Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

46 pointssahin-boydas65 comments

Don't bother with a Hackintosh. I've spent time R&D iDeneb and custom Tony Mac OS X builds, and realize it's way easier (and cheaper, especially in terms of time) to simply buy an entry level Macbook Air or Pro (honestly an Air is fine enough if you're not doing video editing, I got by using one for 3+ years before I got a Pro).

To get the best deal you can either purchase from eBay (use cashback at TopCashback.com and no tax) or try to find a store that lets you use gift cards purchased at ~10+% discount. You can get gift cards at https://www.giftcardgranny.com and if you shop at a store like Best Buy you can probably get the EDU discount code with a fake EDU from https://secure.californiacolleges.edu/Home/Create_an_Account....

Hackintosh really not worth it unless you're doing serious video editing.

For desktops, it can be pretty straightforward to install, but not always update. I used to run one for a couple of years.

For laptops, absolutely agreed. Configuring a Hack is always going to be painful.

You can also get a refurbished macbook pro or imac straight from apple for less than a new macbook air http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

The Apple Store matches prices, up to 10% iirc. Fry's electronics email prices are about the same 15% discount as the refurbished apple products at your link.

Having used a hackintosh (Surface Pro) as a secondary machine to my Mac, I don't recommend it for everyone.

* You won't be able to update to the latest patches without possibly breaking the build. There's a possibly you need to re-hack your device every year. Xcode is tied directly to Mac OS X builds. For example, you can't download 8.1 unless your own Sierra right now.

* WiFi / Bluetooth didn't work for my particular hackintosh, but it'll be better for others.

* Graphics were a bit buggy (again not a problem depending on the device).

* Login would fritz out on occasion so I'd have to boot into safe mode to fix it. Could be my particular device, but random problems are common with hackintoshs.

* When it worked it was amazing, touchscreen worked as well.

* iMessage / FaceTime will not work unless you hack it and provide it your Mac's serial number. Do this at your own risk. This could essentially break iMessage on your original mac. I think I ended up emailing them or something to get it looked into / fixed.

* App Store has some issues as well as lot of things are tied into the serial number of the Mac.

* If you enjoy fiddling and hacking on things, I'd recommend this. It was a good learning experience for me and I don't regret it, but I wouldn't want to do it again. I ended up having to modify some kernel files to get some things working. Basically a lot of tinkering from one patch to another.

Having done it once, I wouldn't go the hackintosh route again. While I enjoyed the process, the amount of time I spent to get it work wasn't worth it for me. If price was an issue, it's definitely a good route.

You don't need Sierra to run 8.1

I don't recommend using a hackintosh for your professional development.

That being said, building a hackintosh rig and getting it to work is really fun to play around with!

> That being said, building a hackintosh rig and getting it to work is really fun to play around with!

In other words, doing this will eat up countless hours so you should only by doing this if you want (i.e., have time for) a new hobby, not because you think the new MBPs lack of an Esc key is going to ruin your productivity.

I would also add that I would be _incredibly_ wary of doing any professional develop outside of a properly licensed environment.

To my great sadness there is no such way to do hackintosh development in a properly licensed manner. :(

Don't know why you are getting downvoted. Hackintosh often have problems with interacting with specific non mac hardware and they can be a pain to set up.

I've tried many Hackintosh options out there years ago specifically to get started developing on iOS. While I think many machines can run Mac, I gave up on Hackintosh for iOS development mainly because:

1. Opportunity cost - The time you spend on hackintosh could be spent exploring the iOS SDK. It is an extensive and amazing SDK to work with.

2. Need to embrace the platform - I once hated the fact that you had to get a Mac to develop for iOS. But then a light clicked in my head: If you aren't willing to get a Mac, you'd never appreciate the iOS platform and always hate it for not being more open, or not supporting many languages, etc.

Why would needing to purchase the hardware somehow change your opinion on hating iOS for not being more open?

I think the idea is that the tying of the software and hardware is a cornerstone of Apple's proprietary platform control efforts, so if you're upset about that, you're likely to be upset about the other aspects too.

Right, exactly... how would I stop being upset by being forced into buying expensive hardware?

That is some backwards logic right there.

I've compared a load of new laptops on my spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nnmI9pN9rBMBJHE1gqYA...

Compares CPU Passmark score, GPU Flops, Display gamut Rec 2020.

Might be of interest.

Hackintosh laptops though are hit and miss. I'm not sure if Apple even have kexts for modern Nvidia GPUs?

EDIT: There are no Macs packing Nvidia 10xx GPUs. So yes, there might be a problem.

NVidia has kexts available for Mac that support pretty much all of their modern cards.

There are no Macs packing Nvidia 10xx GPUs.

I had problems in the past because I was using a Hackintosh with an AMD card that didn't work with OSX at the time.

Thanks for the spread sheet.

Nice spreadsheet. Will you also list the MBPR13 with 16GB RAM (BTO)? What's the difference between the Dell in row 26 vs row 29? They seem to be the same model (different price). Is the Dell XPS 13 with the i7-7500U already in the list?

