All the above?
Forgive me. I've been on Linux since the 90s and don't really engage much with the Apple ecosystem. I don't mean this as a dig. I'm really ignorant on this stuff.
- it's expensive, especially if you want to load up on memory or disk space
- there is limited choice
- it's relatively unreliable
- it's difficult to fix, you have to send it to Apple under warranty, third party repairs are difficult or impossible, self fix is impractical for most people
With Hackintoshes you can have a solid desktop machine starting from $150 (motherboard and processor). You can easily fix it yourself by swapping out parts and get local warranty. You can upgrade and downgrade at will. You can use a much wider range of macOS versions.
Laptops are a more complicated issue and much more marginal.
I've used a Hackintosh as my daily driver for about 10 years ever since I had the misfortune of trying to get my brand new MacBook fixed by a "genius" who was actually a rude, condescending arsehole who spoke nonsense. Apple applied the trivial fix of a replacement internal cable and then held my laptop for nearly a week as a matter of policy.
I replaced the SSD a few years ago, and I don't think the battery would last very long nowadays, but I don't want a laptop on holidays anymore anyway.
I got fed up with osX though, just run Linux nowadays.
I dream of a day when I can daily drive Linux and also do dev on iOS, but currently that’s not really possible without some unacceptable compromise. I’ve done quite a bit of research and have yet to find a viable solution (recommendations welcome).
If I measure against "is it viable?", for me the answer is "absolutely, yes".
Another aspect was that the Mac desktop lineup wasn't great. There was the Mac Mini, which had a pretty limited chassis for any kind of expansion, not the best CPU options and ran on integrated graphics. Then there was the iMac, which had the same CPU I chose for my Hackintosh, but was significantly more expensive and came with a monitor that I didn't really need since I already had a good monitor. And lastly there was the Mac Pro, which was overkill both for budget and power, since it wasn't like you could spec it out with an i7 instead of a Xeon. The latest Mac Pro was also the trashcan, really emphasising how not great the lineup was.
With a Hackintosh, I could really just choose what parts I wanted, as long as macOS supported them in some way, and stuff as many SSDs and HDDs as I required over time, since it's not like my student budget expanded to having a separate NAS. And it'd be much cheaper than a comparable Mac, not that there were really any directly comparable ones. Performance-wise the iMac would've probably been the best one.
While it was a pretty superb system, especially for the money, it did get a bit tiresome to deal with the hacky nature of the system by the end of it. macOS updates would always be somewhere between "mild pain" and "large pain", so I did defer updates quite a lot. Sleep also stopped working at some point, so I often kept the computer running 24/7. And when Apple switched over to ARM, I knew that it was time to jump the Hackintosh ship. Thankfully by 2022, I had access to engineering bucks and had already acquired a NAS for my data storage needs, so I replaced my Hackintosh with the first-generation Mac Studio. A lot more expensive than my Hackintosh was, but a great computer nonetheless. Also dropped my apartment's total power usage by like 15-20%.
Initially I just did it because I assembled a pretty good PC for gaming, but for work stuff I liked macOS more, so dual booting was a nice option!
This was also before the M-series chips, where you had to pay a hefty premium to get better Intel processors, and also (imo) Apple increasingly struggled with the heat produced by the chips.
Things got a bit more annoying a couple years later, when Apple had their fallout with NVIDIA and would not sign their drivers anymore, which meant I had to buy a cheap AMD GPU to use for macOS.
End of last year I changed a couple of components, including the GPU, in my PC and then decided the hassle with two GPUs was just not worth it for me anymore; so I bought a Mac studio.
I gained some and lost some with this transition. I'm no longer worried about major software updates, it's nice that I don't have to deal with complicated config files for the bootloader every once in a while, and of course there were some minor bugs too.
But I kind of miss the convenience of dual booting, with shared IO and drives. Now I need a network switch, USB-hub and have to toggle between monitor inputs. So yeah! Wasn't all bad!
Anyways, I think it's very cool that there is this community of people that write and maintain special bootloaders and drivers to make it all possible!
It was nice in paper, but really needed to be undervolted and under locked... Not an easy task in a mbp. I couldn't get IT approval to buy a software to do it and didn't have local permission to load a self signed driver to do it either.
It was unusable for such a beast of a machine on paper.
