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> Now if you're a programmer doing native code, I'd still recommend doing a hackintosh; Apple has no hardware for you, so you might as well roll your own. For desktops, that is. Also get an apple made macbook pro for portability. Maybe the one without the emoji keyboard though.

There's one more use case that infuriates me: CI. Are we supposed to buy outdated and underpowered Mac Minis, outdated and overpriced Mac Pros, stuff clamshell'd MBPs into racks, or horizontally slide in iMac Pros even?

The fact that we collectively have to hack hypervisors to merely flick a flag and be able to operate a snapshottable macOS on server-class, rackable hardware at non-trivial scales is just beyond ridiculous. That license requirement is inane.

You can buy 1u Mac mini server racks explicitly for this purpose. But yes, the specs of the mini are a joke.

The TLDR is it takes a lot of time and effort to get it running. I've spent a long time getting OSX to work on a laptop and at various times in virtual machines.

It's a lot of time and effort and takes a certain masochism.

> Now if you're a programmer doing native code, I'd still recommend doing a hackintosh; Apple has no hardware for you, so you might as well roll your own. For desktops, that is.

What's wrong with the higher-end iMacs? (My nitpicks are no dealbreakers: Glossy screen, height is not easily adjustable, I've heard of thermal issues.) The iMac always seemed like the only line of Apple computers where updates are both frequent and well-received.

Many of us like our screens and computers to be separate, and like having expandability in the latter.

Thermal issues, they're not designed for 100% CPU usage for long periods. They may throttle and not catch fire, but they're also noisy at 100% CPU because they have a laptop cooling system. Please don't tell me about the redesigned cooling system on the new iMac Pro unless it's been proven to remain silent while, for example, building Qt from source.

Lack of storage. For my use case at least, which involves a lot of VMs and large source trees. Please don't suggest external storage boxes.

Shit video card for taking gaming breaks ;) Or the monitor is too big for the video card, I'm not sure. Please don't suggest a separate gaming PC, considering how much Macs cost they'd better play games well.

Seems like you're making a lot of assumptions about programmers who write native code.

Not at all, I'm describing my use case.

And to add another example, a friend of mine is working on a 5K iMac (non pro) on a normal-ish desktop application. He has to use external storage for testing, because the application has to manage large document libraries that don't fit on his internal SSD. Also, he's always mentioning that the iMac gets noisy when he's doing a build.

Exactly the reasons I have a hackintosh at home:

1. It has a form factor that suits my needs for space and cooling

2. It has a 1080Ti which I can use for ML or Games (though primarily games)

Though I have to say - your use case is a bit extreme. If you need excellent cooling, lots of internal storage space and ultra smooth gameplay then maybe a mac is not what you need?

I'm a (sort of independent) software developer, and a Mac enables me to do software on the 3 major desktop platforms and both major mobile platforms on the same machine. It's a no brainer really. I can make it run on whatever the customer wants.

And Apple used to have a system that fit the bill pretty well - the pre trashcan Mac Pro. If the promised expandable Mac Pro comes out and they don't make it unusable for one dumb reason or another, I may abandon hackintoshes.

5K iMacs and the iNac Pro are amazing for their price. You can’t build anything to drive 5K to such a nice monitor otherwise.

And their fans/heat management is great for 99% of developers.

TL;DR : hackintoshes are a total shit-show in all but the simplest of use cases (no need for decent hardware support or any software upgrades ever)

> while nvidia just works.

Huh ? He specifically mentions why he didn't go NVidia : NVidia doesn't "just work" on a hackintosh. It requires installing a new closed source NVidia "web driver" for EVERY new macOS point release, because it absolutely refuses to start if there's the slightest build number mismatch, and NVidia can take days to catch up. One day, they may just get tired of it and stop supporting older cards or macOS versions.

Also, that driver refuses to install before you've actually upgraded macOS, which means your first reboot will be in super low res non-accelerated compatibility mode, and you'll have to painfully navigate to the installer in this environment then reboot a second time.