The MBPr13 doesn't even have an nVidia or AMD GPU, just the Intel GPU that's part of the CPU.

As a developer I do not care about the color gamut that much, that's more for the designers.

Yes.

But if you bought one of the PC laptops linked in my document, you might end up with a system with unsupported graphics.

MIGHT.

I had huge problems with hackintosh in the past because my GPU was newer than the Kexts OSX had available at the time.

EDIT: You edited your comment. The difference was the cheaper model shipped with Ubuntu. Didn't notice because I was watching Star Trek. Haha.

Good point. The i7-7500U is too new for now to consider running macOS on it.

Just buy a used Mac, save some cash. I'm running a mid 2012 and the things still super fast.

How wise and straightforward is it to run OS/X in a virtual machine on a Windows laptop? How recent a version can you run, and what's the best setup to use? What limitations does it have, and what kind of graphics cards can it take advantage of, if any?

For my purposes, I only need to build apps with XCode, not do anything graphically intensive.

The entire UI is GPU accelerated, which isn't supported in a VM. It's pretty painful to use for more than 2-3 minutes.

Have you used Beamoff to disable beam sync? Once it runs, the performance is drastically improved.

Wow I never heard of beam sync or beamoff -- great tip! Googling for that found some other useful vm performance stuff.

Looks like it might only work in older operating systems since El Capitan is based on Metal instead of OpenGL.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/3l3mp2/anyone_kn...

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/improving-yosem...

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/302424-yosemite-on-vm...

http://www.chromescreen.com/disable-beamsync-at-osx-login/

Are you not going to need to run the iOS simulator?

Oh heavens no, I'm not going down the Inception rat hole! ;) I'm developing Unity apps so there are already way too many levels of abstraction!

I run it in virtualbox on Windows. El Capitan. All you need to do is run a hacked installation image in a vm with some conservative settings. It works fine but no graphics acceleration is possible since its not officially supported.

I built a VMWare image for older version OS X -- it requires some patching but it's pretty straight forward. The performance of the VM was good enough for basic usage. I never ended up doing much with it, though.

I realize this is not what you asked for, but the non-touch entry level macbook pro is in apple stores now.

Go check it out before you take on the headache that is working on a hackintosh.

It's still somehow better built than dell's XPS and the space gray color is nice to boot. Since it's the "entry level", it doesn't have a touch strip and instead has a full function row, including the esc key. It felt fast from my first impressions and the aspect ratio is 16:10 (thanks for the correction), which you still can't get on windows pc other than the surface book.

That's a decent machine, but amusingly the Macbook Air has more ports and potentially a better keyboard. Depending on your actual needs, the 13" MBA may be quite sufficient for $500 less.

I wouldn't really want it as a primary computer if you're only doing iOS development, but as an ultraportable that can run Xcode, sure.

Agree to disagree I guess.

I always buy hubs/docking stations anyway - you can run 2 5k displays off that tiny macbook (don't think you can with the MBA, could be wrong) and thunderbolt has good speed for all your peripherals.

For me personally the deal killer is the touchpad and aspect ratio. PC touchpads are still mechanical and you still have to click on the bottom 2/3rds of the pad to get a crisp click. Similarly, there is only one 16:10 pc laptop out there that I know of which is the surface book. A nice machine, but I personally don't like the detachable/touch screen stuff yet.

It's 16:10.

If you are a professional app developer (you make a living out of it) then Hackintosh is a bad alternative. It can get your developer account, and apps, banned by Apple. On top of that, you can get sued.

Provide sources.

Multiple acquittances have been working on custom built Hackintoshes for years without _any_ issues from Apple.

Previous success does not mean it's a good or advisable idea. This is the kind of thing companies will tolerate until they decide not too and then drop a horde of lawyers on a few 'examples'.

I guess it's just a matter risk tolerance then.

The source is the license agreement for macOS. It explicitly says that the software is licensed to run on Apple branded computers. If you run it elsewhere you are running it unlicensed.

Can you also provide a source? Would your acquaintances mind if you provided links to the apps they have developed with their Hackintoshes for years?

If you are talking about the Apple EULA, that is not enforceable in the EU.

That loophole was an argument back when you could buy a copy of OS X on DVD, but is there any current way of obtaining a legal copy of OS X separately?

Looks like you can purchase a USB drive with the OS X El Capitan installer[0] from SanDisk(?) via Amazon.

You can purchase Snow Leopard[0], Lion[1], and Mountain Lion[2] directly from the Apple Store, but Snow Leopard looks like a DVD and Lion and Mountain Lion look like Mac App Store codes, and you'd need an existing macOS installation in that case.

You can also purchase an OS X Lion USB installation drive[4] from Apple via Amazon.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Capitan-10-11-Mac-Instruction-Include...

[1]: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow...

[2]: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion

[3]: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6377Z/A/os-x-mountain-lio...

[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Thumb-Drive-Model-A1384/dp/B006...

I could imagine having a Mac Mini to do the publishing and the rest of your development on a more powerful Hackintosh. In fact I'll probably end up in that boat myself.

