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Comment by uuid | Hacker News Reader

As someone who ran a hackintosh for over a year, here's the summary:

CON - even if things work now, they can and will break in the future (removed hardware support etc)

- every update takes time and work

- don't even think about running it on the hardware you already have - only use specifically built systems (such as those linked)

- backups aren't as nice as on a mac (disk cloning, time machine)

PRO - you get a lot of harddisks (internal, cheap and fast ones)

- it's almost stupid not to use a raid setup (such as 10)

- serious GPU power is affordable, but OSX is picky

- repairs are really really cheap

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I'll second this. I built a hackintosh 2 years ago that ran 10.5 beautifully (leopard), with quad core, 4GB RAM, 750GB hard drive, for only $800. The problem is that now there is no driver support to run snow leopard, so I'm stuck running an OS from 2 years ago that probably won't be supported much longer, and I can't even install point releases very easily without risk of breaking my system.

So, 2 years later I've got a system that runs Windows or Linux beautifully but isn't really a functional Mac. This can be great for a short time, but just keep in mind that anything you build now will probably not run 10.7 when it comes out next year.

What hardware did you have issues with?

Not that I necessarily recommend the hackintosh route, but if you had 10.5 running, 10.6 should run as well. I had my system moved to 10.6 within a week of it's release.

I had an ATI 3870 which was supported in 10.5 but ceased to be in 10.6 - a shame, since it outperformed the nvidia cards in core graphics by a large margin.

But if you're a hacker, and you like doing it (like I do), you can bring new OS support. For instance, I wrote patches to get my system up to speed on 10.6 the week of its release. Lots of other people now use my code. That's rewarding.

Like anything, it's a tradeoff. Do you want to learn about deep osx internals? Or do you want to go back to your day job writing webapps? Both can be rewarding; it's a function of your free time and how much you want things to "just work" vs how much you want to learn.

  - don't even think about running it on the hardware you already have - 
  only use specifically built systems (such as those linked)

As far as I know, hackintosh works well in laptops. I'm running it on HP Pavilion dv5-1010us. The only hardware I can't get to work is wireless - which is admittedly quite a pain.

QED

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