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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".

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The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy the equivalent-specced Mac.

The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible.

People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)

I have a need to be able to run macos binaries and xcode from time to time, and it used to be non-trivial to run macos in a unsanctioned vm so I had a mac laptop around.

But these days you can spin up a qemu macos vm without too much effort and that's my virtual hackintosh.

I remember I needed Hackintosh to build an iPhone app on my PC. You must possess a Mac to make apps for iPhones, don't know why.

This really brings me back. My first hackintosh as a kid was on a 1.4ghz Pentium 4 with a ATI Radeon 9600.

I started my developer career on Hackintoshes many years ago.

No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop, it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest Xcode.

Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over the years, like crashes and graphical glitches with certain apps, like Photos or Preview, problems with monitor resolutions and refresh rates, and many, many others.

Ultimately, they were a useful tool for a time, but they suffered from death by a thousand cuts in terms of practical usability. So, I bought a basic Mac Mini as soon as I was able to, and never looked back.

The first hackintosh I built back around 2008 I was able to get working actually perfectly. Somehow the hardware and software bits all aligned and everything worked great. It’d run for months on end without issue.

Nothing since that one were quite as good. Had a Dell laptop for a while that was almost perfect, but would lock up and require a reboot once every couple of weeks. A tower I built in 2016 was also almost perfect, except I never could get USB working 100% right and later on the Nvidia drivers got flaky.

I built a hackontosh in 2016, bought all the right mobo with the right driver sets, etc. Used the buyer's guides on tonymacx86.com and purchased the exact hardware, downloaded the drivers, flashed things, etc. It was far from "just working". I had a stable and solid system for about 18 months (after a weekend of tweaking), and then it needed to be reconfigured, and I didn't have the time to spend the weekend getting it to work again....so that machine went back to windows. Even with the proper supported Nvidia card, I had issues, and went through some pains with the wifi.

Cost of ownership of an M3 MacBook Pro is like $300-400 a year. Even if you have the time, it's just not worth it anymore like it used to be.

I wouldn't count on 10 years of real-world life from a non-upgradeable and 'repair-resistant' device with a glued in battery, even if the hardware specs are good enough to last that long.

That's 5 years of ownership. $2500 USD for a 16" then you get something back on the second hand market.

I'm happy with the M1 air pro for 700. Could use 256 more SSD but it's not worth $500 extra that apple wants to charge.

It seems reasonable when you consider TCO, but you still have to pay 100% up front. Not everyone can drop $2k on a laptop, most people don’t need to.

Buying a new MacBook Air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/13-inch-m2

    $999.00
    or
    $83.25/mo.per month for 12 mo.

With a footnote:

> Monthly pricing is available when you select Apple Card Monthly Installments (ACMI) as payment type at checkout at Apple, and is subject to credit approval and credit limit. Financing terms vary by product. Taxes and shipping are not included in ACMI and are subject to your card’s variable APR. See the Apple Card Customer Agreement for more information. ACMI is not available for purchases made online at special storefronts. The last month’s payment for each product will be the product’s purchase price, less all other payments at the monthly payment amount. ACMI financing is subject to change at any time for any reason, including but not limited to, installment term lengths and eligible products. See https://support.apple.com/kb/HT211204 for information about upcoming changes to ACMI financing.

----

You do not have to drop $2000 on a new laptop up front.

Don't forget the $700 Walmart special: https://www.walmart.com/ip/609040889

8gb model doesn't count as a usable computer. It's absurd that it is even being offered in 2024.

And that's how you know someone has not used the 8GB MBA model. 8GB is more than enough for the light usage you'd buy a 8GB model to begin with. Which means not running 3 IDEs and 5 VMs at the same time.

Sure, then just add $100 each for a decent amount of RAM and storage.

Oh, wait... forgot that these are designed to be landfill fodder.

> Not everyone can drop $2k on a laptop

That's what most laptops used to cost back in the 1990s or so (after adjusting for inflation). If you look further back in time, hardware was even more expensive - and it couldn't even do 10% of what a modern MacBook does. Modern hardware is ridiculously cheap.

In the 90s most people didn't have a laptop for that very reason. They just owned desktops which were way cheaper.

I studied computer science then and I knew 1 student out of 50 that had an actual laptop. Even at the uni we had to use their computer rooms full of desktops and X terminals.

Cheaper for sure but not "way cheaper", at least nowhere near as cheap as desktop hardware is today.

In the 90s no one I know had a computer at home. Nintendo/Sega maybe, rich guys had Play Station, but no one had PC.

Oh here people did. Internet was booming and I set up so many PCs. It was great business.

