7 ms·

Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

50 points by opengears 2y ago

axiologist 2y ago
https://archive.is/tuAZc https://archive.is/tuAZc
userbinator 2y ago
The only reaction I can think of to this massive non-sequitur of an article is "WTF?" If you really care about forced obsolescence, refuse to upgrade and push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly. Write and prefer native code. Add drivers for hardware that's "no longer supported". What does this have to do with Hackintoshing? No idea.
- wmf 2y ago
  There's a flavor of virtue signaling about saving the environment using really old hardware.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Yes, but associating that with Hackintoshing is the weirdest part.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Indeed, it makes no sense because some old hardware that might be ok with Linux or even Windows is probably not ok with macOS. This article even tells you to go buy an RX580, and that's not the half of it. And since you mentioned wasteful web, medium.com is a prime example of that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- amatecha 2y ago
  > push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly What does that mean (like what should one do to actually follow what you're saying?) I hate how the web is progressing, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. I use the free-est browser I can use while still being able to access most stuff (Firefox), I use old computers (my newest machine is from 2018 which I just bought second-hand a few months ago), and I use open source OSes (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux). Anyway, that person has already directly "refused to upgrade" by using existing hardware, so I'm not sure what you're actually criticizing. Hackintoshing happens to be the way they reached this goal, and they made a blog post about it. Nothing wrong with that.
justahuman74 2y ago
Just install linux and move on with life
- khana 2y ago
  [dead]
- rvz 2y ago
  For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL. You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    I tried WSL, but when WSL 1 was abandoned in favor of Hyper-V I was devastated because the new Hyper-V WSL is kind of shit in comparison. No longer are processes and files shared with the host system, you just get an opaque block of CPU and an opaque block of disk space being used. BTW, if at any time in the future you have to clear out part of that opaque block of disk space to make room - good luck shrinking it. I completely recognize why WSL 1 could have been unsustainable for Microsoft but that does not mean that I do not disagree with the decision to abandon it. There is a certain attraction to the Linux being safely contained but I'm just not getting it at all. I don't want my Linux in a container, I want to live there. So basically that's why I now use macOS, because it doesn't have to use hacks like WSL in order to be like Linux, it just already is Unix. Also in general I tend to find that Apple is more detail-oriented than Microsoft, they are probably autistic as fuck and that is a very good thing. (in my opinion) I'm not yet fully happy with the state of affairs on desktop Linux, although GNOME is to a degree shaping up to a decent experience (partly by copying macOS, though). Their trackpad support is far better than Windows, for example.
    - JackYoustra 2y ago
      you can shrink it now! You're going to have to change the vhd format to sparse (this is why docker for windows doesn't run on exFAT-formatted SSDs, as I found out a couple weeks ago) and then run compaction on it once. After running compaction once, it should grow and shrink dynamically as you'd expect.
wilg 2y ago
For calibrating your understanding of greenhouse gas emissions producing, packaging, shipping, using, and recovering materials from a 14-inch MacBook Pro in 2023 emits about 243 kg of carbon [1], which is equivalent to using 27 gallons of gasoline. [2] For some people, this may math out. But it's probably easier to worry less about buying a new laptop every once in a while, and more about driving a bit less or getting a more efficient car. [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-inch_MacBook_Pro_PER_Jan2023.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-... [2] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...
- hot_gril 2y ago
  We really need rules of thumb like this physically posted in more places. I grew up seeing "be green" signs in school that didn't really tell you how.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    A reasonable rule of thumb is how much money you spend on something. Even if you buy something that is ostensively green your money is still flowing into an economy which isn’t.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Yeah, that's what I use if nothing else is available, but in this case the 27 gallons of gasoline costs about 1/10 of the MacBook.
  - wilg 2y ago
    Something I would like to see is well regulated “Carbon Facts” on products like nutrition facts.
- exitb 2y ago
  …which is about as much as commuting to work that’s 5km away for 6 months. Given a ~3 year lifespan of such device, it isn’t such a low amount. And when you decide to get a new, more efficient car, it will have a its own carbon footprint too.
hot_gril 2y ago
I've done this three times, albeit not very recently. First you need a regular computer, on which you're both going to Google a ton and prepare a lot of software. It's only for fun or maaaybe a niche work use case. I also had a MacPro5,1 I used extra long, thanks to some of the tooling mentioned here. Great machine. But seeing how it used 200W and I had to buy a new RX580 for it to be usable, idk if that really helped the environment, nor was that the reason I had it.
- opengears 2y ago
  Hackintoshing supports internal GPUs (iGPU) as well (not only RX 580) - and lots of people install on their Lenovo Thinkpads or other notebooks.
aspenmayer 2y ago
Hackintoshes make for good troubleshooting devices when working with Mac formatted drives and images.
- opengears 2y ago
  This is what I use them for exactly. The HFSPlus driver is three years old now, and seems to not get updated anymore. Does anyone know if it is the same one as in Linux kernel? https://github.com/acidanthera/OcBinaryData/blob/master/Drivers/HfsPlus.efi https://github.com/acidanthera/OcBinaryData/blob/master/Driv...
mikae1 2y ago
