15 ms·

Hackintosh is almost dead

549 points by ingve 3y ago

wutwutwat 3y ago
I think this article reaches a valid conclusion based on the wrong evidence. It claims hackintosh is dead because they are dropping Wifi drivers. Hackintosh is dead because the number of major versions that will support x86 are 2-3 at best and after that, the OS will only run on apple silicon. Maybe if we’re lucky an arm chip similar enough will come along but I don’t see many motherboards socketed for arm chips. It is dead, but not because of WiFi driver support.
Retr0id 3y ago
macOS supports running as a paravirtualised guest OS (officially, on an apple-hardware host also running macOS). If there is to be a "next gen" of hackintoshing, I think it'd be based on a cut-down linux host acting as a shim between the real hardware and the paravirt interface. See also: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amazon.com/T/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amaz... "This patch set introduces a new ARM and HVF specific machine type called "vmapple". It mimicks the device model that Apple's proprietary Virtualization.Framework exposes, but implements it in QEMU."
- Asooka 3y ago
  It would be interesting to see how feasible it is to run that on an Arm workstation, e.g. an Ampere Altra. Or going the other way and trying to squeeze macOS on to the latest Raspberry Pi.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    Would be cool and ironic to get the full Macos on Android hardware.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      I would pay at least $100 to have MacOS running on an Android tablet.
      - mdaniel 3y ago
        Lucky you, that's how much they used to charge when one could actually, no kidding, buy Snow Leopard. I paid it so that my hackintosh (on HP Mini) wasn't stolen and I still have the CD-ROM, which shows you how long ago they cared about making the OS a purchasable thing
- m463 3y ago
  I was about to say that VMs will always be wanted.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  One thing I've been on the hunt for is a good server hypervisor solution for Apple Silicon. I would like to put an Apple Silicon Mac Mini in my rack, and it would be really nice to have a minimally bootstrapped host OS running a handful of macOS VMs for various purposes. The best I'm aware of currently is UTM which has some scripting capabilities. But that is very far off from the experience with Proxmox.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8&themeRefresh=1
    - hamandcheese 3y ago
      I think you missed the "Apple Silicon" part of my comment.
  - brirec 3y ago
    I know Cirrus CI uses (and I think developed(?) Tart^1 as a scriptable VMM for macOS CI. [1]: https://tart.run/ https://tart.run/
- DrNosferatu 3y ago
  Came here to write what the parent is saying: exploit the virtualization route to trick MacOS into running on the target hardware.
bsdpufferfish 3y ago
Additional reasons: - there is less alternative hardware I want to use. I want Apple Silicon processors, materials, and there just isn't much high quality competition. - Because of inflation the Apple premium isn't as high as it used to be. You get a Mac mini or MacBook Air at very competitive prices (RAM is still painful). - Linux Desktop software is more competitive and fills some of the roles that needed macOS before.
- asdff 3y ago
  Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
  - esafak 3y ago
    $500 for a Mac is great! $100 for an Intel is great too. PCs used to cost thousands of dollars! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT
  - shagie 3y ago
    > I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a lot of utility in it that hasn't depreciated significantly in the 2 years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the role that it has, it becomes outdated in another 2 or 3 years... and wouldn't be surprised if it lasts another 2 or 3 beyond that. If you spent $700 on it in 2020 at release, it is still working as well as it did on the day you bought it. You may be seeing the premium from when it was bought being attached to the current used price - and there are less expensive ones available now - but the device, for what it was when I got it is still providing value and selling it used would mean I'd need to get a new one... at a similar price as what I'd sell it for. > sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc. I will note that for me, in the spot where it is, the "multiple drive bays, pcie, etc." represents a worse device as it doesn't sit nicely under a monitor on a small desk. Part of the choice of the Mac mini for me for that role was its form factor and quiet running.
Muromec 3y ago
Next in the series: EU mandates Apple to sign 3rd party hobbyist drivers to enable Hackintosh enthusiasts.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Apple never licenced their OS to run on non Apple hardware, with exception of when it was on death bed shortly before the NeXT reverse acquisition, and Steve Jobs killing all agreements with clone makers. Hardly the same of the current DMA requirements.
  - Muromec 3y ago
    They are always one step away from another regulation even if the current one doesn’t apply in this way.
monetus 3y ago
Bad news for the indie music scene using these, where they just want to be able to run their VSTs and DAWs. Some will switch back to macs, so worth it for apple I guess.
- WWLink 3y ago
  This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad. I spent the last week shopping around for an audio interface and every single model had people complaining about driver issues and latency and "random loud static" or other crazy things when using Windows. Always Windows. Crazy stuff.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Except that Apple breaks audio applications with every new release of macOS and has for years. And, it's just a matter of time before Apple kills basically every DAW and VST when they finally kill off OpenGL on macOS. Edit: What I have said is true here, so I'm unsure why the downvotes.
    - WWLink 3y ago
      Why would anyone ever use anything other than Logic Pro? /s
    - MenhirMike 3y ago
      Curious, why would OpenGL break VSTs? (And yes, I get that AU is the preferred way over VST2 or even VST3, which is why most modern plugins are available in AU as well. I just don't see how OpenGL plays into this.)
      - conradfr 3y ago
        A lot of plugins use OpenGL, it's just that simple :)
        3y ago
actimia 3y ago
I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now. Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around. Now if we could have Windows running on an M3 chip with the nice touchpad and battery, that would be really nice.
- joemi 3y ago
  I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What software do you have issue with, and why?
  - kybernetyk 3y ago
    I think he's missing the forced advertisements in the macOS startmenu. Or the forced restarts/updates :)
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL. Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck. There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in macOS. It's bizarre. Or the fact that macOS doesn't implement basic protocols for external monitors, making macOS work terribly with non-Apple monitors.
    - joemi 3y ago
      > Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck. I have non-Apple bluetooth headphones (Sennheisers) and this isn't something that happens on my M1 MacBook Pro. Is this a common issue for other people?
mchannon 3y ago
A $9 USB to WiFi dongle addresses my networking needs.
- wellthisisgreat 3y ago
  Not the iServices though?
  - mchannon 3y ago
    Not all of them, no. In exchange for giving up a few minor bells and whistles I gain what I’m looking for.
verticalscaler 3y ago
In the olden times this used to be called the Jade plan: I don’t really complain. I had a good run which helped me skip over the worst price/performance Mac lineup that I remember. There’re now plenty good choices within the current crop of M1 / M2 / M3 machines and I’ll be following eBay closely for a good used Mac mini / studio models. Or maybe even splurge on something new. I've been doing it for ages as Apple hardware holds its resale value exceptionally well. You can use the often exaggerated price premium to your advantage - buy brand new default config at an opportune moment in the upgrade cycle, sell just in time for a coveted new release. This works even better if you happen to be traveling somewhere where Apple devices are unusually expensive. I'm still on the M1 Air and will likely sell it just before a M4 release 12-18 months from now. Cost of ownership averages out to <$0.25/day.
haunter 3y ago
Well I can run Mac OS in Proxmox nowadays so that's killed the "bare matel" Hackintosh for me. Yes it takes time to set it up (once!) but I much prefer KVM now than fiddling with hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8
- drumttocs8 3y ago
