Hacker News Reader

Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

Indeed it does. Which nicely explains the rising popularity of Hackintosh's, particularly among developers and other technologists. AMD Hackintosh's[1] in particular have skyrocketed in maturity and simplicity since Ryzen.

1: https://amd-osx.com/

View on HN

Apple are locking down the platform via proprietary chips etc. It isn't a long term solution and shouldn't be relied upon.

To be fair, the Hackintosh community is pretty persistent. They added opcode emulation into the kernel, for example, to handle running on CPUs without the expected instructions (older AMD CPUs back in 10.8 or so). I wouldn't be surprised to see the cat-and-mouse continue.

Wonder what happens when Apple starts "enforcing" a Tx chip to boot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#Appl...

This sounds really interesting, do you have any links that I could follow to learn more? Is it setting an invalid opcode exception handler?

They released a whitepaper on it, yeah. It was a bit annoying to dig up, but Archive.org comes to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100217014904/http://xnu-dev.go...

It's strange that I can't find any source code for this…

https://github.com/sinetek/xnu-amd/tree/master/osfmk/OPEMU

Thanks! I still wonder how usable programs that utilize SSE3 with this, but it's a pretty cool workaround.

Indeed though keep in mind that the current method for running macOS on AMD doesn't use this and instead relies on patching through Clover. The downside being that whilst the OS itself may run any applications that use an opcode that isn't implemented will simply crash.

I'd been running Hackintosh and an rMBP for my desktop and laptop respectively... this past year I've passed on both and now running Linux for my personal desktop, and will be getting a new laptop within the next few months, some of the Ryzen Asus laptops coming soon are interesting.

Although still not without issue, my workflow has aligned so much with Linux and it's finally reached a good enough point for my day to day use... not having to use the VM based mac or windows docker has been really nice (WSL isn't good enough imho).

So, explain to me again how "the marked dictates the price"? ...

I know you are being facetious, however there are options which the market provide.

1) Other companies that are willing to sell you workstation and laptop computers that you can run other operating systems on such as one of the Linux variants, Windows, BSD etc. Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer from Apple.

2) There is a thriving second hand market of Apple machines just look at ebay, craigslist, gumtree etc.

If a new Apple machine isn't worth it to you, you are free to buy alternatives.

I am going to buy one of the newer Lenovo Thinkpads as I don't think the MacBook pro is worth it to replace my ageing Macbook Pro.

> Which nicely explains the rising popularity of Hackintosh's, particularly among developers and other technologists.

Can you provide a citation for this? Having worked with literally thousands of engineers, I have never seen a hackintosh in real life.

I personally know of a iOS software house where all developers use hackintosh, so yeah it's popular.

Which you can derive from there being at least one hackintosh shop?

It's the only iOS software house I personally know, so in my POV it represents 100% of macos/iOS shops.

YMMV.

You put together all your information from anecdotally never seeing one.

I believe he’s wrong and they are not meaningfully rising in popularity. Hackintoshes started as soon as the Intel transition, and they do exist (I’ve seen a couple personally, both built around the Leopard era when tools were mature and the desirability of iCloud/iMessage integration was lower.) Today there aren’t many people who need to push computing beyond the relatively affordable Mac Mini and iMac configurations. Most Hackintosh practitioners want Apple to release the “XMac,” a cheap and configurable desktop tower* and operate their Hackintosh in its stead.

It’s a respectable hobby, though, like iOS jailbreaking or emulation, and for persistent people it does let them run MacOS on more powerful hardware than they could afford.

* https://arstechnica.com/staff/2005/10/1676/

Not sure a citation exists for such an assertion -- but I'm a decade deep and numerous production (profitable) iOS apps shipped without ever touching Apple hardware. MacOS is a joy but the hardware is consumer rot.

I’m sure if it was indeed popular, there would be some way of demonstrating that. Aside from the fact that I have never seen one in my entire career as a consultant, working with hundreds of organisations, the reason this sounds ridiculous to me is that Apple has a long history of making very little effort to obstruct the hackintosh community. Which suggests very strongly that the community is too small for Apple to bother with. There are a few topics on HN that seem to bring out people claiming that incredibly niche interests are actually very common and popular. Apple is one of them. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that somebody making such an incredible claim should have at least some way of substantiating it.

I’m sure if it was indeed popular, there would be some way of demonstrating that.

Google Trends suggests that searches for 'Hackintosh' peaked around 2009 and have been steadily declining down to around a half since then. Searches for 'Ubuntu' dominate so much it makes the Hackintosh graph look flat by comparison, but Hackintosh seems about as popular as 'Manjaro' (Linux Distribution) currently is, fwiw:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=hackinto...

The only reason I'm using a Mac now is by pure good luck as all my PC components at the time (back in 2011-ish) were OSX Snow Leopard compatible, right down to Wi-Fi, bluetooth, motherboard, soundcard, etc. I admit it wasn't completely vanilla due to the infamous tonymacx86 software method but it did get me running quickly.

I gave OSX a test drive and found it much more simple compared to Windows. As I already had an iPhone/iPad it made sense to switch. Come upgrade time I bought a Macbook Pro and have been on OSX since.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com