[kristopolous]

Help me on this. Do people really like say, macOS but not Apple hardware? Is this to lower cost? Just a hobby project?

All the above?

Forgive me. I've been on Linux since the 90s and don't really engage much with the Apple ecosystem. I don't mean this as a dig. I'm really ignorant on this stuff.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Apple hardware sucks for the following reasons:

- it's expensive, especially if you want to load up on memory or disk space

- there is limited choice

- it's relatively unreliable

- it's difficult to fix, you have to send it to Apple under warranty, third party repairs are difficult or impossible, self fix is impractical for most people

With Hackintoshes you can have a solid desktop machine starting from $150 (motherboard and processor). You can easily fix it yourself by swapping out parts and get local warranty. You can upgrade and downgrade at will. You can use a much wider range of macOS versions.

Laptops are a more complicated issue and much more marginal.

I've used a Hackintosh as my daily driver for about 10 years ever since I had the misfortune of trying to get my brand new MacBook fixed by a "genius" who was actually a rude, condescending arsehole who spoke nonsense. Apple applied the trivial fix of a replacement internal cable and then held my laptop for nearly a week as a matter of policy.

[exe34]

I'm very lucky apparently, my mid-2012 Macbook air is still my daily driver outside work. At the time, it was the longest battery life, reasonable CPU, ram and SSD, in the thinnest but robust and lightest laptop I could find at 13in.

I replaced the SSD a few years ago, and I don't think the battery would last very long nowadays, but I don't want a laptop on holidays anymore anyway.

I got fed up with osX though, just run Linux nowadays.

[moondev]

hackintoshes also support a killer feature that new Mac computers do not - nested virtualization

[nickpsecurity]

Can you describe how you use that with what software packages?

[moondev]

A few examples: using vmware fusion provides an option to enable nested virtualization

1) running a windows vm from macos, and inside that windows vm you enable and use WSL2 or docker desktop. Both of those windows tools require nested virtualization

2) run a hypervisor such as esxi or proxmox as the vm OS, which in turn launches vms. Handy for simulating infra.

3) run a macos vm and inside that vm, install docker desktop for mac

4) experiment with any qemu/kvm tooling inside a linux vm, such as multipass or kubevirt

Everything above is not possible on modern mac hardware but is on hackintosh

[3abiton]

I want to say that's so cool, but why so manu vms are needed? Isn't possible to run all of this on hackintosh directly without VMception?

[moondev]

The ultimate setup is actually running esxi directly on the mac mini 2018 (6c/12t) and 64G DDR. Then esxi can launch as many macos, windows, linux and nested esxi vms as needed. 4 tb3 allows plenty of options for extra nvme or 10+ GbE nics. You can even passthrough the intel iGPU to linux and light up a monitor.

Compare to a modern mac mini has a strict limit of 2 macos vms, no hyperthreading , no nested virt and CPU optimized for vertical integration.

[kristopolous]

Thanks. I'm deep in the Linux world and really don't know anything about this stuff

[jspizziri]

In my case (and I suspect many others) the answer is Xcode. I develop native apps which means I need access to an iOS dev environment. iOS development is nearly impossible without Xcode, so the only way to do it is either pay a virtualization penalty (which is not appealing when Xcode builds already take a massive amount of time), have a specific machine just for iOS work (which would be super inconvenient, even with a virtual KVM), use a Hackintosh (which have problems), or pay Apples exorbitant fees for hardware.

I dream of a day when I can daily drive Linux and also do dev on iOS, but currently that’s not really possible without some unacceptable compromise. I’ve done quite a bit of research and have yet to find a viable solution (recommendations welcome).

[sokoloff]

This might not be an answer you like, but I find the virtualization penalty (running on proxmox [kvm]) to be acceptable. In synthetic benchmarks, the penalty is possible to measure but small (1-3% typically). Passing through a AMD graphics card and a USB port, I get a pretty good experience in using it and an excellent experience in administering it [backups/snapshots, restores, etc. are all super clean].

If I measure against "is it viable?", for me the answer is "absolutely, yes".

[Hamuko]

I ran a Hackintosh as my main computer between 2014 and 2022. Large part of the reason was cost: I was a student, so I didn't really have money to drop thousands upon thousands to get a Mac desktop. Even dropping like 1200€ on the cheapest MacBook Pro, which got me into using macOS in the first place, was a tough ask.