  Yep, this is exactly what I do. It's nice to be able to use Messages from my desktop, plus it fulfills an edge case of 2-way backup with Synology Drive and iCloud for me
- tripdout 3y ago
  There's no GPU acceleration is there?
  - jwells89 3y ago
    There can be if you’ve got a spare PCI-E slot to plug a supported AMD GPU into and pass through to the VM.
    - AnthonBerg 3y ago
      This works very well, especially if the VM storage is on a fast SSD linux md raid array. Very very snappy Mac working environment.
- k8sToGo 3y ago
  Why are you using Proxmox instead of just kvm? Are you running more than just Mac?
- m463 3y ago
  this. A lot of the ground hackintosh broke like opencore is directly in use with VMs
bruce511 3y ago
Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using. Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work. Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere. Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  With a little preparation setting up a Hackintosh is not much more difficult than setting up an actual Mac. What you're describing is a myth or just out of date.
- hackburg 3y ago
  [dead]
- hparadiz 3y ago
  It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
  - derefr 3y ago
    The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy the equivalent-specced Mac. The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible. People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)
jwells89 3y ago
It can still be useful for those looking to run older versions of macOS for some reason or another. If there’s PPC applications that one wants to run for example, you can piece together a Snow Leopard hackintosh from used parts that will run PPC apps through Rosetta faster than any real PPC mac ever could while be also being easier and more cheap to maintain. From time to time I’ll consider building such a box as a time-frozen “zen machine” that runs OS X 10.6 or 10.9, is disconnected from modern distractions, and will never be subject to the disruptions that software updates can bring.
givemeethekeys 3y ago
I'd give Windows some credit - it is actually quite good and stable these days.
- nirav72 3y ago
  No denying that windows these days isn’t stable. Indeed it is. My biggest issue is all the third party crap I never asked for gets installed with it. Not to mention all the Microsoft services that I don’t want to use, but still manage to be there. Like OneDrive. Sure one can uninstall it. But then see the mess it leaves with the way files are saved in the documents directory. Even when setting up a Windows 11 VM , I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    > I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down. All of that is automated now. https://atlasos.net https://atlasos.net
    - nirav72 3y ago
      yeah, I've used plenty of community made tools to de-bloat windows. But that's not the point. We shouldn't have to do that. Especially when its a paid windows license, I shouldn't have to spend time dealing with Microsoft's effort at further squeezing out more revenue from their OS platform.
      - xcv123 3y ago
        It was even worse in the Win95/98 era. I remember reinstalling the entire network stack multiple times in one day just to get TCP/IP working. The operating system was an extremely broken piece of shit and wasted days of my life. Shoulda this. Shoulda that. This is just the reality of Microsoft that we have to accept, and it will never change. There are tools to deal with it. So I use the tools and move on with my life.
mundays 3y ago
Now that their MacBooks come with 120hz screens with acceptable response time (unlike their early 120hz screens), the value proposition for hackintosh isn't as alluring for me. Previously, I've been worried about the T2 chip and the trend of Apple locking down MacOS, which also turned out to be less of an issue that I thought. The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.
- acmj 3y ago
  > The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming. Mac gaming is probably getting better thanks to wine, crossover, GPTK and Whisky [1]. I am not a gamer but I have seen others playing serious Windows games like FF7 remake (not sure if that counts) on mac. [1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
  - mundays 3y ago
    The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games (for now).
    - acmj 3y ago
      Sure, nothing beats bootcamp but that is not strictly macos. Apple's GPTK released last year seems to have greatly advanced gaming compatibility. Probably lots of games still don't work but it looks promising and is getting better. Hope Apple can continue to put resources into that.
      - mundays 3y ago
        I do hope that they would steer some of their resources from Apple Arcade into cross platform porting toolkits. I think the fundamental problem still remains that games unlike softwares are media and cannot be substituted with equivalents. By pushing their proprietary tech and neglecting native macOS ecosystem over the years, Apple has willingly pushed themselves in to the same corner as with console makers where they cannot compete with the value proposition of PC because of the overwhelming majority of exclusive titles that only run on PC. It's either all or nothing in terms of game coverage, because that's what ultimately allows consumers to "buy one device for (mostly) everything" for a hobby that takes significant upfront investment unlike netflix and hulu for example.
KingOfLechia 3y ago
Other than trying out the MacOS for the first time to learn how bad it is, why would anyone make a hackintosh? Windows and Linux are infinitely better operating systems, more open, with better backwards compatibility, more hardware support, independence from vendor servers and more available software. A reminder that with MacOS you need internet connection in order to re-install the OS as it requires activation just like iPads and iPhones. Imagine one day Apple stops supporting your Macbook model, shuts down its activation server and your computer turns into brick after something goes wrong and it requires a factory reset.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  When was the last time you used Windows?
  - KingOfLechia 3y ago
    now
  - PhasmaFelis 3y ago
    Or Mac...
- mundays 3y ago
  Yes, Tim Cook could flip a switch and my mac would become activation locked. Considering that Windows 11 has been working really hard to sneak remote attestation below our noses (and other stuff), I think it's safe to cross out Windows as well.
  - KingOfLechia 3y ago
    As long as Microsoft wants to keep Windows compatible with user-controllable hardware (like computers that let you disable secure boot and TPM or enroll custom keys), there should always be a way to debloat Windows.
    - treyd 3y ago
jupp0r 3y ago
Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm still surprised this requires special interaction with the hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.
- mid-kid 3y ago
  Custom drivers trip some security features and "taint" the kernel.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    How does that impact iMessage? Are parts of it implemented in the kernel?
    - mid-kid 3y ago
      The application can see that the kernel is tainted and refuse to run. Similarly, some kernel-related functionality may be disabled. None of this requires iMessage to run in the kernel or have a module of its own.
    - niteshade 3y ago
      I remember reading (perhaps here on HN) that Apple does weird/nonstandard things to wifi packets to enable Continuity/Handoff features, so it could be related.
    - philistine 3y ago
      I'm not a specialist, but there's a chain of trust you need to maintain to have the full set of features. If it's ever broken, you're sent to the gulag. I broke the chain when reinstalling like an old-timer on my M1 Macbook Air and was then forced to enter my password twice to unlock the Mac. I had to reflash with a second Mac to restore the chain.
- lwkl 3y ago
  > doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable. Why should it? Apple only supports their own hardware so the software should never run into this problem.
hd4 3y ago
I'm yet to be convinced there is a single use-case other than iOS development/publishing for someone to want Hackintosh rather than simply installing a well-supported distro like Ubuntu or Fedora. I tried it a few times and it was always a painful and substandard experience.
twoodfin 3y ago
No speculation in the article or thread yet what Apple is doing with the WiFi stack that creates such a fragile coupling with its services. Per iFixit, they’re using an obscure WiFi / Bluetooth module from USI in the new MacBook Pros: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+M3+Pro+Chip+ID https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+M... Possible they’ve gotten some “out of spec” capabilities wired in? Trying to imagine what for… Securely bridging local adhoc networks with the internet?
