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Comment by Pmop | Hacker News Reader

Hackintosh allows you to have OS X on better hardware but these days it's really unsafe, due to the possibility of Apple going full ARM in the near future, dropping all the support for x86.

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> but these days it's really unsafe

How is it different than buying a Mac now? It also won't upgrade itself to an ARM processor and they'd need to support existing macOS installations for a while anyway.

Not a chance, the Mac Pro isn't even out yet and it's Xeon, so x86 support will be in Mac OS for at least the next 10 years. There's just nothing from ARM that can compete with Xeon at any price. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the low-end laptops within 5 years, but x86 is still safe as houses.

I'd argue that the software people run on a Mac Pro is a strict superset of the software people run on a MacBook. Combine that with Apple's philosophy of hiding technical details from users (e.g. with fat-binaries in Darwin), so if Apple _does_ switch to ARM for the MacBooks that's not a problem: Microsoft Office for Mac, Chrome for Mac, and the rest (if they aren't just Electron apps like everything is thesedays) will have to be an x64/ARM fat-binary for the Apple App Store - and no-one will complain about specialty pro-only software distributed outside of the store only being available as x64.

That logic is a bit strange.

When / if Apple stop support for x86 any Apple computer purchased before they go ARM will essentially be end of life.

If you do not want to build a hackintosh because of ARM in the future you also do not want to buy a Apple x86 computer today.

It seems like a Hackintosh would actually be the better choice if you're worried about Apple moving to ARM, since you could run Windows or Linux on it without relying on Apple for driver support.

Given that the latest Mac still uses an Intel CPU, I’d say the range is [5,7] years at minimum, based on Apple’s current vintage/obsolete policy, before x86 support is dropped from OSX.

It was only 4 years between the Intel announcement and Snow Leopard (Intel-only), and you couldn’t even buy an Intel Mac for nearly the first year.

Considering they just spent possibly 6 years designing this crazy expensive x86 beast, I don't think support is going to drop that hard that fast to warrant avoiding x86.

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