the past two years. I've also helped them make quite a bit of money through their App Store cut. I recently put together a dual-booting Windows 10/OSX system for usage at home, used for both gaming and development. I spent about $1200 on it, and I couldn't even get an equivalent desktop from Apple no matter how much I spent. My ceiling would have probably been around $3k.
- jsz0 10y ago
  > My ceiling would have probably been around $3k. That gets you real close to buying an iMac for development and a PC for gaming. I think this is part of the reason Apple has pulled back from the high end. Hardware is cheap enough that we can use different devices for different purposes now. There are often some good advantages to doing it too. I like having my workstation in the office, my gaming PC in the living room, and a tiny little laptop for travel. That would have cost me close to $10k a decade ago!
pekk 10y ago
Nobody would run a Hackintosh unless they were enthusiastic about Apple's software and Apple in general. Otherwise, why put up with the trouble? I think that most of these people have a long history of buying things from Apple and really are customers. The issue here isn't piracy, but whether Apple is willing to listen to people who use non-Apple hardware. And since Apple's PCs aren't selling all that well, why refuse to consider input from people who love your stuff and can suggest slightly different approaches? Even people who never bought anything from Apple before are customers by definition the moment they do buy something from Apple. If Apple is trying to make money, it doesn't seem smart to take a dogmatic stance that the money of new customers isn't worth having. Everyone is by definition a possible future customer. Apple has a long history with tactics like gluing things shut, obfuscating software, enforcing walled gardens, banning the GPL, and an unusual degree of legal aggression toward people trying to interoperate with their products. There seems to be a well-established groupthink among Apple and its fans that this is the only possible future for Apple. But when Apple is more extreme on these tactics than almost any company that's still in the PC business, yet is not selling all that well, it really proves the viability of softer approaches. Apple can make money, depending on its execution maybe even a lot more money, by leaving this playbook behind. They could end Windows, taking all their existing fans, and adding new ones. But they can't do it until they can learn some humility from their epic steamrolling by the IBM PC clone market in the 80s and 90s. Apple swallowed their pride about PowerPC and started using the "Intel" from "Wintel" so why does it have to keep re-enacting the anticompetitive tactics from the dawn of the personal computer? If Apple's products really are the best on merit, it shouldn't be necessary for Apple to lock everything down at a technical level or at a licensing level or to use the law aggressively against people who just want to interact with Apple products.
rorosaurus 10y ago
Back when I built a Hackintosh in 2007/8, all the tutorials I saw encouraged people to buy a legitimate copy of OSX (and I did - $79 seemed fair to support the OS I wanted to use). Do I can definitely answer "yes" to this question.
stordoff 10y ago
Doesn't that assume they'll never be customers? If Apple provide the hardware they want, I don't see why that would be the case.
chongli 10y ago
You could say the same thing about people who pirate Adobe software as teenagers/young adults. If they're using the software all the time they're likely to get good enough with it that they'll want to make a job or a business out of it. At that point they become a customer. If Adobe software were somehow impossible to pirate then maybe they would've used and learned with an alternative.

megablast 10y ago

These people would probably be buying macs if they could get more out of the hardware. Macs are losing the power race, which is fine for most people, but not for some.

ryan-allen 10y ago
I didn't find it very difficult to make the switch from OS X to Windows. It's not like Apple have built some hyper revolutionary operating system that is years ahead of the competition. They're all similar and people complain about the little differences, like driving on one side of the road or the other. Really it's just minor things and you get used to it. It's so much better being on the side of the fence where you have more control of your hardware. I don't think I could ever go back to a Mac desktop now I'm used to having so much control.
- cr__ 10y ago
  What extra control did you get?
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Being able to use both major brands of gpu, being able to adopt tech when it comes out not when Apple rolls it out. Alternatively how about being able to get a flexible modular upgradable desktop starting at 500 instead of starting at 3500. This list could easily be a mile long.

edko 10y ago

I am waiting to see what iMacs Apple announces. I'd rather pay a premium and buy a legitimate Mac, but, if they don't announce anything for a few more months, or if the specs disappoint, I might build a Hackintosh.

ryan-allen 10y ago
Give Windows 10 a try, it's pretty good.
- edko 10y ago
  That's what I have now. Windows 10 is OK-ish, but I miss macOS a lot. My plan is to buy a very strong iMac for my home office, and keep my Dell XPS 13 laptop with Windows 10 for when I am mobile.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
me too. one of the things I'd like to see them do with the iMac is offer overclocking and better cooling (i do a lot of work that doesn't benefit much from multiple cores. i need single-thread speed.) i doubt they will though.