I think in the mid-00s I could understand Hackintosh users to some extent. Mac hardware was (and still is) expensive, and OS X was a really nice, developer-friendly OS. But macOS has gotten more and more annoying and (IMO) developer-/power-user-hostile with every release. On the rare occasions I have to touch a Mac laptop these days, I find myself getting easily frustrated.
I think for the most part the reasons today are still due to cost. And maybe a little bit of the hacker spirit, just proving that something is possible. I would never use it, but if some folks' ideal is macOS on non-Apple hardware, and can make it work to their satisfaction, more power to them.
The PC equivalent, probably a 2023 Dell Optiplex 7010, for instance, looks to be just about the same amount ($449).
Compare https://www.ebay.com/itm/364218215167 with https://www.ebay.com/itm/276266965157
I think we've hit the commodity price point market with used Apple hardware.
Again, maybe I'm just too rich to care about the $50 here but I thought the Apple premium has shaken itself off at least the used market.
For macOS vs. Linux it’s more fuzzy, but there are still some ways the macOS experience is a bit smoother once everything is up and running, like dodging the tinkeriness of X11 and awkwardness of the transition from X11 to Wayland… for example, you’ll never see blurry XWayland windows because someone forgot to update Electron.
That said I haven’t hackintoshed in several years. It stopped feeling as necessary after M1 came out, with my reasons for doing so being lack of power and bad cooling endemic to late 2020s Intel Macs. These days I use real Macs alongside a custom built gaming tower running Windows and ThinkPad X1 Nano running Fedora.
I have an mà air for my personal laptop, still running macOS though.
The only compute I had after that was an old thinkpad x270, dual core with 8gb memory.
I ran Debian with kde for awhile, but I like the macOS workflows and key bindings too much. I like the quality polished native apps folks build. I like homebrew casks, etc. It’s running opencore and Sonoma right now. For me, it was a way to get the OS I am productive in while no longer being able to afford the expensive hardware.
I fear that with Apple making their own arm chips now, hackintoshes are on numbered days. It’s only a matter of time before the OS no longer runs on x86_64 and they are already starting to drop support here and there.
For parts of the config.plist, you can find generators, but when installing on raw hardware you will probably be combining presets based on your system specifics.
The reason is twofold. First, tutorials are not "knowledge". They help you to get started, and then... You're on your own. Secondly, most hackintosh tutorials are not even that. Lots and lots of them are written by people who don't really know what they are doing and why. They put something together, they don't know how it works, but they rush to educate the masses nonetheless.
Mechanistically putting the exact bits of configuration into a file and stringing some files in a directory does not make you magically learn how any of this works.
Then again, I'm no CodeRush or usr-sse2 or vit9696 any other hackintosh star, but I've been tinkering with hackintoshes since 2009 and know a thing or two about how they work. However, I'm emphatically not fond of having to rediscover ACPI quirks of my machine on my own if someone else has done it, and done it better.
Once the thing boots and works at its best, I promptly forget all the bootloader and ACPI intricacies I needed to juggle to make it work, this is not how I do my computering. Which is why premade EFI directories are good IMO, once you know what they are made of and why. Bonus points if well-commented .dsl files are published next to .amls, of course.
Since OSX-KVM is out, though, I very happily confine my hackintoshing to a VM if I need it. With VFIO, you can even have accelerated desktop if it's what you fancy.
As much as I love Hackintoshes, they can be a huge time sink if you want 1-1 feature parity with an equivalent Apple product. It is not too difficult getting Hackintoshes to install and boot to the desktop in this day and age thanks to Dortania’s OpenCore guide and contributions from groups like Acidanthera. However, it takes far more time, effort, research, and trial-and-error to get small things working because there are so many different variants and situations to account for. Examples - Wifi/BT and Continuity features require cards pulled directly from a recent MacBook, or a Fenvi card, both of which no longer work with Sonoma without using OCLP / CPU profiles might need adjustment to account for battery life and performance issues / Intel SST was never used with MacOS devices, so any computers using Ice Lake Intel CPUs and Intel SST can’t have a working built-in microphone or headphone jack, etc. Reliability is a pain as well. Anything can break at any time.