I had a Gameboy, parents had a PC. Friends all had a game console. NES, SNES, SEGA, Amiga, C=64, etc. PC went booming in 90s though. Because here you could buy a PC tax deductible via a law called 'pc-privé'. This was to stimulate citizens to learn to use a computer in their private time. Still, even with tax deduction a PC was very expensive. Not like a car, but expensive still.

Not really sure they were much cheaper in the 90s. My first PC was a Dell P90 in 1994, IIRC it cost about $2500. There was kind of a mantra at the time that no matter the improvements, you'd always spend about $2500. And adjusted for inflation, that "way cheaper" desktop was over $5K in today's dollars.

Inflation calculator says the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro I bought in 2007 is something like $4400 now. Bought a small intel ssd for the sata3 port in it too for probably another $500 now

Entry-level price for a new Mac, right now, is $700 (M1 Macbook Air at Walmart). It doesn't get you the best or the fastest, but it's a perfectly usable laptop. Or, if you're okay with something lightly used, a refurbished M1 Mac Mini is ~$500.

But Apple's entry-level Macbooks aren't intended to be bought. They have almost comically low amounts of storage and RAM for 2024 (8GB/256GB).

It's all about the upsell on those non-upgradeable parts.

The M1 MBA being sold by Best Buy and Walmart are perfectly fine for 99% of the computing world. Maybe not for gamers (most laptops suck for this), or for someone needing to crunch large datasets, but when this first came out, tons of developers were perfectly happy using it, even with small storage. Hell, my iMac I used up until buying a Mac Studio only had 256GB.

Yep. 8 GB RAM isn't great, but for basic use -- web browsing, word processing, some light photo/video editing, etc -- it'll be perfectly adequate. Not everyone needs a supercomputer.

Depends on how much browser tabs they dare to keep open, and how many pictures and videos they want to keep around on their computer stored in high resolution.

VSCode remote to my Linux desktop on LAN. The upsell is obvious but I'm not gonna drop $500 on 256 gb of disk space

That's a pretty time limited sale. I doubt the stock of unsold M1s is huge. It's also $700 for a new but essentially 3+ year old machine.

I think this is a longer-term sales deal, not just a clearance sale of old stock:

https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/15/walmart-brings...

As far as the processor goes, the M1 is in active production (e.g. for the iPad Air), and is still a very capable CPU. It may not be the fastest laptop CPU on the market anymore, but it's hardly slow.

And you can drop it and lose the $2k in one single second. You can insure against that but it costs another small fortune.

TCOs are great calculations for companies but don't work for individuals.

AppleCare+ on the $2k 14" MBP is $279 or +14% for 3 years of coverage. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

So now you made it a 2.3k$ MBP didn't you? Funny how the 999$ MacBooks tend to explode in price when you configure them to make them useful.

I don't understand how this relates to paid warranty or insurance. Your TCO for a non-Apple laptop can also include a protection fee or cost to repair with no insurance.

Correct. It’s an insurance product.

Whether you take it is all about your risk tolerance and in no way impacts the usefulness of the machine.

I believe 14% is worth it.

Build a Hackintosh out of a rugged laptop case, problem solved.

They have lots of monthly payment plan options here in Canada, and probably in the US too. It even used to be zero interest. Not sure about the rest of the world.

Also many no interest options in India but the prices are higher here, somewhat so for the Macs but significantly higher for the iPhone as it is such a social status thing here in the north.

Apple Card offer this in the US, but you have to get the card. I buy all my Apple gear this way. 0% loans are great.

But more people can certainly afford a second hand mac mini which doesn't cost more than the sum of the parts of a typical hackintosh.

Lower specced macs don’t cost 2k. Go for a generation or two old refurb and you’re looking at 600-800~

I assume people would do this to get a powerful machine and not comparable with one of the cheaper Macbooks?

Did you factor in repair costs?

A 14in MBP with an M3 Pro/36GB/1TB is $2800. Add 10% sales tax, and that's about 3k.

I've never needed to actually repair a Mac.

> It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".

Oh JFC. This canard has been floating around the about linux for 30 years, and it's always been a half truth at best.

Inevitably, it always comes down to "Cards with 2361YSE rev 5 chipset" or some other nonsense. Like that makes total sense for a kernel developer, but most people don't know what chipset they have in some peripheral.

So now you're left with assholes saying, "WeLL yOu ShOuLd gEt InFoRmEd. JuSt GoOgLe iT!", and it ain't that easy. If you can even find a brand name to chipset list, it's going to be out of date, or it's going to be something that says "2361Y" or "2361YSE rev 3" or something. Is that close enough to "2361YSE rev 5"? Who knows!

Then the best part? Even when you lookup the hardware with "full compatibility", you'll find that it actually isn't. Then when you ask about it, you'll get, "I just don't use that feature, and you shouldn't use it either."

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