I ran a Hackintosh as my main machine for many years. I specced (using info found on tonymacx86[1]) and built it around 15 years ago to make it work well as a Hackintosh. And work well it did. Incredibly well actually. But now the doors are closing. macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era. That's the reason I'm not willing to invest the time or energy to do the same again. Hopefully sometime another era of Hackintoshers will find a way to make macOS run on non-Apple ARM hardware. Perhaps it's already happening? :) After 20 years of Hackintosh and Apple hardware I eventually lost hope in Apple due to their unsustainable practices (mostly unserviceable and unupgradeable soldered memory and storage) and moved on to Linux (https://getaurora.dev/ https://getaurora.dev/). Couldn't be happier with KDE Plasma. [1] https://www.tonymacx86.com https://www.tonymacx86.com
- baq 2y ago
  Funnily enough I hope for an exact opposite: the Apple hardware is IMHO the best and the most irreplaceable part of the whole Apple experience and I’d be a very happy man if there was a simple way of running not-macOS on e.g. the M3 MacBook Pro with full driver support.
  - opengears 2y ago
    Luckily we have Asahi Linux. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/ https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
    - baq 2y ago
      …with barely supported M1 and LKML drama. I would love for it to be an option, but it just isn’t.
      - opengears 2y ago
        To be fair - the reverse engineering has to be done for every of the M series, and the M1 is the best supported Apple SoC so far. I guess we should support the project if we want them to succeed (they live from donations).
fexecve 2y ago
Seems AI-written. Doesn't give any justification for MacOS being better for older hardware than Linux or even Windows. You won't be getting updates for your Intel hardware on MacOS, so you're right back where you started with Windows 10 going EOL.
- peter_opensa 2y ago
  Too many typos to be AI written. I think the point was that if you are able to use the old hardware longer it is better for the environment - not the effectiveness of old hardware in general (Linux always wins this argument)
- LoganDark 2y ago
  This is not AI-written. This is what used to be called asperger's (now part of autism spectrum disorder). You can see it in how they write: > In 2025 the question is: why Hackintosh? And after being in the different communities for so long and observing reasons people install Hackintosh they are: the way they construct sentences is so distinctly recognizable: [And after [being in [the different communities] for so long] and observing [reasons people [install Hackintosh]] they are:] It's like they use Scratch blocks to assemble their language. It's hard to explain, but you can know it when you see it.
rock_artist 2y ago
I've also had a very "sustainable" 6800k machine with 32GB ram that was designated later for many other tasks. But the title is more of a click bait rather than backing that claim. The power source I guess is also a factor, since newer Macs are much more power efficient than Intel days. Since 2016, Apple made their machines less "sustainable" in the sense of upgradability (my MacBook Air 2013 was borderline with 8GB of RAM and ended with 2TB hdd), I'm happy the new Mac minis are also going that "hackable" direction. Anyway, Software wise, the "Hackintosh" scene is also valuable for true macOS users just as enabling Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, you can get up to Sequoia with running those custom EFIs.
- opengears 2y ago
  The power savings of new computers are not relevant if compared with the energy that is needed to build them. University of Edinburgh (2016) found that by extending the lifetime of a single computer and monitor from four years to six years, approximately 190 kgCO2e of carbon emissions are avoided (I doubt anyone is using their devices even 4 years nowadays). Report is here: https://edwebcontent.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/files/pc-carbonfootprints-jh-ecci2.pdf https://edwebcontent.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/file...
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    You can see it straight from the horse's mouth, too. On pages 13 and 14 [1], they estimate that between 9 and 23% of the total lifetime emissions for a Mac mini come from using it. The rest is manufacturing and distribution. According to the fine print, the lifecycle of the computer is determined by some ISO standards and I spent a good 10 minutes searching the web to determine a ballpark figure for this (3 years? 5 years? 10 years?) and came up completely empty. [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_mini_PER_Oct2024.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_...
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    The nice thing is that all those new x86 laptops are going to keep being slower than my 2020 M1 mini unless they're high spec, so software/websites are still built with that in mind.
danw1979 2y ago
I thought it would be interesting to run the numbers for the question “how far can I drive my Prius if I didn’t buy this ?” for a new Macbook Pro M4 (14 inch). The answer is a pleasing 1337 miles (198kg lifetime CO2 of the macbook / 148g mile CO2 average for the 2011 Prius). This is pretty surprising. I’d always thought laptop purchases had a much higher impact than an average couple of months of driving.
- genewitch 2y ago
  148 grams per mile? Do you use a water wheel made of magic to charge your Prius?
  - danw1979 2y ago
    It’s not a plug-in. 148g CO2/mile is ~45mpg using 95 octane E10. still surprised ?
    - genewitch 2y ago
      I get ~197g CO2/mile, unless your mile is different than mine. ~122g/km at stated 45MPG. oh also i remember why i mentioned the water wheel. this doesn't take into account the manufacture of the car, nor any other "externalities" and that's fine, but when you say 148g/mile it sounds like that's all included. Perhaps you meant it as a gotcha, and if so, ensure your value is correct, as i don't think it was. 197 if ~8900g/gallon of gasoline is correct. I couldn't get a quick answer to if RON 95 is fundamentally different than say 91 octane in the US, which some pages assures me means the same thing. If so, it is closer to 200 than 150 grams per mile.
ch_123 2y ago
There are at least two problems with this article: 1) If you can hack a current version of macOS to run on non Apple hardware, you can probably also hack a current version of macOS to run on older Apple hardware (see OpenCore Legacy Patcher). 2) Support for macOS on x86 hardware will be discontinued in the not so distant future, putting Hackintoshes into the same category as old x86 Apple hardware.
sc68cal 2y ago
I recently purchased a new laptop battery and installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a Macbook Pro from 2009 that I had kept in storage. It is used for light note taking and e-mail, because I wanted to try and see how viable it was to try and stretch the hardware a bit longer instead of adding to the e-waste problem by buying something new. It's worked well so far. I will keep using it, and then eventually perhaps pick up another refurbished machine when it finally comes time to replace it.

