This. Apple doesn't even care about Hackintoshes, which are (theoretically) orders of magnitude more threatening to Apple's business model since they (theoretically) cannibalize Mac sales.
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
I am sure Apple loves that Hackintosh users are in the Apple ecosystem (often developing software for Apple machines), and many will eventually start buying real Apple hardware.
Apple will turn a blind eye to Hackintosh as long as the process stays too difficult to ever cannibalize sales.
"A survey conducted by Forrester Research earlier this month showed that Microsoft has already become the country’s second-biggest cloud services provider, with its Office 365 and Azure platforms."
Looks like the subscription model did the trick.
That's because their numbers are so low that they don't represent a threat, but still contribute to keep users hooked to the Apple ecosystem, which is vital for them; of 10 people with a Hackintosh there may be no real Mac users, but many of them are likely to own an iPhone and use other Apple services; Apple need to keep those customers so they close both eyes on Hackintoshes. Also, since they offer no warranty for non original Apple hardware, it wouldn't impact much their corporate users base, which often are forced to use the real thing.
One side effect of making their own line of CPUs, and a system that as for now, runs only on them, however, could also be seen as a way to kill the Hackintoshes "competition", or it may be just a nice side effect for them. Time will tell.
I suspect a lot of Hackintoshes users do so because they like using macOS day-to-day, but don't see anything appealing in Apple's hardware lineup.
I'm one of them.
I wonder if it occurred to someone at Apple, if it's somewhat an added benefit to them.
Add to that a lack of expandability, customizability, (user) repairability and (hardware) compatibility.
Life is just a lot less miserable without having to deal with Apple hardware. PC components seem to be very reliable when you spend just middle-range prices and you can easily buy and swap out components when something does go wrong.
I generally go many months without having to reboot my Hackintosh, and I can't ever remember having a kernel panic after initial setup. Both of those things were not true with Apple hardware.
