I'm sure those people will be happy. But what I want is an upgradable / self-servicable machine that costs under $3k.
I hope Apple isn't about to miss the plot again.
The fact that they aren't building commodity-style boxes for hobbyists is very very minor in comparison. The market for these things is shrinking, and it's dominated by price-sensitive people that are not very valuable customers to begin with. If this is what you want, then there's no point in wishful thinking: start looking at Windows / Linux yesterday.
Was worried about how stable it would be and took good care of researching all the parts that were verified by the community[1]. It's been going good for 3-4 months now. Took some effort to get it all setup but am very happy now. I use this for Video/Photo post-processing, web development mainly.
My concern is upgrading. For people with hackintosh experience what has the longevity experience been like? Do things break each major upgrade? Are things slow moving to get to the latest version?
I'm worried it might be like Linux desktop back in the day. I've found modern Linux to be very stable while using cutting edge versions of Linux. Largely thanks to Archlinux. But I've been interested in having a seperate OSX install for Photoshop and Sketch to have an OS for doing design and having Linux for programming/everything else.
It gets annoying quite fast and the only thing that kept me using it was the fact that Apple was so bad with updating their product line, which is over now as I will buy the new 5k iMac.
May I ask what type of hardware you are using?
With today's MacBook upgrades, I've ordered a 'real' Mac and reverted my desktop tower back to Windows gaming box duties - the 'fun' of hackintoshing quickly fades once you've done it for a few years and just want to know your computer is always going to boot when you press the power button, especially if like me you use OS X 99% of the time.
Maybe I'm just stupid, but as far as I'm concerned folks with hackintoshes who haven't had a boot breaking issue occur are either lucky, or it has yet to happen to them. I deliberately built the most 'golden' of mainstream hackintosh builds (close to identical to the Dan Benjamin one folks are linking here), no custom kexts, used Clover, still had the occasional issue.
Given Apple are moving to ever more intertwine custom hardware into Macs (touchbar, touch id, secure enclave etc), I think the future of hackintoshing is probably going to be harder than it is today.
Yeah that's never going to happen. The Pro iMac starts at $5k. When the Mac Pro does come out it will at least start at that as well, if not higher.
Clarity: "The new iMac Pro will start at $4999 and be available in December."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1545383,00.asp
Fun article from 2004! Article subheading:
> Get used to the idea of a terabyte-plus server in your home. It's closer than you think.
:)
And Machrone's law is: the machine you want will always cost $5,000.
It's been years since Apple has made anything that was upgradable/self-serviceable at any price point. To expect that to change now is just unproductive wishful thinking. Either find an alternative or figure out which of Apple's products comes closest to meeting your needs.
To me this machine is a sign that they had. It has the exact same problems as the Mac Pro design with even less modularity (Pro could swap out drives and ram).
Although I also think this was supposed to replace the Mac Pro line entirely and only in about jan/feb they decided that they still needed a stand alone Pro. So I guess time will tell if they finally release the "xMac" people have been asking for the past 10 years.
I would not hold my breath. If Apple are going to give you something serviceable and upgradable, expect whatever you would have spent servicing and upgrading (at the time of purchase) a "normal" machine through them to be added to the price.
If you want upgradeability and self-serviceability, build it yourself.
Please, Apple, sell me a big Apple motherboard, a quality case, and write OS-X with boot and driver software that supports various CPUs, RAM, storage, GPUs, power supplies, and peripherals. You know, like Windows and Linux have done for years. Whitelist or blacklist as necessary to make it reliable and dependable, but no more than necessary. The model works - but Apple doesn't work with the model, which is why my current machine isn't a Mac anymore.
And they did try this model back in the clone days where Power Computing went straight after their high margin customers and nearly killed the company. Great for consumers. Terrible for Apple.