50 points by opengears 2y ago

https://archive.is/tuAZc https://archive.is/tuAZc

The only reaction I can think of to this massive non-sequitur of an article is "WTF?" If you really care about forced obsolescence, refuse to upgrade and push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly. Write and prefer native code. Add drivers for hardware that's "no longer supported". What does this have to do with Hackintoshing? No idea.

wmf 2y ago
There's a flavor of virtue signaling about saving the environment using really old hardware.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Yes, but associating that with Hackintoshing is the weirdest part.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Indeed, it makes no sense because some old hardware that might be ok with Linux or even Windows is probably not ok with macOS. This article even tells you to go buy an RX580, and that's not the half of it. And since you mentioned wasteful web, medium.com is a prime example of that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
amatecha 2y ago
> push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly What does that mean (like what should one do to actually follow what you're saying?) I hate how the web is progressing, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. I use the free-est browser I can use while still being able to access most stuff (Firefox), I use old computers (my newest machine is from 2018 which I just bought second-hand a few months ago), and I use open source OSes (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux). Anyway, that person has already directly "refused to upgrade" by using existing hardware, so I'm not sure what you're actually criticizing. Hackintoshing happens to be the way they reached this goal, and they made a blog post about it. Nothing wrong with that.

justahuman74 2y ago

Just install linux and move on with life

khana 2y ago
[dead]
rvz 2y ago
For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL. You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  I tried WSL, but when WSL 1 was abandoned in favor of Hyper-V I was devastated because the new Hyper-V WSL is kind of shit in comparison. No longer are processes and files shared with the host system, you just get an opaque block of CPU and an opaque block of disk space being used. BTW, if at any time in the future you have to clear out part of that opaque block of disk space to make room - good luck shrinking it. I completely recognize why WSL 1 could have been unsustainable for Microsoft but that does not mean that I do not disagree with the decision to abandon it. There is a certain attraction to the Linux being safely contained but I'm just not getting it at all. I don't want my Linux in a container, I want to live there. So basically that's why I now use macOS, because it doesn't have to use hacks like WSL in order to be like Linux, it just already is Unix. Also in general I tend to find that Apple is more detail-oriented than Microsoft, they are probably autistic as fuck and that is a very good thing. (in my opinion) I'm not yet fully happy with the state of affairs on desktop Linux, although GNOME is to a degree shaping up to a decent experience (partly by copying macOS, though). Their trackpad support is far better than Windows, for example.
  - JackYoustra 2y ago
    you can shrink it now! You're going to have to change the vhd format to sparse (this is why docker for windows doesn't run on exFAT-formatted SSDs, as I found out a couple weeks ago) and then run compaction on it once. After running compaction once, it should grow and shrink dynamically as you'd expect.