- jwells89 3y ago
  Apple’s always done some unique things with WiFi/Bluetooth. Macs have long been able to keep Apple-branded bluetooth keyboards and mice usable even before the OS initializes for example, and if you use one of a few Broadcom chipset BT/Wifi cards that were used in real Macs in a hackintosh, that capability extends to those too. It feels weird being able to navigate BIOS/UEFI with a Bluetooth keyboard.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
It was pretty smart of Apple to switch to a proprietary architecture. I can’t imagine MacOS running on standard Arm.
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  I think the machine code would run (maybe not Rosetta2, since it uses weird extensions) but the issue is the weird boot sequence. You'd basically have to do the inverse of what Asahi Linux is doing to get it to boot on a machine with ACPI or another bespoke boot system (ala. Raspi).
huytersd 3y ago
I used hackintoshes for a long time. I’m done with dealing with kexts and other such nonsense. Life is short I don’t want to spend all of it dealing with some silly technical administration. Windows is good enough for every piece of software I want to run and I have an old MacBook for the odd thing that windows doesn’t support. My windows machine dual boots into Linux for the extra exceptional thing that I can’t do with windows.
steve1977 3y ago
I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me. Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It is a bit funny, the hacker energy once was there for running OSX on anything, now it is there for running anything else on M1, haha.
  - kirykl 3y ago
    Apple's whole strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    amusing but that hasn’t been my experience just in case anyone is on the fence. Apple’s developer network effects are real and impressive, people updated… nearly everything… so quickly! plus with Rosetta under the hood translations to x86 binaries expand everything runnable to seamlessly I thought I would miss bootcamo but I dont. I have yet to install ARM Windows but I’m hearing praises about that now from relatively casual users
    - steve1977 3y ago
      How is this related to network effects?
      - yieldcrv 3y ago
        because it means enough people were spurred into action because they already use this ecosystem
irusensei 3y ago
Im pretty sure it was fun for everyone involved but the idea of using a patchwork of custom hacks never looked attractive to me.
umvi 3y ago
I feel like hackintosh virtualization is a better investment of time. Currently it's onerous to run Apple OSes on anything but Apple hardware. Being able to spin up a hackintosh VM in any cloud provider would be pretty sweet. Of course that probably violates Apple OS terms of use so not sure if AWS would shut you down if they discovered people were doing that. But actually, as others have pointed out, I'm much more interested in Linux running on M chips than Mac OS running on non Apple hardware. There's nothing particularly compelling about Apple's OSes (except maybe their new VR sorry I mean "spacial computing" OS)
wkat4242 3y ago
For me it's just that macOS isn't a desirable OS anymore. Over the years Apple kept changing things that I preferred the way they were. So I'm done with it. I use KDE now.
zavertnik 3y ago
I daily drove a hackintosh for years until I recently pivoted to apple silicon. I was a very enjoyable experience for me. The success and reliability of a hackintosh is really dependent on your hardware configuration. I had lucked out that my desktop tower that I had built years prior just so happened to coincide almost 1:1 with hardware requirements for a golden build. (6700k, 64gb ram, Vega 64, compatible wifi/bluetooth pcie, compatible m.2 controllers, z170 mb which is well known in the hackintosh community, etc.) Being able to have a modular Mac was really something and I exploited that to tailor my machine to my use case (television/video production). I never had issues with bluetooth or WiFi, nor did I have ever have an issue with Apple's services like iMessage/Facetime. What sucked about the process was staying current with system updates. Updates within the macOS release went without a hitch, but my hardware was aged out in newer macOS versions which made upgrading a bit too much like surgery, and since this hackintosh was my production device, that wasn't something I wanted to roll the dice on. Having switched to apple silicon, I do kind of miss that freedom, but I've found that same freedom just by doing things a little less hacky. Instead of a board I can add drives to, I just setup a NAS, instead of using an old PCIE HDMI capture card, I got a more modern USB one, etc. For a long time, Hackintosh was an opportunity to do things my way, and that experience led me to learning experiences that have improved my day to day that I otherwise may not have learned. It was a freeing experience. Today I still do things my way, but these days my way is more focused on convenience for the things that should "just work" so I put my attention on things that matter, rather than things that shouldn't, such as modifying my EFI before a macOS update to trick macOS into thinking I have the iGPU of a newer chipset because Apple dropped support for Skylake on a new release. Good times, the headaches were worth it in hindsight.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I’ve got a machine pretty similar to what you’re describing in my closet (6700k, mobo reasonably well known in the community, 5700XT GPU) which used to be a hackintosh. Might be worth reviving and trying to find a use for.
reactordev 3y ago
I used to tinker with building nforce4.kexts for OSX Leopard. I got everything working including the Realtek HD Audio thanks to a pcid injection. Snow Leopard was the last time I was able to build for nforce4 boards and we moved onto Intel gen 6 LGA1151. This was back when NVidia and Apple got along. GeForce 900 days. SLI was a thing. And it worked on my drivers. Sadly, I had kids and grew out of it, got old(er), and now only use Linux because aarm64 killed hackintosh.
throwawayyy9237 3y ago
_Many_ moons ago, before I had a job, I remember that Hackintosh seemed like the only way I could enjoy a Mac OS. These days I have literally piles of old Macs that I have fun trying different Linux distros on.
thr0waway001 3y ago
Well, surprisingly Macbooks are competitively priced now and not that much more than Windows laptops.
andrewdb 3y ago
If only this Dockerfile were real. It would greatly help app developers and publishers: FROM apple/mac-os-slim:latest ... Please, Apple, please let your developers use more virtualization or containerization.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX
matthewfcarlson 3y ago
As a long time lover of hackintoshes (couldn’t afford a real Mac as a youth but tried to make the netbook macOS dream come true), I’m quite sad to read this. The author has a very valid point that drivers are going to become increasingly complicated and difficult. I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn’t explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes. As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a unique source of frustration. I’ll spend hours digging through crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7 MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that shouldn’t be possible. The firmware is a version that we never released. Etc etc. I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I’ve fixed it. Now I’ve spent hours chasing something and I can’t help. (Opinions are my own, etc etc).
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  I've been using a Hackintosh as my daily driver for nearly 15 years and they have always been rock solid, with months of uptime consistently. It's just a matter of starting with the right hardware. People are free to look to support the hardware they have but 've always though it's stupid not buying well supported hardware in the first place, of which there is plenty.
  - philistine 3y ago
    What are you going to do once Intel is no longer supported ?
    - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
      Nothing, I'll just stick the last usable version, just like I'm stubbornly sticking to 10.14.6. I'll fight moving up each and every version by narrowing the software I use. Already happening and it's fine.
      - 3y ago
comprev 3y ago
A Hackintosh was my entry point to the Apple ecosystem and I'm still here 15yrs later both at home and at work.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
This article is nonsense. If "I've had compatibility issues with my hardware" is proof of Hackintosh dying then it's been dying from day one. If there are genuine issues across the board Hackintosh software is generally updated to patch the issue, it's always been like that and only improving over time. Personally I'm still on 10.14.6 and will probably never upgrade to 11 since it and its successors suck so hard.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