>Item three: he hasn't hand built a PC in 20 years. And since he's doing video work, he's probably not very technical either. If you're familiar with messing with a unix-like operating system at a lower level, it's fairly easy to fix all those little problems.

No it isn't, at all. I'm a systems engineer, lived and breathed Linux since 1996, including 8 years as my primary desktop OS (Slackware, Gentoo, custom kernel builds, you name it) before switching to the Mac.

I made the mistake of building a Hackintosh last year to save on an iMac's cost, and I want those dozens of hours (and counting) of my life back. The argument the author makes under "price" is spot on : if you're not a student with way more time than money, it's just not worth it. If you bill by the hour/day, don't even THINK about it.

I've now got a 80% working setup after carefully choosing compatible components (including a Z97 Asus mobo, an insanely fiddly to get working Thunderbolt card, and a custom PCI card with original Apple chips for BT/Wifi). But I've given up on getting all USB ports working, or iMessages/Facetime, or sleep/wake which is sure to freeze the machine (it also sometimes reboots out of the blue). The PC also doesn't wake my monitor up half of the time when first booting macOS, and I have to hard reset it.

Part of your journey is to "inject" kexts, pass kernel parameters with magic constants, sometimes provide binary patching instructions for drivers in a Clover plist config file. There's no single guide that takes you through all of this. Everybody has their own different thing. Even the attempts at UI tools (Clover configurator, Multibeast) to generate those config files don't attempt to hide any of the complexity.

And don't get me started about built-in audio : first, you need to pick your kext between several variants of AppleHDA available from zip files hosted on mega.com (or random Github repos when you're lucky, with no context at all given in the READMEs, when there's a README). Then, you need to find out which of a few dozens audio I/O "layouts" is appropriate for your motherboard, and manually pass that as a kernel parameter. The tutorials disagree between each other, there's no standard way of doing it, it feels like the worst hours of Linux on the desktop.

I'm also usually an enthusiastic early OS upgrader, but I've been holding off upgrading my machine to High Sierra for months because a quick search on tonymacx86.com shows the gigantic bag of hurts this is going to be (new kexts to inject, careful with APFS, etc)

I'll finish with a self-explanatory quote from a macOS High Sierra upgrade thread on tonymacx86.com :

Some audio codecs will require an addtional patch (AppleHDA)

If you are using target codec 0x11d4198b, you may need to also zero out codec compare 0x11d4198a (a new supported codec in 10.12).

eg. in KextsToPatch: Comment: 0x11d4198a to zero MatchOS: 10.12.x Name: AppleHDA Find: <8a19d411> Replace: <00000000>

And a helpful recommendation for an easy and "foolproof" way to upgrade to High Sierra (tl;dr : make a second OS installation from scratch on a spare disk (you have that right?), "fix it until it's bootable", then attempt a High Sierra upgrade on the first installation, compare and contrast the two and cross your fingers) : https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/it-is-unclear-how-to-upgr...

> I've now got a 80% working setup after carefully choosing compatible components (including a Z97 Asus mobo, an insanely fiddly to get working Thunderbolt card, and a custom PCI card with original Apple chips for BT/Wifi)

Careful what you wish for. I have no Thunderbolt and no wifi on the desktop (it's immovable so I use a network cable). I would never try to get TB working on a hackintosh. Nor iMessage/FaceTime. For those I have a Macbook Pro.

Audio works out of the box. All USB ports but one work out of the box. Sleep works out of the box.

You're saying you bought a Z97 Asus mobo. You bought one that you liked just because it had a chipset that usually works, or a specific board known to work 100% from tonymac's compatibility list? If you had to patch kexts, i think it's the former not the latter.

And High Sierra... I don't have that even on my laptop yet. Waiting for a few more patches. After it works fine on my laptop I'll consider upgrading the hackintosh.

And yes, I switched to OS X after 10 years of Linux as my primary OS. I've installed Slackware from 80 floppies and hand compiled my kernels because back then it was the only way to get the right drivers in. I still make a lot of my money by doing custom ARM linuxes for various devices. On VMs on OS X :)