wilg 2y ago

For calibrating your understanding of greenhouse gas emissions producing, packaging, shipping, using, and recovering materials from a 14-inch MacBook Pro in 2023 emits about 243 kg of carbon [1], which is equivalent to using 27 gallons of gasoline. [2] For some people, this may math out. But it's probably easier to worry less about buying a new laptop every once in a while, and more about driving a bit less or getting a more efficient car. [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-inch_MacBook_Pro_PER_Jan2023.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-... [2] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...

hot_gril 2y ago
We really need rules of thumb like this physically posted in more places. I grew up seeing "be green" signs in school that didn't really tell you how.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  A reasonable rule of thumb is how much money you spend on something. Even if you buy something that is ostensively green your money is still flowing into an economy which isn’t.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    Yeah, that's what I use if nothing else is available, but in this case the 27 gallons of gasoline costs about 1/10 of the MacBook.
- wilg 2y ago
  Something I would like to see is well regulated “Carbon Facts” on products like nutrition facts.
exitb 2y ago
…which is about as much as commuting to work that’s 5km away for 6 months. Given a ~3 year lifespan of such device, it isn’t such a low amount. And when you decide to get a new, more efficient car, it will have a its own carbon footprint too.

hot_gril 2y ago

I've done this three times, albeit not very recently. First you need a regular computer, on which you're both going to Google a ton and prepare a lot of software. It's only for fun or maaaybe a niche work use case. I also had a MacPro5,1 I used extra long, thanks to some of the tooling mentioned here. Great machine. But seeing how it used 200W and I had to buy a new RX580 for it to be usable, idk if that really helped the environment, nor was that the reason I had it.

opengears 2y ago
Hackintoshing supports internal GPUs (iGPU) as well (not only RX 580) - and lots of people install on their Lenovo Thinkpads or other notebooks.

aspenmayer 2y ago

Hackintoshes make for good troubleshooting devices when working with Mac formatted drives and images.

opengears 2y ago
This is what I use them for exactly. The HFSPlus driver is three years old now, and seems to not get updated anymore. Does anyone know if it is the same one as in Linux kernel? https://github.com/acidanthera/OcBinaryData/blob/master/Drivers/HfsPlus.efi https://github.com/acidanthera/OcBinaryData/blob/master/Driv...

mikae1 2y ago

I ran a Hackintosh as my main machine for many years. I specced (using info found on tonymacx86[1]) and built it around 15 years ago to make it work well as a Hackintosh. And work well it did. Incredibly well actually. But now the doors are closing. macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era. That's the reason I'm not willing to invest the time or energy to do the same again. Hopefully sometime another era of Hackintoshers will find a way to make macOS run on non-Apple ARM hardware. Perhaps it's already happening? :) After 20 years of Hackintosh and Apple hardware I eventually lost hope in Apple due to their unsustainable practices (mostly unserviceable and unupgradeable soldered memory and storage) and moved on to Linux (https://getaurora.dev/ https://getaurora.dev/). Couldn't be happier with KDE Plasma. [1] https://www.tonymacx86.com https://www.tonymacx86.com

baq 2y ago
Funnily enough I hope for an exact opposite: the Apple hardware is IMHO the best and the most irreplaceable part of the whole Apple experience and I’d be a very happy man if there was a simple way of running not-macOS on e.g. the M3 MacBook Pro with full driver support.
- opengears 2y ago
  Luckily we have Asahi Linux. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/ https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
  - baq 2y ago
    …with barely supported M1 and LKML drama. I would love for it to be an option, but it just isn’t.
    - opengears 2y ago
      To be fair - the reverse engineering has to be done for every of the M series, and the M1 is the best supported Apple SoC so far. I guess we should support the project if we want them to succeed (they live from donations).

fexecve 2y ago

Seems AI-written. Doesn't give any justification for MacOS being better for older hardware than Linux or even Windows. You won't be getting updates for your Intel hardware on MacOS, so you're right back where you started with Windows 10 going EOL.