I don't know, but reading on v2ex shows that there is still a sizable community in China. It's called 黑苹果. (Black Apple)
AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
Now it's the other way around: you hack Linux onto Apple Silicon (Asahi Linux). For me buying a new Macbook Air or Pro is definitely made more palatable knowing I could turn it into a Ubuntu laptop down the line. And if the Asahi team keeps kicking ass, we may even use Asahi to run Windows games with Proton inside Linux Steam. Thus replacing the Bootcamp partition for those who dual booted to play Windows games. I don't miss Hackintosh. The one build I made it all looked like it was genuine macOS, but you could feel it wasn't the same. Photoshop felt more laggy. Unless you used an equivalent iMac beforehand as I did you might not notice that something was off. That said this was like ten years ago. Even if it works well "Hacking" isn't worth it imho, whenevr there is the slightest lag or issue, you just never know. Is it because of the hackintosh, is it a genuine bug in macOS? Is it my hardware? Too many unknowns.
johnklos 3y ago
Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance, "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL / Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for years. > While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...] Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;) Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on ARM systems at some point.
- nxobject 3y ago
  Have you read Bob Brant's Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle [1]? The man was a proponent of having the only Apple part in your build be the logic board, and using as many commodity PC parts as possible – I remember one of the builds started with a Macintosh SE logic board that ran "headless" with a (Radius?) video card in a generic AT/XT case, with everything else (drives, PSU, etc.) commodity PC. Pure wizardry, and he somehow managed to make the numbers add up cheaper than first-party Apple even when adding accelerators to your build. [1] https://vintageapple.org/macbooks/pdf/Build_Your_Own_Macintosh_and_Save_a_Bundle_1992.pdf https://vintageapple.org/macbooks/pdf/Build_Your_Own_Macinto...
  - johnklos 3y ago
    I had my library get that book, and it helped with all sorts of projects. What an awesome book :D
pointlessone 3y ago
With Arm CPUs becoming more common I wonder whether we’ll see rebirth of the Hackintosh in a couple of years.
mahgnous 3y ago
[dead]
jasoneckert 3y ago
While I never jumped on the Hackintosh bandwagon, I had many friends who did for almost a decade. They built systems that ran macOS for considerably less when it came to the price/performance ratio. Nowadays, those same friends are all using Mac Studios because the price/performance ratio for running macOS is better. I believe this is one of the major factors to why the Hackintosh community is dying today (not just changes to drivers and the macOS codebase as the author suggests).
- dgellow 3y ago
  I don’t get the point about the price/performance ratio being better. Mac Studio are really expensive compared to a powerful PC
  - jasoneckert 3y ago
    Running macOS on Apple Silicon is very fast compared to running it Intel. This is due to the RISC architecture and tight integration of the components in the SoC. To run it as fast on Intel would cost more than the price of a Mac Studio.
    - dgellow 3y ago
      Can you point to any source supporting that point? All the benchmarks I’ve seen say the opposite, a Mac Studio wins on power consumption but is way more expensive compared to PC parts
ryeguy_24 3y ago
I’m sure Apple doesn’t love the fact that Hackintosh exists but I’ll tell you what. After installing it on my gaming PC 15 years ago, i loved it and bought my first Mac shortly after. It was a previously owned Mac because I was still getting my feet wet and didn’t want to spend a ton. But then I bought a MacBook Air. Then iMac. Then iPhone. Then 5 more Macs. And now, I’m hooked. Hackintosh was a great gateway drug.
sweetjuly 3y ago
It'll be sad when it dies. I remember running Snow Leopard on my netbook and taking it to WWDC. It was sacrilegious but quite the conversation piece; I remember lots of Apple engineers being amazed it worked so well.
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
> WiFi works fantastic, iCloud is perfect but Messages/FaceTime wouldn’t connect at all. This stuff is just bizarre. Are those apps not using the OS for network services or something?
ldehaan 3y ago
[dead]
neonsunset 3y ago
Perhaps author wants to follow OpenCore guides more closely, especially the hardware buyer's ones - the experience could have been vastly different. There are a lot of (cheap!) wireless PCIE cards that both work on Windows and macOS (they are refurbished Mac Pro parts), I've used one for years and iServices have always been working besides the first hiccup when configuring the system for the first time. Eventually, the setup died as I moved to MacBook Pro and cleared out the NVME storage, but when it did - the experience was flawless (that is, after figuring it out). The Hackintosh will eventually die with Apple moving away from x86_64 completely. But that day is not today. Eventually, someone might even manage to continue on the tradition with upcoming ARM64 PC platforms.
giljabeab 3y ago
Virtual machine and GPU pass through is still a nice way to go for hackintosh.
risico 3y ago
When I first delved into programming, I was under the impression that OSX was necessary because most programming video tutorials were recorded on a Mac. This led to a minor obsession with acquiring one. Unfortunately, financial constraints were a significant barrier, leading me to explore Hackintosh as my sole option. Countless days and nights were invested in making it work properly. Despite the challenges, the learning experience and the satisfaction of eventually getting everything to function smoothly made the entire process immensely rewarding. 10/10 would do again, if I were 14. Now I am way older, 3 macbooks around and wish my job would let me use Linux.
darkest_ruby 3y ago
i cant imagine why would anyone want to install macos on their hardware unless they have to. macos built in software is mediocre at best, but most of it is utter crap, take finder or preview as an example
anArbitraryOne 3y ago
Why anyone would go through such effort to have such a user-hostile operating system is beyond me. But I respect the hack
qwerty456127 3y ago
> Many will tell you that buying Intel-based hardware from Apple is buying obsolete models. A strength of Intel-based Macs is they can run Wine/CrossOver. This is very good for people who really need a Windows app for their job and also need to minimze risk of a ransomware attack (which is way higher on Windows). Intel Macs running MacOS 17 also are great for retro gaming through running Win32 games with CrossOver/Wine, also platformer games with OpenEMU.
SillyUsername 3y ago
For a lot of use cases except hardware dev, a VM is sufficient. Arguably you could (can already) run MacOS via VM on generic hardware, the same way retro systems are (which could be partly in hardware, e.g. FPGA performing functions). This would only be bad from a performance perspective, from a maintenance perspective it may make life a lot easier as you've moved a hardware compatibility problem into software. You're no longer having to add compatibility workarounds for hundreds of pieces of hardware, just target one VM. If you really needed the performance you'd then have 3 options that I see, pay for a real Mac, pay for a machine with x2 the performance of a real Mac (which limits you to mid range machines at the moment), or spin up extra VMs as required on hardware you have lying around that previously you couldn't use.
bhavikjadav 3y ago
Was building hackintosh' since 2011, mostly intel based, my i3 h370 is still working strong. I was running macOS till the "M" series came out and the next day i swapped it out. Gifted the hackintosh' to my desinger friend. I do miss the days when i had time to figure out each and every bit of things needed. Nowadays, i am running windows. Edit: Left building hackintosh' in 2019 before covid hit. Been building them for friend and family.
tracker1 3y ago
I think the switch to their own arm based chips should have been the writing in the wall for the end of the hackintosh. I think we're at a point where we are going to wind up needing Linux more and more. My kid is running IIRC 2014 rMBP that I passed on to her a few years ago. While it still runs, it's long passed it's last supported update and now even forced unsupported updates are going to stop working. I'm not sure where the gesture support is in Linux at this point. Google maps in Chrome is probably the best demo experience. I'm looking forward to Cosmic in Pop!OS from System76. I've preferred their take on UX for a while.

