Hacker News Reader

Comment by ageitgey | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you from experience that building a Hackintosh is a terrible idea for almost all people.

I have no moral objection to it and I totally understand the motivation. Apple is completely failing to provide hardware that runs at a fraction of the performance you'd get from building a commodity $2500 AMD/Nvidia desktop even if you give Apple $7000 for a Pro model. Apple's platform especially sucks if you do anything with deep learning since they refuse to sell anything with Nvidia GPUs anymore.

But the actual experience of running a Hackintosh is terrible. Even if you buy exactly the right components, it will still take you days to get everything patched and working perfectly. And then every minor security patch will completely break your system, so you end up never updating. Finally you hit a point where your system is so far behind that you give up and either buy a Mac or just install Linux/Windows.

View on HN

This is fud - buying the right parts means you'll have a working Hackintosh within about 30 to 60 minutes from start to finish. I'm typing this from a Hackintosh, my very first actually. All I did was follow the https://www.tonymacx86.com/ guides. No issues through all High Sierra updates, the nVidia drivers have been generally problem free too.

The truth is between both of your posts. I 'toshed, I would still recommend it, but only for the kind of folks that would sign up for a one way ticket to Mars. They will absolutely love it.

I built a hackintosh using the recommended build and had a mediocre experience. Things I take for granted like sleep and Bluetooth were broken. I ended up spending weeks trying to fix it. Eventually I gave up and bought Apple hardware which hasn’t been perfect, but it’s definitely less annoying than the hackintosh.

I'm glad you had a good experience! But it's also true that the most recent random macOS update thread on tonymac86.com (10.13.6, a minor update) has 44 pages of user comments ranging from the update worked perfectly to the computer completely won't boot and kernel panics - and all manner of issues in between.

If you are using the computer to do paid work and can't gamble like on every update, I think you'd be crazy to use a hackintosh. But if it works for you, sweet.

Two people can both buy "the right parts" according to the site's myriad recommendations but randomly choose slightly different combinations of motherboards or video cards or wifi cards or whatever and have wildly different experiences overall with updates.

Using Hackintosh as my primary driver for 3 years. no Issues. For every 1 person having vocally shared their problems, there are 100s who keep quiet, because of its working fine.

Apple hardware also has problems, yet people use them as their primary computer all the time.

Of course, there is a slightly higher risk with Hackintosh than a proper apple computer. But if your computer uptime and data is very important, the solution is having a proper backup. Having apple hardware won't make things marginally better.

> Apple hardware also has problems, yet people use them as their primary computer all the time.

I will be willing to bet that the ratio of apple hardware problems to general hackintosh problems is heavily geared in favour of opting for Apple hardware.

When computer uptime is important, having backups is a non-issue in that conversation. It's the uptime that's important, and having non-genuine hardware will always raise a flag in this scenario.... The chance of your genuine mac not starting up after a scheduled update is far, far less likely than your hackintosh not starting up after the same update.

Granted, it's awesome that you've had good experiences. But I feel that you need to consider that your use-case is possibly not the same as the vast majority.

> the computer completely won't boot and kernel panics - and all manner of issues in between.

So like a linux dist-upgrade then? :)

As an alternative, I can recommend getting a used tower Mac Pro and upgrading it. There's a ton of community info [1] [2] out on CPU, GPU, and RAM upgrading, and even the oldest 2006 model, the one I have, can run El Capitan, and the 2009-2010 models can do Mojave. There are guides for every configuration you could want and RAM is super cheap (even ECC!). You get as good a case or better than if you build a standard ATX hackintosh - 4 3.5" bays + 2 optical bays you could get more drives into, and the upside-down GPU prevents sag on the PCIe connector. And you get to be "legal" within Apple's T&C, so you could use it without worries in a business/academic setting.

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-cpu-compatibili... [2] http://www.macvidcards.com/i-want-the-best-graphics-card-for...

For multi-core operations, the 12 core Xeons still compare pretty well to newer Macs but are very poor for single core. The range of video cards on that site is surprisingly decent but the newer PCIe 3.0 cards will be limited by the PCIe 2.0 slot.

Yeah, when I was younger and had lots of time but little money I totally would have built a hackintosh. Now? I have lots of money but little time so I'll happily pay for a system that requires nearly zero upkeep.

This was my experience as well. It reminded of running Gentoo Linux a long time ago. Awesome feeling of accomplishment, but not practical if you have a day job.

Gentoo? I don't think it is quite good comparision.

Fair enough :) The complexity that my brain could handle 15 years ago has decreased, and the amount of real work I need to get done has increased.

How about Arch Linux then? I love it and hate it at the same time. Rolling updates are amazing until they hose your system and you have to roll back updates.

Has that happened to you in the last couple of years? I've been using Arch for about that long on my desktop and the only issue I've ever had to resolve is outdated AUR packages with hard version deps.