At this point, I’ve come to learn that if you want a macOS device that just works, you are better off just getting a new Mac mini (desktop) or MacBook Air/Pro (laptop). I understand the arguments against this (high costs for specs, lack of repairability, intentional sabotage of repairs with third-party parts, used market is a gamble with ADE/MDM and iCloud locks, lack of customization with other computer components, etc). But I (fortunately) have never had issues with any of my MacBooks or Mac minis. And they have always “just worked” for my use cases.
Hackintoshes make for great fun projects where you do not rely on that computer for day-to-day operations. Though the ability to Hackintosh may soon be impossible with newer OS versions. It is only a matter of time since Apple is moving away from Intel x86 processors, which is part of what allowed Hackintoshes to be possible in the first place.
Although this is broadly true it can generally be avoided by using proven hardware and premade EFI folders, which is what I've always done. I have no interest in spending time getting things working but there are many options available that don't require it. Most people in this boat are those with existing hardware who are determined to get it working.
> Hackintoshes make for great fun projects where you do not rely on that computer for day-to-day operations.
I run my Hackintosh 24/7 and it stays up for months on end. I've had very few unprompted crashes over the years. The reliability of the hardware is entirely based on what you buy.
> Though the ability to Hackintosh may soon be impossible with newer OS versions. It is only a matter of time since Apple is moving away from Intel x86 processors, which is part of what allowed Hackintoshes to be possible in the first place.
The Intel transition will have little effect on Hackintohses for now. Apple is likely to support their Intel products with updates until about 2030 and then you can keep using them for many years thereafter. Most people will be fine for at least 10 years.
Wound up back in windows for a bit and now have been on Linux for a few years. Much happier just running Linux at this point.
I'm not sure how much longer it will be before Apple kills off x86 support altogether and a modern hackintosh is simply no longer an option.
It kills me that Microsoft crippled styluses in Fall Creator's Update, and it annoys me to no end having to toggle Settings to allow my stylus to work in Macromedia Freehand (though yes, I'll admit that's better than having to run it in a penalty box).
I would love to see it compete with Microsoft Windows.
I am super, super cognizant that the devil's in the proverbial details, but they sure do seem to publish a lot of macOS into the open <https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...> so my interest is to map out the parts that are missing
I'm also aware that Darling exists (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423469 ) but if it's anything like Wine -- no, thank you. The only reason Wine (and their CrossOver friends) are required to exist is because there's no suitable open source release of Windows, so emulating the bugs is glucose cheaper. I had high hopes for ReactOS when I was in college, but I think they're just pushing that rock uphill (although I am super glad the project exists)
Having said all of that, don't overlook that even if I snapped my fingers and had a PureDarwin built 14.3 .iso this very second, the supply chain for x86_64 applications for any such OS is likely going the way of the dodo, since it won't be in a vendor's best interest to dedicate resources to building releases for what they assume is a dead platform
Apple is not very frequent in self-shooting in the foot.
Microsoft is a software company that builds some hardware.
They’re coming from opposite directions.
Nah, they're a software company that builds physical runtimes.
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." — Alan Kay
It seems they consider hardware obsolete 7 years from availability to purchase. Intel mac pro was selling last year so sometime around 2030?
Not only is the driver support abysmal, kext are gone, and the actual quality of macOS has declined significantly over the years.
10 years ago, there was the rule of thumb to wait one update before you do the “big” OS upgrade, now it's better to wait for 3–4 updates as Sanoma crashes on our working machines (1500 people company) frequently.
Speaking of crashes, my m1 MacBook Pro 13, still running Ventura, has crashed more than ANY OTHER mac before. And I'm talking about crashes like, you close the lid, drive to the airport, take a seat, open the lid and just see that macOS starts completely fresh and presents you with a system crash message.
And this is the first Mac where I don't use any kext, strange tools, and completely abandoned software development…
The only thing that let me keep the m1 is the battery life...
On the topic of Hackintoshes: They are becoming more and more obsolet with Apples focus on Apple Silicon, Neural Engines and so on. Not spec or price wise, but regarding feature parity and Apples OS support for the Intel architecture. Lots of old „Hackintoshers“ abandoning the hobby.
Wonder if your M1 might have a hardware defect lurking, though — the vast majority of kernel panics on real macs come from hardware malfunctioning.
They tried to do such a thing with IBM back in 1995-96. Didn't work out.