549 points by ingve 3y ago

I think this article reaches a valid conclusion based on the wrong evidence. It claims hackintosh is dead because they are dropping Wifi drivers. Hackintosh is dead because the number of major versions that will support x86 are 2-3 at best and after that, the OS will only run on apple silicon. Maybe if we’re lucky an arm chip similar enough will come along but I don’t see many motherboards socketed for arm chips. It is dead, but not because of WiFi driver support.

Retr0id 3y ago

macOS supports running as a paravirtualised guest OS (officially, on an apple-hardware host also running macOS). If there is to be a "next gen" of hackintoshing, I think it'd be based on a cut-down linux host acting as a shim between the real hardware and the paravirt interface. See also: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amazon.com/T/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amaz... "This patch set introduces a new ARM and HVF specific machine type called "vmapple". It mimicks the device model that Apple's proprietary Virtualization.Framework exposes, but implements it in QEMU."

Asooka 3y ago
It would be interesting to see how feasible it is to run that on an Arm workstation, e.g. an Ampere Altra. Or going the other way and trying to squeeze macOS on to the latest Raspberry Pi.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Would be cool and ironic to get the full Macos on Android hardware.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    I would pay at least $100 to have MacOS running on an Android tablet.
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      Lucky you, that's how much they used to charge when one could actually, no kidding, buy Snow Leopard. I paid it so that my hackintosh (on HP Mini) wasn't stolen and I still have the CD-ROM, which shows you how long ago they cared about making the OS a purchasable thing
m463 3y ago
I was about to say that VMs will always be wanted.
hamandcheese 3y ago
One thing I've been on the hunt for is a good server hypervisor solution for Apple Silicon. I would like to put an Apple Silicon Mac Mini in my rack, and it would be really nice to have a minimally bootstrapped host OS running a handful of macOS VMs for various purposes. The best I'm aware of currently is UTM which has some scripting capabilities. But that is very far off from the experience with Proxmox.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8&themeRefresh=1
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    I think you missed the "Apple Silicon" part of my comment.
- brirec 3y ago
  I know Cirrus CI uses (and I think developed(?) Tart^1 as a scriptable VMM for macOS CI. [1]: https://tart.run/ https://tart.run/
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Came here to write what the parent is saying: exploit the virtualization route to trick MacOS into running on the target hardware.

bsdpufferfish 3y ago

Additional reasons: - there is less alternative hardware I want to use. I want Apple Silicon processors, materials, and there just isn't much high quality competition. - Because of inflation the Apple premium isn't as high as it used to be. You get a Mac mini or MacBook Air at very competitive prices (RAM is still painful). - Linux Desktop software is more competitive and fills some of the roles that needed macOS before.

asdff 3y ago
Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
- esafak 3y ago
  $500 for a Mac is great! $100 for an Intel is great too. PCs used to cost thousands of dollars! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT
- shagie 3y ago
  > I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a lot of utility in it that hasn't depreciated significantly in the 2 years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the role that it has, it becomes outdated in another 2 or 3 years... and wouldn't be surprised if it lasts another 2 or 3 beyond that. If you spent $700 on it in 2020 at release, it is still working as well as it did on the day you bought it. You may be seeing the premium from when it was bought being attached to the current used price - and there are less expensive ones available now - but the device, for what it was when I got it is still providing value and selling it used would mean I'd need to get a new one... at a similar price as what I'd sell it for. > sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc. I will note that for me, in the spot where it is, the "multiple drive bays, pcie, etc." represents a worse device as it doesn't sit nicely under a monitor on a small desk. Part of the choice of the Mac mini for me for that role was its form factor and quiet running.

Muromec 3y ago

Next in the series: EU mandates Apple to sign 3rd party hobbyist drivers to enable Hackintosh enthusiasts.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 3y ago
Apple never licenced their OS to run on non Apple hardware, with exception of when it was on death bed shortly before the NeXT reverse acquisition, and Steve Jobs killing all agreements with clone makers. Hardly the same of the current DMA requirements.
- Muromec 3y ago
  They are always one step away from another regulation even if the current one doesn’t apply in this way.

monetus 3y ago

Bad news for the indie music scene using these, where they just want to be able to run their VSTs and DAWs. Some will switch back to macs, so worth it for apple I guess.

WWLink 3y ago
This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad. I spent the last week shopping around for an audio interface and every single model had people complaining about driver issues and latency and "random loud static" or other crazy things when using Windows. Always Windows. Crazy stuff.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Except that Apple breaks audio applications with every new release of macOS and has for years. And, it's just a matter of time before Apple kills basically every DAW and VST when they finally kill off OpenGL on macOS. Edit: What I have said is true here, so I'm unsure why the downvotes.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    Why would anyone ever use anything other than Logic Pro? /s
  - MenhirMike 3y ago
    Curious, why would OpenGL break VSTs? (And yes, I get that AU is the preferred way over VST2 or even VST3, which is why most modern plugins are available in AU as well. I just don't see how OpenGL plays into this.)
    - conradfr 3y ago
      A lot of plugins use OpenGL, it's just that simple :)
      - 3y ago

actimia 3y ago

I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now. Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around. Now if we could have Windows running on an M3 chip with the nice touchpad and battery, that would be really nice.

joemi 3y ago
I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What software do you have issue with, and why?
- kybernetyk 3y ago
  I think he's missing the forced advertisements in the macOS startmenu. Or the forced restarts/updates :)
- bmitc 3y ago
  Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL. Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck. There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in macOS. It's bizarre. Or the fact that macOS doesn't implement basic protocols for external monitors, making macOS work terribly with non-Apple monitors.
  - joemi 3y ago
    > Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth headphones connect. Good luck. I have non-Apple bluetooth headphones (Sennheisers) and this isn't something that happens on my M1 MacBook Pro. Is this a common issue for other people?

mchannon 3y ago

A $9 USB to WiFi dongle addresses my networking needs.

wellthisisgreat 3y ago
Not the iServices though?
- mchannon 3y ago
  Not all of them, no. In exchange for giving up a few minor bells and whistles I gain what I’m looking for.

verticalscaler 3y ago

In the olden times this used to be called the Jade plan: I don’t really complain. I had a good run which helped me skip over the worst price/performance Mac lineup that I remember. There’re now plenty good choices within the current crop of M1 / M2 / M3 machines and I’ll be following eBay closely for a good used Mac mini / studio models. Or maybe even splurge on something new. I've been doing it for ages as Apple hardware holds its resale value exceptionally well. You can use the often exaggerated price premium to your advantage - buy brand new default config at an opportune moment in the upgrade cycle, sell just in time for a coveted new release. This works even better if you happen to be traveling somewhere where Apple devices are unusually expensive. I'm still on the M1 Air and will likely sell it just before a M4 release 12-18 months from now. Cost of ownership averages out to <$0.25/day.