Happened to me last last year, an openssl upgrade broke many of my projects, and wasted a couple of days trying to fix it with no luck, had to resort to docker to get them working again(not a good DX).

I don't use Arch as my daily driver anymore, I've switched to NixOS(has its issues as well, but at least no rolling release model)

Nonesense. I'm still using a performant Hackintosh I built 8.5 years ago with a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 board. It's been through several Mac OS upgrades and point updates. The only thing I have to do without is sleep and target disk mode. The trick is to clone your system to a second disk and trial any upgrades on the backup. Usually the only thing required after an upgrade is to re-run MultiBeast. Piece of cake so long as you stick with recommended hardware.

I have to disagree on your phrasing. I have been using a Hackintosh for over three years now. I agree, that it was a hassle in the past. It isn't anymore. I haven't had a serious technical problem with my PC since the beginning of Sierra. Even major updates don't pose a serious problem, if you have the correct hardware.

However, picking the correct hardware and figuring out the necessary basics is a challenge in itself. You need patience and technical knowledge. So it is far from going into the store and purchasing an iMac. That is certain. But it is not as dark as you are putting it, IMHO.

This is my experience as well. As an iOS developer I needed to upgrade my OS and then came the the problems with pretty much everything. Clover, EFI-partitions and backups of every kernel extension I needed couldn't keep the update threshold from being uncomfortably high which meant I hesitated to keep my system up to date. The issues show up in the most subtle ways too. I had a kernel extension for networking and after a seemingly minor update the LAN interface would die under high load. As in it would work when browsing, streaming, regular use but downloading a larger file with high bandwidth usage for a while would just bork the connection completely.

The only reasonable thing to do was to dedicate the machine to gaming on Windows and buy a Mac. Not trying this again anytime soon.

The simpler solution most people miss is to just buy a hackintosh-able laptop, like the Lenovo ThinkPad X220.

Updates up until 10.13.6 worked seamlessly, only "hack" you had to do was change out the WiFi card.

That is a 7 year old laptop.

That's a 7 years old Thinkpad.

And by the way, if you need to build Android source code more often than once a month, you need AWS anyway.

Aye, and it's a backup for my maxed out 7 year old MacBook Pro which builds code just as fast as the 2 month old MacBook Pro I use at work.

That would miss the point entirely, and arguably be morally dubious.

The Macbook hardware is pretty excellent, and prices are comparable to the (few) competitors of similar quality. In absolute terms, they are not outside the range that their market can afford.

It is only in desktops, or, more precisely, workstations that Apple's offerings fall short.

Wait, no way! Does the pen work?

That was my experience as well. And installing an update is a tour de force, every time. Most of the time it goes smoothly but when it blows up, it really does.

This encouraged me even further to run Linux as my daily driver. Without a hackintosh, I might be stuck in overpriced, un-upgradeable Apple land.

Instead, I completely made the switch: got a 300$ fully decked ThinkPad x230 with 16gb ram and an IPS screen, running Ubuntu + i3, and the former hackintosh is now on server duty. I'm finally apple free :)

So I highly recommend hackintoshes as a stepping stone to leaving Apple!

> Finally you hit a point where your system is so far behind that you give up

My 2013 Macbook Pro retina will be at this point in the fall with two major upgrades uninstallable. I'd say this argument no longer holds because even the official hardware often can't be upgraded. I would be shocked if the next OSX version doesn't fail to upgrade like the one from last fall. That new filesystem breaks everything. Thankfully I had backups, but even attempting again is not worth losing a day to Apple's shitty software. OSX Used to be the one piece of software that was solid. Now there is no Apple software I use that is solid except old versions of OSX <= 10.12.x

What updates were those? I'm still using a 2013 MBP too and no plans to upgrade. Given that 10.14 is still compatible with 2010 MBPs I think I have more than a few years left with it.

10.13 and the upcoming 10.14 and any future updates no doubt.

Ah, so they just failed to install correctly? They're meant to be supported fine. What a pain. Do you know where it went wrong?

10.13 yes. I haven't tried 10.14. I have no idea where it went wrong. Maybe it didn't like that I had shrank the OSX partition for dual booting. It was a pain just to restore from Time Machine as the rescue partition they keep is old too. I think I ended up installing some older version then restoring on top of that.

Actually, 10.14 will only support MacBook Pro (Mid-2012 or later) according to: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/05/macos-mojave-will...

I'm an idiot, was muddling up Mojave and High Sierra. Right you are.

Not to belittle OP's experience, but I've been running High Sierra on a 2010 MBP since it came out with no issues, so YMMV.

I'm running the same machine, and had the same experience, but our MBPs will not be supported by the new OS in the fall.

Might be worth trying without the APFS conversion?

  /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --converttoapfs NO

Reply on news.ycombinator.com