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Comment by gantengx | Hacker News Reader

except that Hackintosh not exactly legal :-)

Breaking a contract is not illegal, it's a matter of civil law. And depending on where you live, such EULAs might not even be enforceable.

IANAL, but I believe breaking the terms and conditions violates the CFAA [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

Has Apple ever prosecuted a violation of this terrible rule of theirs?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psystar_Corporation

That was a company selling Hackintoshes. In the many years since, Hackintoshes have remained a thing and I'm unaware of any individuals that have faced criminal or civil penalties.

Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac. As Apple is starting to drive us away, I bet the phenomenon will grow, and then Apple's interest in squishing it will too. And the fact is, Apple could shut this phenomenon down in a matter of hours if they wanted to.

This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.

There's the potential to create a pretty powerful machine for the buck, but it's definitely fraught with challenge. Reminds me of building a decent desktop Linux machine in the late 90's/early 2000's.

not really, i was running osx 10.5, so almost 10 years ago out of the box, the only thing that i had to play with was sound.

there was only one rule and i believe the same i truth now, if you plan to run hackintosh u better watch what hardware you get. if you do that u can run hackintosh without problems.

> Until recently, a Hackintosh was a time-consuming way of producing a somewhat worse Mac.

Oh? What has changed?

> This level of risk is fun but not for the faint of heart.

Read: as soon as a new patch comes out for macOS you are either running around with known security vulnerabilities (as well as missing reliability fixes), or you're a guinea pig entirely unsure if it breaks anything and if so how much effort it is going to take to get the patch applied. Why? Mainly due to drivers.

Besides, good luck finding a well working laptop with good macOS support.

I gave up and bought a MBP 2015 instead. Very nice machine. Expensive, but nice.

For a workstation or MP replacement it'd make more sense. The MP hasn't been updated for 4 years and with physical access to the quick machine its easier to fix issues. You're also guaranteed not on the go, so you got all the tools you need at your disposal. However there is still a risk for loss of productivity and worst of all you can't plan it. Because you don't know when Apple does release their software updates.

I guess it still is what I said, it's just that the cost/benefit ratio lately is different than it was five years ago.

I don't think it'd be wise of them to shut down the Hackintosh community. The vast majority of Hackintosh refugees aren't going to be buying Macs, they're going to be wiping their macOS partitions and jumping ship to Windows or some random Linux distro instead. It'd shrink the number of people invested in the Apple ecosystem (including subscriptions like iCloud and Apple Music) and put a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people with sway of family/friend and perhaps even corporate purchasing decisions, not to mention strongly casts Apple in a Big Corporate Bully sort of light. There's not a scenario in which they kill off Hackintoshing that's a net benefit for Apple.

Apple is a hardware company. The services you mention are small in terms of revenue compared to their profits in hardware. If the Hackintosh community is large enough that the services revenue or impact on the ecosystem is signigicant, Apple would rather have the revenues associated with the hardware as well.

The fact that Apple hasn't done this already is because it's insignificant, not because of some benelovence on Apple's part. They're not going to encourage unlicensed use of the OS. The OS is there to sell the hardware, not vice versa.

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