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Comment by GiraffeNecktie | Hacker News Reader

The $800 budget hackintosh seems roughly equivalent to a $2600 quad core Mac Pro.

Roughly? The Mac Pro has a workstation-grade dual-socket motherboard with Xeon processors, ECC FB-DIMM memory, and four PCI-E x16 slots. The build quality is also significantly better than most off-the-shelf PC hardware. Granted, this isn't important to most people buying their home system to dick around with, but it IS called the "Pro" for a reason. Go spec out the same hardware from Dell or HP and you'll find similar prices.

Actually they don't use FB-DIMM ram anymore http://www.apple.com/ca/macpro/specs.html

Seems that it has gone the way of rambus.

>but it IS called the "Pro" for a reason

Exactly, the money you safe on hardware you'll lose on support issues. If I were still a student I'd probably be running a hackintosh but my time now is too valuable to dick around with such a setup and afaik there are no firms offering support for hackintoshes.

Well with the money you save you can even build another hackintosh as backup.

But if you value the time to buy parts and assemble them more then a mac is good for you.

Yeah, but you don't need that stuff unless you're Pixar or running production servers.

I think there's a market for a midrange, expandable mac. A quad-core machine with a few extra drive bays and two PCI x16 slots. A software developer's box. A Mac Mini is underpowered, but the Pro is way overpowered, esp with regards to I/O. The quad-core iMac is a step in the right direction, but it's not really expandable.

Apple has traditionally taken the position that there's not enough margin on this sort of market. But all those iOS developers have to run something. Couldn't Apple sell it at cost and write it off as developer evangelism for iOS?

Probably not. Even if you (unrealistically) assume that there isn't a huge amount of overhead to designing and maintaining another Mac product, there's a huge cost involved in complicating their product line and confusing customers. Part of Apple's computer product strategy involves an extremely simple product line with few options.

Isn't a Mac Mini a perfectly valid choice for iOS development?

There's a pretty big difference in compile time for large projects. If you're just hacking around, sure, works great. But if you make a living on iOS and do a few hundred compiles a day, it's a no brainer to buy a quad-core or eight-core machine.

Here in Australia, the quad-core Mac Pro is $3600 AUD, and I've built myself a similarly spec'd machine for about $2000 AUD. This included some extras, like an external pro sound card, which I highly recommend to hackintosh builders as it negates having to mess around getting the chipset sound working. That said, in my case getting onboard audio working was as simple as installing the VoodooHDA kext, but as mentioned in the article YMMV.

And the $1350 build is rougly equivalent to a $3650 Mac Pro.

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