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Comment by _def | Hacker News Reader

Is it worth it building a Hackintosh? Are there any downsides comparing to Apple hardware? (in terms of using OSX)

I spent a lot of time setting up Hackintoshes and, in the end, I always ended up asking myself: why did I bother doing all this?

The time you have to spend maintaining it can amount to a lot. In my case, the machine would always feel sort of unstable with random freezes, etc. You just never really know 100% what's going on behind the scenes, it could be the wrong kext, or the wrong graphics card, or the wrong os patch, the wrong iso used, etc.

If you have plenty of time to play with it, I would say go for it. But if you just need your machine to do work and cannot afford having a computer that may suddenly stop working (and requiring a lot of time to get it going again), just save your time/money and buy an actual apple device.

The idea of having a fast and custom made computer running macOS is pretty enticing, but it's a lot more time consuming/intricate than one would like to admit.

I have had my previous hackintosh since 2014 and only once was there an issue. It all depends how good your boot loader config was. If it was configured properly, it was rock solid.

I am using Hackintoshes for the past 5++ years and it's running smooth and stable. I always make sure to buy only hardware that is supported and I never had any problems.

Updates were a pain in the past, but recently they are being applied smoothly.

My Hackintosh is my main device (typing from it right now) and I am working on it 10h+ a day for years without interruptions, so I think it's more than worth it for me.

Apple simply does not understand what we want.

You need to buy hardware specifically for hackintoshing. Don't just buy whatever's in fashion and try to make Mac OS fit.

If you do that it's mostly hassle free. Never had freezes, had stuff like sound not working when coming back from sleep (which i solved by switching to usb audio).

Of course, then something will come along and fuck you up, like Apple dropping nvidia drivers completely. Which is solved by getting an AMD video card. Admit it, it was time you upgraded the video card anyway :)

I bought specific hardware,

HP 6300 SFF: $35 NVidia GT 710: $30 16GB of DDR3: $60 Cheap 256GB SSD: $30

More than fast enough for me. Everything works: iMessage, iCloud, etc. No crashes, no freezes, no audio issues. It started on High Sierra and is on Mojave now. Installation straightforward, though it requires concentration as you read the instructions - and no cheating.

I was gifted an HP 6300 and was astonished by how easy they are to Hackintosh. The 6300 & 8300 can be had on ebay for $75-150.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-hp-6300-pro-hp-8300...

I added this graphics card:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B7YMBFC/

I even get HDMI audio support.

Does that graphics card work with the little PSU in the 6300? I have the SFF. Not sure if it even has a power cable to feed it. And is it noisy?

It's a low profile card and I don't remember it needing any power being plugged in. To be fair, I think this card is overpriced for whatever performance you would get out of it. That is especially considering I only use it for 2d acceleration. But I needed the card because I could not get displayport from the motherboard working - I suspect it is the particular CPU. Regardless, my entire outlay for this machine was the price of the graphics card.

It is fairly quiet, but I've never heard it really ramp up.

I do vaugely remember the card NOT coming with the shorter edge connect (metal L bracket thingy). Need to look back there and see what I have going on.

Don't forget the random times it doesn't just reboot into the OS and you're sitting there debugging for hours to login back in.

Depends on a persons needs. Worth it for me. It’s faster than an 8-core 6000 USD Mac Pro and a 10-core iMac Pro. Downsides are maintenance, knowing what you’re doing, checking if it’s safe to upgrade to a newer version of macOS.

It's all about your trade-off between what you want, time, and money. Do you want the desktop equivalent of a fully-loaded 16" MBP or a low-mid-range Mac Pro? Is $3000 a significant amount of money to you? If the answer to both of these is yes, it's worth it.

If you are going to spend the money, just build yourself a desktop and install Elementary OS on it. Modern Linux is fantastic. I moved to Ubuntu earlier this year and had to tweak like 2 things for seamless use.

Then if you really want MacOS, look into VFIO with GPU passthrough. People are getting native like performance with both Windows for gaming and MacOS.

The main downside is you have to be super careful when applying os updates - and recent macos tend to be updated more frequently.

The problem is that a lot of the tools you need to run a Hackintosh may not be open-source or only provided in binary form (or you don't have a platform to compile the code even if it was open-source, so you'd still need to somehow bootstrap it first, either with a real Mac or with the untrusted binaries).

Running untrusted code from anonymous people on a forum, some of which runs at kernel level (like hardware drivers) is a no-no for me and should be for anyone.

OpenCore is completely open source.

And you can build everything on Windows or Linux. Mac not needed (though I still prefer it).

Do you have an example of tool that is not open-source and mandatory for running a Hackintosh?

I followed the "vanilla" guide to build my Hackintosh. It uses only open-source kexts files available on Gitlab or Github.

Just avoid TonyMac and their apps.

I move that PirateBay downloads can be a lot more secure than stuff from many commercial vendors.

In our case, the hackintosh community is highly technical and would notice any suspicious behaviour immediately.

Also, I think all the drivers are available on github? The TonyMac stuff is just a frontend that installs the same source available drivers...

I thought about myself, but OS updates / upgrades are risky.

Upsides: price, upgradeability, repairability.

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