haunter 3y ago

Well I can run Mac OS in Proxmox nowadays so that's killed the "bare matel" Hackintosh for me. Yes it takes time to set it up (once!) but I much prefer KVM now than fiddling with hardware https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8

drumttocs8 3y ago
Yep, this is exactly what I do. It's nice to be able to use Messages from my desktop, plus it fulfills an edge case of 2-way backup with Synology Drive and iCloud for me
tripdout 3y ago
There's no GPU acceleration is there?
- jwells89 3y ago
  There can be if you’ve got a spare PCI-E slot to plug a supported AMD GPU into and pass through to the VM.
  - AnthonBerg 3y ago
    This works very well, especially if the VM storage is on a fast SSD linux md raid array. Very very snappy Mac working environment.
k8sToGo 3y ago
Why are you using Proxmox instead of just kvm? Are you running more than just Mac?
m463 3y ago
this. A lot of the ground hackintosh broke like opencore is directly in use with VMs

bruce511 3y ago

Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using. Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work. Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere. Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
With a little preparation setting up a Hackintosh is not much more difficult than setting up an actual Mac. What you're describing is a myth or just out of date.
hackburg 3y ago
[dead]
hparadiz 3y ago
It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".
- derefr 3y ago
  The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy the equivalent-specced Mac. The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible. People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)

jwells89 3y ago

It can still be useful for those looking to run older versions of macOS for some reason or another. If there’s PPC applications that one wants to run for example, you can piece together a Snow Leopard hackintosh from used parts that will run PPC apps through Rosetta faster than any real PPC mac ever could while be also being easier and more cheap to maintain. From time to time I’ll consider building such a box as a time-frozen “zen machine” that runs OS X 10.6 or 10.9, is disconnected from modern distractions, and will never be subject to the disruptions that software updates can bring.

givemeethekeys 3y ago

I'd give Windows some credit - it is actually quite good and stable these days.

nirav72 3y ago
No denying that windows these days isn’t stable. Indeed it is. My biggest issue is all the third party crap I never asked for gets installed with it. Not to mention all the Microsoft services that I don’t want to use, but still manage to be there. Like OneDrive. Sure one can uninstall it. But then see the mess it leaves with the way files are saved in the documents directory. Even when setting up a Windows 11 VM , I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down.
- xcv123 3y ago
  > I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down. All of that is automated now. https://atlasos.net https://atlasos.net
  - nirav72 3y ago
    yeah, I've used plenty of community made tools to de-bloat windows. But that's not the point. We shouldn't have to do that. Especially when its a paid windows license, I shouldn't have to spend time dealing with Microsoft's effort at further squeezing out more revenue from their OS platform.
    - xcv123 3y ago
      It was even worse in the Win95/98 era. I remember reinstalling the entire network stack multiple times in one day just to get TCP/IP working. The operating system was an extremely broken piece of shit and wasted days of my life. Shoulda this. Shoulda that. This is just the reality of Microsoft that we have to accept, and it will never change. There are tools to deal with it. So I use the tools and move on with my life.

mundays 3y ago

Now that their MacBooks come with 120hz screens with acceptable response time (unlike their early 120hz screens), the value proposition for hackintosh isn't as alluring for me. Previously, I've been worried about the T2 chip and the trend of Apple locking down MacOS, which also turned out to be less of an issue that I thought. The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming.

acmj 3y ago
> The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is gaming. Mac gaming is probably getting better thanks to wine, crossover, GPTK and Whisky [1]. I am not a gamer but I have seen others playing serious Windows games like FF7 remake (not sure if that counts) on mac. [1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
- mundays 3y ago
  The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games (for now).
  - acmj 3y ago
    Sure, nothing beats bootcamp but that is not strictly macos. Apple's GPTK released last year seems to have greatly advanced gaming compatibility. Probably lots of games still don't work but it looks promising and is getting better. Hope Apple can continue to put resources into that.
    - mundays 3y ago
      I do hope that they would steer some of their resources from Apple Arcade into cross platform porting toolkits. I think the fundamental problem still remains that games unlike softwares are media and cannot be substituted with equivalents. By pushing their proprietary tech and neglecting native macOS ecosystem over the years, Apple has willingly pushed themselves in to the same corner as with console makers where they cannot compete with the value proposition of PC because of the overwhelming majority of exclusive titles that only run on PC. It's either all or nothing in terms of game coverage, because that's what ultimately allows consumers to "buy one device for (mostly) everything" for a hobby that takes significant upfront investment unlike netflix and hulu for example.

KingOfLechia 3y ago

Other than trying out the MacOS for the first time to learn how bad it is, why would anyone make a hackintosh? Windows and Linux are infinitely better operating systems, more open, with better backwards compatibility, more hardware support, independence from vendor servers and more available software. A reminder that with MacOS you need internet connection in order to re-install the OS as it requires activation just like iPads and iPhones. Imagine one day Apple stops supporting your Macbook model, shuts down its activation server and your computer turns into brick after something goes wrong and it requires a factory reset.

throwaway5959 3y ago
When was the last time you used Windows?
- KingOfLechia 3y ago
  now
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago
  Or Mac...
mundays 3y ago
Yes, Tim Cook could flip a switch and my mac would become activation locked. Considering that Windows 11 has been working really hard to sneak remote attestation below our noses (and other stuff), I think it's safe to cross out Windows as well.
- KingOfLechia 3y ago
  As long as Microsoft wants to keep Windows compatible with user-controllable hardware (like computers that let you disable secure boot and TPM or enroll custom keys), there should always be a way to debloat Windows.
  - treyd 3y ago

jupp0r 3y ago

Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm still surprised this requires special interaction with the hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.

mid-kid 3y ago
Custom drivers trip some security features and "taint" the kernel.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  How does that impact iMessage? Are parts of it implemented in the kernel?
  - mid-kid 3y ago
    The application can see that the kernel is tainted and refuse to run. Similarly, some kernel-related functionality may be disabled. None of this requires iMessage to run in the kernel or have a module of its own.
  - niteshade 3y ago
    I remember reading (perhaps here on HN) that Apple does weird/nonstandard things to wifi packets to enable Continuity/Handoff features, so it could be related.
  - philistine 3y ago
    I'm not a specialist, but there's a chain of trust you need to maintain to have the full set of features. If it's ever broken, you're sent to the gulag. I broke the chain when reinstalling like an old-timer on my M1 Macbook Air and was then forced to enter my password twice to unlock the Mac. I had to reflash with a second Mac to restore the chain.
lwkl 3y ago
> doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable. Why should it? Apple only supports their own hardware so the software should never run into this problem.

hd4 3y ago

I'm yet to be convinced there is a single use-case other than iOS development/publishing for someone to want Hackintosh rather than simply installing a well-supported distro like Ubuntu or Fedora. I tried it a few times and it was always a painful and substandard experience.

twoodfin 3y ago

No speculation in the article or thread yet what Apple is doing with the WiFi stack that creates such a fragile coupling with its services. Per iFixit, they’re using an obscure WiFi / Bluetooth module from USI in the new MacBook Pros: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+M3+Pro+Chip+ID https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+M... Possible they’ve gotten some “out of spec” capabilities wired in? Trying to imagine what for… Securely bridging local adhoc networks with the internet?

jwells89 3y ago
Apple’s always done some unique things with WiFi/Bluetooth. Macs have long been able to keep Apple-branded bluetooth keyboards and mice usable even before the OS initializes for example, and if you use one of a few Broadcom chipset BT/Wifi cards that were used in real Macs in a hackintosh, that capability extends to those too. It feels weird being able to navigate BIOS/UEFI with a Bluetooth keyboard.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