I knew a bunch of people developing for iOs in college who took this road.

They used some university Macs to publishing, but did their dev work on Hackintosh to avoid spending all day in a musty computer lab. It worked quite well, barring the usual issue of Hackintosh being a bit flaky. If you had to buy a machine to publish on it would be a bit less appealing, but picking up an old Mac on Craigslist sounds worth it to develop as you like and publish 'legitimately'.

does it really?

the eula, which is hardly enforceable anyway, says literally "xcode must run on Apple hardware". just that. they'd have a really hard case if you used a apple keyboard or pen drive...

but, I'm not a lawyer and the lawyers at my company didn't want to test it themselves

Getting sued isn't the end of the world

The risk is $400 of hardware and a $99 dev account for the possibility of making way more than that releasing your own apps and making that much on a daily basis developing apps for other people.

Risk meet Reward

If you're gonna do that, develop for Android, and don't worry about running unlicensed stuff.

do both on the hackintosh

Risk, meet reward

You are debating over contract privileges that aren't even enforced and have very minimal consequences even if they were

I would honestly just buy a used Oct 2013 15" MBP instead. A used one should run you under $1000 now that the new MBPs are coming out.

I currently have one that I bought in 2014, and I can drive a 4k display (Dell P2715Q) with a large storyboard file open in xcode, along with the laptop display itself at the highest scaled resolution. I think this is a pretty good benchmark for whether or not a system is good enough.

Don't know if it's the 'best' but I've got El Capitan working smoothly on my second-hand Thinkpad T440. The trackpad and display are crap compared to a MacBook Pro, but hey, it was less than a sixth of the price for similar specs.

Took about an evening of tinkering and reading the TonysMac86 forums (really helpful community) to set up and has been trouble-free since. Sleep/wake works with the lid and it even supports dual batteries. Battery life is good too.

Hackintoshing a laptop is harder than a custom-built desktop as you don't have much choice over the hardware. For example often the internal wifi and bluetooth cards aren't supported - I have to use a USB dongle on mine. However, there's some good resources on TonysMac on which laptops are the most compatible.

Please, please don't kill me - I know there are people who love the Mac Ecosystem (I have a macbook too!) and don't like linux, but I switched to Mint Linux with Cinnamon Desktop, and its pretty darn great. For people who live in containers, virtualenv, node, and many other types of dev, you will feel at home in no time. I bet there is a slider of where the things you like about mac go from unix like environment to "it just works" and if you are even a bit on the "it just works" side, don't go with linux, it will be an adventure. A worthy adventure, but maybe not profitable for everyone.

If you're an existing Mac user, the recommendations here to "just get a Mac" may be better, but I'll throw another possibility into the mix:

I ran OSX in VirtualBox for a good while in order to use some locked-in iOS dev tools. It was slow, but that was largely just because my underlying machine wasn't very new at the time, it was easy to install, and I never encountered any stability issues. It would free you up to get the best machine without worrying about hw compat.

Disclaimer: This was OSX Lion days. Have not tried recently. Ymmv.

Well, considering that all iOS devices now have P3 Wide Color displays, you'll need a computer with a wide color screen to accurately create and preview content for iOS.

To my knowledge, aside from the new MacBooks, Retina iMacs and the new Surfaces your only options would be external 10-bit-per-channel monitors, and those can be expensive.

The Razer Blade Pro has a wider gamut too but as far as I know it's Adobe RGB and not DCI-P3.

I'll go against the grain here and say that I used a HP Probook 4530s as my sole development 'Mac' while I was in high school and shipped three iOS apps with it.

Was it time consuming to set it up? Yes. Did it break after most updates? Yes.

That said, when you're working as a dishwasher, a used $250 HP is much more realistic than a $1300 Macbook.

After second year of university, I bought a 2015 MBP and haven't looked back.

I'm getting a Dell XPS 13 9350 and will replace the wifi card with a DW1560. The guide that explains the details about installing macOS on this machine is at https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-dell-xps-13-9350-si...

Why replace the wifi card if you don't mind me asking?

Apparently the wifi card comes with the laptop does not yet work with macOS.

Both are 802.11ac capable however. I think the DW1560 is a bit slower.

Probably Mac OS X doesn't support the original WiFi card.

Just use the real Macbook. If you are honestly that upset about the touchbar without having seen it at all, then buy a 2015 model.

As much as I love the idea of playing around with getting hackintosh-es working, does anyone else feel like it's a little backwards for software developers to use unlicensed software to produce (presumably) profitable software? I'm all for hacking for fun, but doing it to make business seems unethical. Just my $0.02...

I'm considering the same. But since you need a Mac to build a Hackintosh, I decided to buy a used Mac for $500. I'll still probably build my Hackintosh, but It'll be for fun hacking reasons. And it's a NUC so I don't expect it to be too challenging.

I would say a good start is tonymacx86 - Hugely valuable resource fro all things hackintosh:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/laptop-compatibility.114/

www.macstadium.com just rent one online, much easier!

Buddybuild if you don't want to use OSX

Reply on news.ycombinator.com