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Comment by colept | Hacker News Reader

This is where the Hackintosh market has thrived.

For desktop users, size of the machine is not nearly as important as raw. computational. power. The iMac was good in its time but that time was half a decade ago. The Mac Pro was supposed to be the revolution for Mac desktops, but they neglected it for too long. And since you can't upgrade it yourself that shiny new Mac depreciates exponentially and even more so when software updates bog down resources further.

Support for specific combinations of hardware is near the flawless breaking point where just about anyone could follow the guides to put together a machine that will run MacOS using near top of the line hardware. Being able to dual boot Mac and Windows, so that I can be productive and game on a high end graphics card - and not locked down in expandability is unparalleled.

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A maxed out current iMac is a pretty competitive workstation machine imo. Not especially cheap, but not prohibitive for a company. The top of the line is currently a 4.0 GHz quad-core i7 w/ 32 GB RAM (27" model w/ the memory and CPU upgrades). I have that on my desk at work and am quite happy with it.

A maxed out iMac would depreciate within 5 years, and any particular part would render your entire system unusable for week(s). Three years later and Apple adds a new feature that for the slightest reason requires an entire hardware upgrade because you can't upgrade components individually. Then factor in that the thin iMacs have terrible heat dissipation which means the CPU can't run at full speed without overheating.

That top of the line iMac costs four grand while a Hackintosh costs half that and gets you a top of the line graphics card and the ability to keep on par with the top of the line.

I'm not going to claim they're really cost-competitive with PC equivalents, just that they're fast enough machines to make good workstations, and the price is within the range of what our IT considers a reasonable office workstation purchase price.

At least where I work, desktop machines aren't kept for five years anyway, so I don't think this distinguishes it from any other supplier. Our standard depreciation/replacement cycle for workstations is 3 years, whether it's coming from Apple or Dell. Obviously for home use the economics are different, but then a lot of things are different there, e.g. I build PCs from parts, and there's no way work wants people to be DIY building their own office workstations. And yeah, you can spec out a comparable Dell that's cheaper (though don't forget to add in a high-quality 27" monitor!), but not by enough to really make a dent in the IT budget one way or the other.

> just that they're fast enough machines to make good workstations

Except they're not. The heat dissipation in the thin iMacs is terrible in that it prevents the CPU from working at full capacity 100% of the time.

It's not competitive at all to a hackintosh.

I have an i7 overclocked to 4.6 GHz, 64GB of RAM, 6GB GPU and it was almost $1400 cheaper. It took maybe a day and a half to put together (the last PC I put together out of parts was a pentium). Everything works, including Thunderbolt 3.

It's also way better looking, imho.

What guides do you recommend?

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