It was pretty smart of Apple to switch to a proprietary architecture. I can’t imagine MacOS running on standard Arm.

seabrookmx 3y ago
I think the machine code would run (maybe not Rosetta2, since it uses weird extensions) but the issue is the weird boot sequence. You'd basically have to do the inverse of what Asahi Linux is doing to get it to boot on a machine with ACPI or another bespoke boot system (ala. Raspi).

huytersd 3y ago

I used hackintoshes for a long time. I’m done with dealing with kexts and other such nonsense. Life is short I don’t want to spend all of it dealing with some silly technical administration. Windows is good enough for every piece of software I want to run and I have an old MacBook for the odd thing that windows doesn’t support. My windows machine dual boots into Linux for the extra exceptional thing that I can’t do with windows.

steve1977 3y ago

I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me. Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)

bee_rider 3y ago
It is a bit funny, the hacker energy once was there for running OSX on anything, now it is there for running anything else on M1, haha.
- kirykl 3y ago
  Apple's whole strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  amusing but that hasn’t been my experience just in case anyone is on the fence. Apple’s developer network effects are real and impressive, people updated… nearly everything… so quickly! plus with Rosetta under the hood translations to x86 binaries expand everything runnable to seamlessly I thought I would miss bootcamo but I dont. I have yet to install ARM Windows but I’m hearing praises about that now from relatively casual users
  - steve1977 3y ago
    How is this related to network effects?
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      because it means enough people were spurred into action because they already use this ecosystem

irusensei 3y ago

Im pretty sure it was fun for everyone involved but the idea of using a patchwork of custom hacks never looked attractive to me.

umvi 3y ago

I feel like hackintosh virtualization is a better investment of time. Currently it's onerous to run Apple OSes on anything but Apple hardware. Being able to spin up a hackintosh VM in any cloud provider would be pretty sweet. Of course that probably violates Apple OS terms of use so not sure if AWS would shut you down if they discovered people were doing that. But actually, as others have pointed out, I'm much more interested in Linux running on M chips than Mac OS running on non Apple hardware. There's nothing particularly compelling about Apple's OSes (except maybe their new VR sorry I mean "spacial computing" OS)

wkat4242 3y ago

For me it's just that macOS isn't a desirable OS anymore. Over the years Apple kept changing things that I preferred the way they were. So I'm done with it. I use KDE now.

zavertnik 3y ago

I daily drove a hackintosh for years until I recently pivoted to apple silicon. I was a very enjoyable experience for me. The success and reliability of a hackintosh is really dependent on your hardware configuration. I had lucked out that my desktop tower that I had built years prior just so happened to coincide almost 1:1 with hardware requirements for a golden build. (6700k, 64gb ram, Vega 64, compatible wifi/bluetooth pcie, compatible m.2 controllers, z170 mb which is well known in the hackintosh community, etc.) Being able to have a modular Mac was really something and I exploited that to tailor my machine to my use case (television/video production). I never had issues with bluetooth or WiFi, nor did I have ever have an issue with Apple's services like iMessage/Facetime. What sucked about the process was staying current with system updates. Updates within the macOS release went without a hitch, but my hardware was aged out in newer macOS versions which made upgrading a bit too much like surgery, and since this hackintosh was my production device, that wasn't something I wanted to roll the dice on. Having switched to apple silicon, I do kind of miss that freedom, but I've found that same freedom just by doing things a little less hacky. Instead of a board I can add drives to, I just setup a NAS, instead of using an old PCIE HDMI capture card, I got a more modern USB one, etc. For a long time, Hackintosh was an opportunity to do things my way, and that experience led me to learning experiences that have improved my day to day that I otherwise may not have learned. It was a freeing experience. Today I still do things my way, but these days my way is more focused on convenience for the things that should "just work" so I put my attention on things that matter, rather than things that shouldn't, such as modifying my EFI before a macOS update to trick macOS into thinking I have the iGPU of a newer chipset because Apple dropped support for Skylake on a new release. Good times, the headaches were worth it in hindsight.

jwells89 3y ago
I’ve got a machine pretty similar to what you’re describing in my closet (6700k, mobo reasonably well known in the community, 5700XT GPU) which used to be a hackintosh. Might be worth reviving and trying to find a use for.

reactordev 3y ago

I used to tinker with building nforce4.kexts for OSX Leopard. I got everything working including the Realtek HD Audio thanks to a pcid injection. Snow Leopard was the last time I was able to build for nforce4 boards and we moved onto Intel gen 6 LGA1151. This was back when NVidia and Apple got along. GeForce 900 days. SLI was a thing. And it worked on my drivers. Sadly, I had kids and grew out of it, got old(er), and now only use Linux because aarm64 killed hackintosh.

throwawayyy9237 3y ago

_Many_ moons ago, before I had a job, I remember that Hackintosh seemed like the only way I could enjoy a Mac OS. These days I have literally piles of old Macs that I have fun trying different Linux distros on.

thr0waway001 3y ago

Well, surprisingly Macbooks are competitively priced now and not that much more than Windows laptops.

andrewdb 3y ago

If only this Dockerfile were real. It would greatly help app developers and publishers: FROM apple/mac-os-slim:latest ... Please, Apple, please let your developers use more virtualization or containerization.

shepherdjerred 3y ago
https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX

matthewfcarlson 3y ago

As a long time lover of hackintoshes (couldn’t afford a real Mac as a youth but tried to make the netbook macOS dream come true), I’m quite sad to read this. The author has a very valid point that drivers are going to become increasingly complicated and difficult. I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn’t explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes. As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a unique source of frustration. I’ll spend hours digging through crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7 MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that shouldn’t be possible. The firmware is a version that we never released. Etc etc. I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I’ve fixed it. Now I’ve spent hours chasing something and I can’t help. (Opinions are my own, etc etc).

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
I've been using a Hackintosh as my daily driver for nearly 15 years and they have always been rock solid, with months of uptime consistently. It's just a matter of starting with the right hardware. People are free to look to support the hardware they have but 've always though it's stupid not buying well supported hardware in the first place, of which there is plenty.
- philistine 3y ago
  What are you going to do once Intel is no longer supported ?
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    Nothing, I'll just stick the last usable version, just like I'm stubbornly sticking to 10.14.6. I'll fight moving up each and every version by narrowing the software I use. Already happening and it's fine.
    - 3y ago

comprev 3y ago

A Hackintosh was my entry point to the Apple ecosystem and I'm still here 15yrs later both at home and at work.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

This article is nonsense. If "I've had compatibility issues with my hardware" is proof of Hackintosh dying then it's been dying from day one. If there are genuine issues across the board Hackintosh software is generally updated to patch the issue, it's always been like that and only improving over time. Personally I'm still on 10.14.6 and will probably never upgrade to 11 since it and its successors suck so hard.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

I don't know, but reading on v2ex shows that there is still a sizable community in China. It's called 黑苹果. (Black Apple)