peter_opensa 2y ago
Too many typos to be AI written. I think the point was that if you are able to use the old hardware longer it is better for the environment - not the effectiveness of old hardware in general (Linux always wins this argument)
LoganDark 2y ago
This is not AI-written. This is what used to be called asperger's (now part of autism spectrum disorder). You can see it in how they write: > In 2025 the question is: why Hackintosh? And after being in the different communities for so long and observing reasons people install Hackintosh they are: the way they construct sentences is so distinctly recognizable: [And after [being in [the different communities] for so long] and observing [reasons people [install Hackintosh]] they are:] It's like they use Scratch blocks to assemble their language. It's hard to explain, but you can know it when you see it.

rock_artist 2y ago

I've also had a very "sustainable" 6800k machine with 32GB ram that was designated later for many other tasks. But the title is more of a click bait rather than backing that claim. The power source I guess is also a factor, since newer Macs are much more power efficient than Intel days. Since 2016, Apple made their machines less "sustainable" in the sense of upgradability (my MacBook Air 2013 was borderline with 8GB of RAM and ended with 2TB hdd), I'm happy the new Mac minis are also going that "hackable" direction. Anyway, Software wise, the "Hackintosh" scene is also valuable for true macOS users just as enabling Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, you can get up to Sequoia with running those custom EFIs.

opengears 2y ago
The power savings of new computers are not relevant if compared with the energy that is needed to build them. University of Edinburgh (2016) found that by extending the lifetime of a single computer and monitor from four years to six years, approximately 190 kgCO2e of carbon emissions are avoided (I doubt anyone is using their devices even 4 years nowadays). Report is here: https://edwebcontent.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/files/pc-carbonfootprints-jh-ecci2.pdf https://edwebcontent.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/file...
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  You can see it straight from the horse's mouth, too. On pages 13 and 14 [1], they estimate that between 9 and 23% of the total lifetime emissions for a Mac mini come from using it. The rest is manufacturing and distribution. According to the fine print, the lifecycle of the computer is determined by some ISO standards and I spent a good 10 minutes searching the web to determine a ballpark figure for this (3 years? 5 years? 10 years?) and came up completely empty. [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_mini_PER_Oct2024.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_...
- hot_gril 2y ago
  The nice thing is that all those new x86 laptops are going to keep being slower than my 2020 M1 mini unless they're high spec, so software/websites are still built with that in mind.

danw1979 2y ago

I thought it would be interesting to run the numbers for the question “how far can I drive my Prius if I didn’t buy this ?” for a new Macbook Pro M4 (14 inch). The answer is a pleasing 1337 miles (198kg lifetime CO2 of the macbook / 148g mile CO2 average for the 2011 Prius). This is pretty surprising. I’d always thought laptop purchases had a much higher impact than an average couple of months of driving.

genewitch 2y ago
148 grams per mile? Do you use a water wheel made of magic to charge your Prius?
- danw1979 2y ago
  It’s not a plug-in. 148g CO2/mile is ~45mpg using 95 octane E10. still surprised ?
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I get ~197g CO2/mile, unless your mile is different than mine. ~122g/km at stated 45MPG. oh also i remember why i mentioned the water wheel. this doesn't take into account the manufacture of the car, nor any other "externalities" and that's fine, but when you say 148g/mile it sounds like that's all included. Perhaps you meant it as a gotcha, and if so, ensure your value is correct, as i don't think it was. 197 if ~8900g/gallon of gasoline is correct. I couldn't get a quick answer to if RON 95 is fundamentally different than say 91 octane in the US, which some pages assures me means the same thing. If so, it is closer to 200 than 150 grams per mile.

ch_123 2y ago

There are at least two problems with this article: 1) If you can hack a current version of macOS to run on non Apple hardware, you can probably also hack a current version of macOS to run on older Apple hardware (see OpenCore Legacy Patcher). 2) Support for macOS on x86 hardware will be discontinued in the not so distant future, putting Hackintoshes into the same category as old x86 Apple hardware.

sc68cal 2y ago

I recently purchased a new laptop battery and installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a Macbook Pro from 2009 that I had kept in storage. It is used for light note taking and e-mail, because I wanted to try and see how viable it was to try and stretch the hardware a bit longer instead of adding to the e-waste problem by buying something new. It's worked well so far. I will keep using it, and then eventually perhaps pick up another refurbished machine when it finally comes time to replace it.