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Comment by awesomerobot | Hacker News Reader

After running a Hackintosh for about 6 months a few years ago I became convinced that they're not really for budget-minded Mac enthusiasts, but for people who enjoy maintenance and troubleshooting.

Unless you're on a tight budget and planning to use existing hardware, I strongly recommend going the way of a Mac Mini and spend the time you would have lost to building a Hackintosh on literally anything else.

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That's exactly how I felt. Every update had a risk of being a maintenance nightmare. The machine was really fast, but now I ended up buying a top end iMac 5K and a MacBook Pro. I'll never go back to a hackintosh, but if I didn't do it originally I doubt I would have gone Mac full time. My old hackintosh is now relegated to Win7 for those game devs that are making games for Windows only.

This was my experience exactly. Seemed like a great idea at the time, but always required some sort of maintenance at various times that required researching solutions, posting on message boards, and trial-and-error. Basically, it's the same amount of effort required to run a linux based desktop.

I'd argue that it's more effort than running a popular distro like Ubuntu because the hackintosh knowledgebase is generally a lot smaller.

totally agree.

Without intentionally trying to turn this in to an OS War, at least on a linux box, there was source code. So if something bothered you enough you could go in and fix it yourself (which added to your skills as a coder).

These days, it feels like people enjoy digging around on their systems less and less, and they just want javascript to run in a browser.

Me too -- would add that despite the time I sunk into troubleshooting, I don't feel like I learned anything useful in the process.

Maintenance and troubleshooting with PCs was the reason I switch to Mac in the first place. To me at least, it's worth a few extra dollars if it means I never have to look inside of it (the hardware or the software).

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