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Comment by nateberkopec | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. I buy Macs because they "just work", so a Hackintosh completely destroys the point of even owning a Mac for me.

I always felt the same way. Even a huge cost premium matters very little to me since it's a machine I use professionally.

However I'm starting to give it serious consideration as Apple is signaling pretty hard that they don't give a shit about desktops any more, and MacOS is not seeing much development other than some sloppy seconds and half baked ports of iOS ideas.

I'm pretty heavily depend on MacOS for my daily workflow these days, but the writing is on the wall that I've got to start thinking about Linux or even Windows over the next 5-10 years.

In that light, the benefit of the hackintosh is not only being able to get current hardware at a fair price, but also being able to hedge my bets and dual boot to Linux to get my feet wet.

As a data point, I was putting together a super cheap "build server" (for compiling stuff on) recently. Supermicro motherboard, and dual 6 core Xeon cpu's (E5645). Cost of the motherboard and cpu's (from Ebay) was ~$US140.00. 32GB of ECC ram to match was ~US60.00. Everything else needed (power supply, etc), I already had around.

Just to see if it would work, I hackintoshed it prior to installing FreeBSD. Apart from the network ports, everything else (Nvidia card, USB, etc) worked.

Network connectivity was fixable by just plugging in a USB3<->ethernet adapter (also had one handy), and voila, usable desktop.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00XZQRMRU/

It wouldn't be surprising (to me), if newer generation Supermicro boards also worked. That would open up possibilities for lots more cpu grunt in an OSX box. :)

> MacOS is not seeing much development other than some sloppy seconds and half baked ports of iOS ideas

While I may not wholly disagree with this, what OS is doing much better? Linux is still slowly catching up to the macOS graphics compositor from 10 years ago, and Microsoft is busy integrating its own half-baked port of Windows Tablet Edition... True Windows does have some momentum with the new ubuntu subsystem, but that's still catching up when macOS is a real native UNIX from the ground up.

There's not much more I want out of my OS... a new filesystem to replace the 30-year-old-design HFS+ is already on the way, and while I'd love a more modern CLI userland, that isn't going to happen due to legal reasons, so I'm fine with homebrew. They just need to fix SMB and clean up bugs and performance issues for me to be totally happy.

Except that Macs don't "just work" any more. At best they "just work" until the day that Apple decides to deprecate a feature or an application that you have come to rely on (for me it's iPhoto) and then it stops working. It doesn't crash, it just says, "Sorry, this application cannot run on this version of MacOS." But from the user's point of view the effect is the same.

[UPDATE] Case in point: one of the banking apps on my iPod just stopped working, insisting that I upgrade to the latest version. So I did, but the new version doesn't work either. It just hangs when I try to log in. Granted, this is an iPod, not a Mac, but the iOS philosophy of having Apple control the device is slowly creeping in to the Mac. Every day and every upgrade is a crap shoot in terms of whether or not what worked yesterday will still work today.

I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth. Ask anyone who gets paid to fix Macs.

Sure, I see less of them, but hardly unexpected considering people buy fewer of them (and they're less targetted by malware).

On the other hand, I hate dealing with them because they can suffer from the same "it should work but doesn't" crap that Windows machines do but without the critical mass of support via Google.

And unless you get your issue escalated, the Apple Geniuses are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

> I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth.

To a certain extent that is certainly true. But there was a time during the Snow Leopard era when Macs were extraordinarily reliable compared to the then-contemporary competition, and even compared to anything before or since. Things have gone downhill since then because Apple decided to de-emphasize reliability in favor of other things like thinness, and the merging of desktop and mobile environments.

We had an (recent) iMac that just kept randomly crashing. Apple replaced most of the parts inside it, and it kept doing it. Eventually they have us new one. Kudos for that; random errors are a pain to diagnose and fix, but they did.

Agreed -- the new "productivity" applications are a disaster. If you shoot RAW, you have to either stick with an old version of Aperture, or switch to Lightroom (typical Adobe crap), because Photos doesn't do lens profiles. If you want to create a bound book, you can't use Pages, because it doesn't do inner and outer margins, only left and right. For now, it's less work for me to stay than to go, but Apple needs to pay more attention to their software.

Indeed; I switched to Mac for 6 months after getting sick of trying to get things to work how I want them and be stable, on windows or Linux. Ended up being Just as fiddly, and needing to reboot at least once per week due to some kernel item chewing through increasing CPU. back on windows now; not perfect, but good enough for now.

My conjecture is that my hatred for any system will increase the more I use it, to the point of switching to another system, then the cycle repeats.

The trick is to ignore OS updates after the initial setup, until you absolutely need a newer version or at least 6 months have passed and you can reserve a day for troubleshooting.

Of course, it helps if you have a macbook pro in addition to your desktop; you can check out the new stuff on the genuine apple machine, and maybe get away with postponing updates on your desktop even more.

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