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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Are you familiar with Hackintosh? That's what people did with Intel based platforms. Apple Silicon put an end to the Hackintosh.

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Source? Last year I installed macOS 14 on a Thinkpad X230

Sure, if you want to linger onto old versions of the OS, but once Apple quits supporting Intel it will be over.

So maybe I'm calling it early, but it will at some point be pointless to continue running the old Intel systems.

Can’t emulate or spoof m series chip?

with what? the m series is everything on the chip. you're suggesting an Intel CPU an Nvidia GPU and a bunch of RAM sticks to be emulated to present itself to the OS as a single device?

Not sure. I assumed there could be some way to lie to the os like how you can spoof other metadata about the device to other software.

Not at any usable level of performance. It's a completely different hardware architecture.

Hackintosh still exists. macOS 16 will be officially the last x86 supporting release.

But I think it's point, the performance of Hackintosh is terrible for many reasons as its all a hackjob.

The Hackintoshes I've built were much better performance for price compared to equivalent official model. It just took a lot longer to get them up an running. We were building for production machines vs personal use, so things like Messages, AppStore, etc that could be tricky to get to work were just not something we cared about.

I ran Hackintoshes for many years. Performance on a $1500-2000 Intel platform was always extremely good (certainly better than any Mac I was willing to shell out for and sometimes better than any Mac that was sold).

That time period of the trash can mac saw a lot of people looking to have a useful computer and Hackintosh was the only way. We had systems with multiple GPUs that blew the doors off the trash can's AMD multiple year old GPUs. Then, when the new GPUs came out, Hackintoshes just upgraded while the trash can just sat their all sad in how useless it was.

The people involved in making the Hackintosh possible should be immortalized in stone carvings to be remembered for all of time.

Performance was very, very good in my experience. Benchmarks normally took a 10% hit vs their equivalents on windows, but being able to run macOS on arbitrary consumer hard made performance incredibly cheap. My first proper bang-for-buck machine was an i7-4790k with an R9 270x GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a combination of SSD and HDD storage. Total cost was around $1300 CAD if I remember correctly, which is absurdly cheap compared to what you’d have to pay at the time for a Mac with that performance. I also ran macOS on a 2x E5-2670 machine with 64GB of RAM, as well as a 2x E5-2697 v2 machine, and an i9-12900k machine with an RX 6950XT GPU, all of which were incredible value compared to an off-the-shelf Mac. It’s only recently that Macs are catching up to hackintoshes performance-to-dollar wise, because Apple Silicon is very, very good. Once I get my WRX90 workstation hackintoshed it should give the Mac Studio and Mac Pro a run for their money, but not for much longer if Apple drops support for x86 after macOS 16.

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