Hacker News Reader

Comment by elagost | Hacker News Reader

As someone who used to do this myself, I don't quite understand why people still go through all the effort to run macOS. In the past I've built Hackintoshes on desktops and laptops, and it was fun to accomplish (audio through HDMI was especially tricky!), but in the end it was slower, less stable, and not nearly as useful as running Linux on the same hardware. I run Linux on everything these days.

What's the draw? Better off buying a mac if you want the "Apple Experience" anyway. If you don't, I don't imagine why you'd want anything to do with this.

View on HN

I switched away from a hackintosh tower to a real Mac recently because things lined up for that to make sense, but previously I hackintoshed because nothing came as close to checking all of my boxes for a desktop environment as even just out of the box macOS.

No amount of effort spent on customizing Windows does the trick because of things about it that are unchangeable (like its terrible text rendering), and while a Linux setup can get close (especially if eschewing a monolithic DE), it requires pouring countless hours into it to get it there, and even then many details are wrong and random things are flaky.

It's largely (if not entirely) due to the cost-to-performance ratio.

Apple's cheapest Mac configuration, the Mac Mini, starts at $799 for a measly i3 4-core processor and 8GB of RAM with no dedicated GPU. For the same price, I can put together something of at least 2X the performance: i5 6-core, 16GB RAM, and an RX 570/580 GPU.

Granted for Hackintoshes you're on your own for debugging but as others below have said and on r/hackintosh, the end product is oftentimes very stable. So tradeoff can be worth it, especially as you go up the product stack.

Price, flexibility, control are some of the top things that come to mind. Yes there can definitely be stability issues but if you are in some country where you want to develop iOS apps but can't really afford a high end Mac this makes sense. Also as a stepping stone into their ecosystem.

Also it is hard to underestimate the amount of polish that Apple puts into their UI. Overall it is a pretty good experience especially compared to some of the windowing systems on various flavors of linux. Polish is something that does not come easily in the open source world.

Maybe you don’t need to use adobe products along a solid coding environment? A very common scenario for Webdev.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com