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago

Now it's the other way around: you hack Linux onto Apple Silicon (Asahi Linux). For me buying a new Macbook Air or Pro is definitely made more palatable knowing I could turn it into a Ubuntu laptop down the line. And if the Asahi team keeps kicking ass, we may even use Asahi to run Windows games with Proton inside Linux Steam. Thus replacing the Bootcamp partition for those who dual booted to play Windows games. I don't miss Hackintosh. The one build I made it all looked like it was genuine macOS, but you could feel it wasn't the same. Photoshop felt more laggy. Unless you used an equivalent iMac beforehand as I did you might not notice that something was off. That said this was like ten years ago. Even if it works well "Hacking" isn't worth it imho, whenevr there is the slightest lag or issue, you just never know. Is it because of the hackintosh, is it a genuine bug in macOS? Is it my hardware? Too many unknowns.

johnklos 3y ago

Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance, "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL / Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for years. > While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...] Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;) Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on ARM systems at some point.

nxobject 3y ago
Have you read Bob Brant's Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle [1]? The man was a proponent of having the only Apple part in your build be the logic board, and using as many commodity PC parts as possible – I remember one of the builds started with a Macintosh SE logic board that ran "headless" with a (Radius?) video card in a generic AT/XT case, with everything else (drives, PSU, etc.) commodity PC. Pure wizardry, and he somehow managed to make the numbers add up cheaper than first-party Apple even when adding accelerators to your build. [1] https://vintageapple.org/macbooks/pdf/Build_Your_Own_Macintosh_and_Save_a_Bundle_1992.pdf https://vintageapple.org/macbooks/pdf/Build_Your_Own_Macinto...
- johnklos 3y ago
  I had my library get that book, and it helped with all sorts of projects. What an awesome book :D

pointlessone 3y ago

With Arm CPUs becoming more common I wonder whether we’ll see rebirth of the Hackintosh in a couple of years.

mahgnous 3y ago

[dead]

jasoneckert 3y ago

While I never jumped on the Hackintosh bandwagon, I had many friends who did for almost a decade. They built systems that ran macOS for considerably less when it came to the price/performance ratio. Nowadays, those same friends are all using Mac Studios because the price/performance ratio for running macOS is better. I believe this is one of the major factors to why the Hackintosh community is dying today (not just changes to drivers and the macOS codebase as the author suggests).

dgellow 3y ago
I don’t get the point about the price/performance ratio being better. Mac Studio are really expensive compared to a powerful PC
- jasoneckert 3y ago
  Running macOS on Apple Silicon is very fast compared to running it Intel. This is due to the RISC architecture and tight integration of the components in the SoC. To run it as fast on Intel would cost more than the price of a Mac Studio.
  - dgellow 3y ago
    Can you point to any source supporting that point? All the benchmarks I’ve seen say the opposite, a Mac Studio wins on power consumption but is way more expensive compared to PC parts

ryeguy_24 3y ago

I’m sure Apple doesn’t love the fact that Hackintosh exists but I’ll tell you what. After installing it on my gaming PC 15 years ago, i loved it and bought my first Mac shortly after. It was a previously owned Mac because I was still getting my feet wet and didn’t want to spend a ton. But then I bought a MacBook Air. Then iMac. Then iPhone. Then 5 more Macs. And now, I’m hooked. Hackintosh was a great gateway drug.

sweetjuly 3y ago

It'll be sad when it dies. I remember running Snow Leopard on my netbook and taking it to WWDC. It was sacrilegious but quite the conversation piece; I remember lots of Apple engineers being amazed it worked so well.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

> WiFi works fantastic, iCloud is perfect but Messages/FaceTime wouldn’t connect at all. This stuff is just bizarre. Are those apps not using the OS for network services or something?

ldehaan 3y ago

[dead]

neonsunset 3y ago

Perhaps author wants to follow OpenCore guides more closely, especially the hardware buyer's ones - the experience could have been vastly different. There are a lot of (cheap!) wireless PCIE cards that both work on Windows and macOS (they are refurbished Mac Pro parts), I've used one for years and iServices have always been working besides the first hiccup when configuring the system for the first time. Eventually, the setup died as I moved to MacBook Pro and cleared out the NVME storage, but when it did - the experience was flawless (that is, after figuring it out). The Hackintosh will eventually die with Apple moving away from x86_64 completely. But that day is not today. Eventually, someone might even manage to continue on the tradition with upcoming ARM64 PC platforms.

giljabeab 3y ago

Virtual machine and GPU pass through is still a nice way to go for hackintosh.

risico 3y ago

When I first delved into programming, I was under the impression that OSX was necessary because most programming video tutorials were recorded on a Mac. This led to a minor obsession with acquiring one. Unfortunately, financial constraints were a significant barrier, leading me to explore Hackintosh as my sole option. Countless days and nights were invested in making it work properly. Despite the challenges, the learning experience and the satisfaction of eventually getting everything to function smoothly made the entire process immensely rewarding. 10/10 would do again, if I were 14. Now I am way older, 3 macbooks around and wish my job would let me use Linux.

darkest_ruby 3y ago

i cant imagine why would anyone want to install macos on their hardware unless they have to. macos built in software is mediocre at best, but most of it is utter crap, take finder or preview as an example

anArbitraryOne 3y ago

Why anyone would go through such effort to have such a user-hostile operating system is beyond me. But I respect the hack

qwerty456127 3y ago

> Many will tell you that buying Intel-based hardware from Apple is buying obsolete models. A strength of Intel-based Macs is they can run Wine/CrossOver. This is very good for people who really need a Windows app for their job and also need to minimze risk of a ransomware attack (which is way higher on Windows). Intel Macs running MacOS 17 also are great for retro gaming through running Win32 games with CrossOver/Wine, also platformer games with OpenEMU.

SillyUsername 3y ago

For a lot of use cases except hardware dev, a VM is sufficient. Arguably you could (can already) run MacOS via VM on generic hardware, the same way retro systems are (which could be partly in hardware, e.g. FPGA performing functions). This would only be bad from a performance perspective, from a maintenance perspective it may make life a lot easier as you've moved a hardware compatibility problem into software. You're no longer having to add compatibility workarounds for hundreds of pieces of hardware, just target one VM. If you really needed the performance you'd then have 3 options that I see, pay for a real Mac, pay for a machine with x2 the performance of a real Mac (which limits you to mid range machines at the moment), or spin up extra VMs as required on hardware you have lying around that previously you couldn't use.

bhavikjadav 3y ago

Was building hackintosh' since 2011, mostly intel based, my i3 h370 is still working strong. I was running macOS till the "M" series came out and the next day i swapped it out. Gifted the hackintosh' to my desinger friend. I do miss the days when i had time to figure out each and every bit of things needed. Nowadays, i am running windows. Edit: Left building hackintosh' in 2019 before covid hit. Been building them for friend and family.

tracker1 3y ago

I think the switch to their own arm based chips should have been the writing in the wall for the end of the hackintosh. I think we're at a point where we are going to wind up needing Linux more and more. My kid is running IIRC 2014 rMBP that I passed on to her a few years ago. While it still runs, it's long passed it's last supported update and now even forced unsupported updates are going to stop working. I'm not sure where the gesture support is in Linux at this point. Google maps in Chrome is probably the best demo experience. I'm looking forward to Cosmic in Pop!OS from System76. I've preferred their take on UX for a while.