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Comment by TooCleverByHalf | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve been considering building a “Hackintosh” system. But with Apple’s plans of going to ARM possibly by the end of this year, I don’t want to invest a lot in hardware that’s going to be obsolete soon.

This argument doesn't make much sense to me. While not all hardware works with the goal of building a hackintosh. Plenty of top of the line hardware does and will run Windows just fine if ARM becomes an issue.

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You generally build a hackintosh machine with parts that are most compatible with MacOS and not necessarily the best bang for buck. So, I agree with the argument from the article here. If ARM makes the build obsolete, then all you now have is a Windows machine that you did not spend your money wisely on.

Have you built a Hackintosh? I have, the only two parts that require any consideration are the Motherboard and the GPU, and even then enough Motherboards are fine as to say really the only consideration is the GPU. I admit you pretty much have to use a stock AMD GPU, if you’re ok with essentially this one requirement then you’re set, if not then yea you didn’t spend your money wisely.

Well, I did build a hackintosh and the parts you claim need to be fixed are exactly the parts I claim are not spent wisely on. You're paying for compatibility not performance. I mean the AMD offerings are no where near Nvidia, particularly with the release of the 3000 series. But you have to settle with AMD for compatibility.

A lot of AIB cards work too, for example the Sapphire 5700XT Nitro+ is popular for hackintoshing. There are a handful that don't (usually because the GPU vendor decided to make some funky design change), both those surface pretty quickly after the release of a new model and are easy to avoid.

It's argument that has not been given much careful thought. Hardware bought today will likely become obsolete itself before Apple obsoletes it.

Apple will likely be supporting Intel hardware with updates for at least 5 years and probably much longer. Application devs will likely provide even longer support, say 10 years plus.

There is a massive installed base of Intel machines and ARM is a downgrade for anyone who values compatibility (such as Bootcamp, VMs, etc) so there will not be a rush to the new platform like previous transitions.

Most of the attraction of ARM hardware will be in laptops because of improved power efficiency. People with desktops will have much less incentive to upgrade early, or at all.

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