My good friend Mark gifted me a Hackintosh which I use for most of my CG and editing projects. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it if (when) it fucks up - but it’s a speedy (and cheap) machine that am still trying to run into the ground.
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My main computer has been a hackintosh since 2013. If you indeed get precisely the right hardware (see tonymacx86’s buying guide), then after the additional setup hassle it will all work with the same reliability as 1st-party hardware, which in many cases it is.
That said, the first run through that extra setup will wreck a weekend and change for you. The second time, maybe just your Saturday.
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See, I feel like have better things to do with what little spare time I have on my weekends than dick around with stuff like this. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago I would have had the time and patience to deal with this, but these days I simply don’t. I’d rather just get a real Mac and grouse about how shitty Apple has made its hardware than cobble something together and curse it every time something goes wrong.
I consider myself a pretty technical person but as soon as the article said, “and now we open up the laptop and replace the built-in Wi-Fi adapter” I couldn’t help but laugh.
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What exactly feels so good about an X1 carbon? Im forced to use one for work and its horrible
I bought a new MacBook Pro in 2010, and am keen to upgrade it, but from what I’ve read about the shoddy keyboard and what I’ve seen of that useless, shitty touchbar, the most I’ll do is buy a used 4 year-old (when I do). It’s distressing what they’ve done to the brand.
This article makes me think Hackintoshing might be the way to go.
It’s that or have a machine with a keyboard that breaks after 6 months. Or shudder running Windows.
The touch bar is indeed useless.
The keyboard isn’t so bad after you get used to it (and it’s better still on the latest gen). This product makes it a million times better:
It’s still not as good as the keyboard on, say, the Surface Book, but it’s not as awful.
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I spec’d out the hardware in the PC I built in 2010 so that it could run as my Windows gaming PC, as my ESXi lab and as a Hackintosh. I wound up running ESXi from time to time from a USB key and never got around to making it into a Hackintosh.
Like a number of you, I think it’d be fun to do but I’m not sure I want to devote the time and energy to maintaining it.
A few of us looked into building a couple in college. At the time the good affordable video software was largely MacOs exclusive, but being film students we weren’t exactly the sort of flush that says “hey lets drop $5k on a Mac desktop we don’t really need”. Things changed pretty rapidly from there, Apple lost (or straight up abandoned) its lock on production environments, Adobe fixed its shit, Avid often became a lot more important than Final Cut once you were actually out there working.
The few of us that actually ended up building boxes that were capable of getting hackintoshed never got around to giving it a go. It just never ended up being worth the trouble. If you were working for someone you didn’t neccisarily need to buy a work station of your own. And if you were a freelancer you could just roll around in Windows land or you got involved in the whole “buy used and upgrade with last years parts when they get cheap” thing if you needed to keep costs down. The latter now being increasingly a thing you can’t do, so everyone is going PC.
Plus most of us ended up bartenders and shit. Gotta love that global economic collapse.
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Hackintoshes are more hobby than tool. You’ve been warned. Now, go build one anyway and have fun.
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My wife and I built a Hackintosh in an old B&W G3 mac we found in the rubbish. It was a fun project building it and it has been our lounge room internet machine for the last 6 or so years. I didn’t find it particularly troublesome. In fact, having very specific requirements when getting parts for a desktop makes it easier.
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Disingenuous much?
That has not been true for at least the last 3 years. Some (owners of 2006-ish plastic MacBooks) might argue the quality problem has been around much longer.
I’ve had at least one of every Mac portable for the last nearly 2 decades, gave up on the current offerings after the 12" MacBook came out. I just couldn’t adjust to that ridiculous and fragile keyboard.
My daily driver is a nearly 7 years old retina machine. I won’t be replacing it with the current generation.
Price, performance and ultimate thinness are not factors for me. Usability is. The fragile and awful keyboard and lack of ports are dealbreakers for me.
Pretty much this. Any theoretical savings in hardware that you make will be eaten up by the time you invest in getting it to work. BUT: if you are doing it for the simple fun of “because it’s possible”, then go ahead! Getting things to work in ways their creators did not intend has a certain pleasure in and of itself.
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Huh? I have not one, but two Mac’s here dual-booting Linux (One triple-boots Linux, OSX and Windows for gaming).
I will agree that they’ve all been bulletproof, though. Every Apple laptop or desktop I’ve owned managed at least five years in service, and would have lasted longer if I wasn’t a gamer and eventually needed a better GPU. More importantly, they hold residual value incredibly well, so upgrading completely eliminates the “Apple Tax”.
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If you require MacOS for something this is the way to go. The hardware is no longer “a computer”, it is “a computing appliance”. You don’t get value from the hardware with their machines - it’s a pretty shell and an alternate OS
You can’t replace the SSD, or increase your own memory, or get bigger batteries, and have to use that awful touchbar unless you go for the lowest hardware option. Even the higher-end models are weaker than PCs, thanks to Apple’s psychotic fear of proper ventilation everything will thermally throttle.
Looking around, it looks like they’ve not locked out Linux, they just don’t include the Microsoft partners key in the secure area. All you have to do is turn off secure boot, which you should do anyway as it’s an anti feature, so those of you who want to run Linux, feel free - I guess?
I guess you’re not the type of user who do heavy workloads on your computer.
Apple hardware has been dropping in quality for several years. The main problems are thermal design issues, specially on the laptops that have dedicated graphics cards, but lately is something that happened on mac and mac mini. Basically, for several years, Apple has been prioritizing design over stability.
These past years, though, Apple has become a running joke of computer design: From the infamous butterfly keyboard,to screens that stop working after opening the screen normally, to laptops that ramp up to 98ºC at any load (and that’s with aggressive throttling in place).
Setting that up aside, there is an interest in hackintoshes because there are people who need the computer for heavy workloads that need at least one powerful video card. Most of them still cling to the 2008 Mac Pros, but they are starting to get a bit old in the processor side.
Hackintoshes cover a niche that professionals have been asking to Apple since at least 2001: an expandable macintosh for professional workloads. If you read the article, you will see another of the pet peeves most old-school, pro users have with the new macs: NOT ENOUGH PORTS.
Most people I know that use a hackintosh as a daily drivers use it for video editing with MacOS, so Linux is not an option, and current apple hardware is not an option, either. Not all hackintosh are unstable, but their rigs are not exactly cheap (3000$).
The main issue is not that they want to save money, is that Apple is not offering a product they can use.
If you want to get an idea, search for “Hackintosh video editing rig” or something similar.
Lightweight and solid feel, with a good keyboard, not oversized trackpad. Not as heavy or sharp-edged as a MacBook Pro. But the speakers fall far short of MacBooks.
What’s going wrong with yours?
Because we can. Because we’re forbidden to do so, which makes us want to all the more. Because it’s interesting. Because it’s fun, albeit in a very dwarf-fortress sense. Because we have spare hardware lying around. Because it’s interesting to look at the insides of how things work.
I saw a drone that looked like a flying lawnmower a while back. Same thing.
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I’d guess the same thing that goes wrong with all corporate laptops, shitty image full of bloated, out of date encyrption, key loggers, backgrounded remote management systems that suck up everything, inability to install applications on a per-user basis, so you need a ticket for an “admin” to install anything distributed as an *.msi. That admin will be the lowest rung first line support kid who will do it wrong.
Put linux on that machine and it FLIESSSSSSS. I’m a fan of the Thinkpad 4x0s line over the carbons myself.
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