Another aspect was that the Mac desktop lineup wasn't great. There was the Mac Mini, which had a pretty limited chassis for any kind of expansion, not the best CPU options and ran on integrated graphics. Then there was the iMac, which had the same CPU I chose for my Hackintosh, but was significantly more expensive and came with a monitor that I didn't really need since I already had a good monitor. And lastly there was the Mac Pro, which was overkill both for budget and power, since it wasn't like you could spec it out with an i7 instead of a Xeon. The latest Mac Pro was also the trashcan, really emphasising how not great the lineup was.

With a Hackintosh, I could really just choose what parts I wanted, as long as macOS supported them in some way, and stuff as many SSDs and HDDs as I required over time, since it's not like my student budget expanded to having a separate NAS. And it'd be much cheaper than a comparable Mac, not that there were really any directly comparable ones. Performance-wise the iMac would've probably been the best one.

While it was a pretty superb system, especially for the money, it did get a bit tiresome to deal with the hacky nature of the system by the end of it. macOS updates would always be somewhere between "mild pain" and "large pain", so I did defer updates quite a lot. Sleep also stopped working at some point, so I often kept the computer running 24/7. And when Apple switched over to ARM, I knew that it was time to jump the Hackintosh ship. Thankfully by 2022, I had access to engineering bucks and had already acquired a NAS for my data storage needs, so I replaced my Hackintosh with the first-generation Mac Studio. A lot more expensive than my Hackintosh was, but a great computer nonetheless. Also dropped my apartment's total power usage by like 15-20%.

[Yaina]

I've had a Hacktintosh from 2016 until end of last year.

Initially I just did it because I assembled a pretty good PC for gaming, but for work stuff I liked macOS more, so dual booting was a nice option!

This was also before the M-series chips, where you had to pay a hefty premium to get better Intel processors, and also (imo) Apple increasingly struggled with the heat produced by the chips.

Things got a bit more annoying a couple years later, when Apple had their fallout with NVIDIA and would not sign their drivers anymore, which meant I had to buy a cheap AMD GPU to use for macOS.

End of last year I changed a couple of components, including the GPU, in my PC and then decided the hassle with two GPUs was just not worth it for me anymore; so I bought a Mac studio.

I gained some and lost some with this transition. I'm no longer worried about major software updates, it's nice that I don't have to deal with complicated config files for the bootloader every once in a while, and of course there were some minor bugs too.

But I kind of miss the convenience of dual booting, with shared IO and drives. Now I need a network switch, USB-hub and have to toggle between monitor inputs. So yeah! Wasn't all bad!

Anyways, I think it's very cool that there is this community of people that write and maintain special bootloaders and drivers to make it all possible!

[tracker1]

Yeah, in the head issue, the last work issue i9 MacBook I ever had was absolutely horrible... Would stutter and freeze up constantly under load and just become unusable as a platform.

It was nice in paper, but really needed to be undervolted and under locked... Not an easy task in a mbp. I couldn't get IT approval to buy a software to do it and didn't have local permission to load a self signed driver to do it either.

It was unusable for such a beast of a machine on paper.

[kelnos]

I never really understood it either. And I'm someone who (only moderately successfully) used to run Linux on various Mac laptops. I had the opposite problem: I really really really liked Mac hardware, but was kinda meh on the OS.

I think in the mid-00s I could understand Hackintosh users to some extent. Mac hardware was (and still is) expensive, and OS X was a really nice, developer-friendly OS. But macOS has gotten more and more annoying and (IMO) developer-/power-user-hostile with every release. On the rare occasions I have to touch a Mac laptop these days, I find myself getting easily frustrated.

I think for the most part the reasons today are still due to cost. And maybe a little bit of the hacker spirit, just proving that something is possible. I would never use it, but if some folks' ideal is macOS on non-Apple hardware, and can make it work to their satisfaction, more power to them.

[kristopolous]

Maybe I'm just too rich to appreciate it these days but a, say, 1-year old used mac mini m2 looks like it can be snatched for around $499 on ebay.

The PC equivalent, probably a 2023 Dell Optiplex 7010, for instance, looks to be just about the same amount ($449).

Compare https://www.ebay.com/itm/364218215167 with https://www.ebay.com/itm/276266965157

I think we've hit the commodity price point market with used Apple hardware.

Again, maybe I'm just too rich to care about the $50 here but I thought the Apple premium has shaken itself off at least the used market.

[Lazonedo]

>Again, maybe I'm just too rich to care about the $50 here but I thought the Apple premium has shaken itself off at least the used market.

On the base configurations /only/.

If you need a lot of ram and storage (neither of which are upgradable on modern macs, and in my experience storage being the most common component failure the idea of throwing away a computer because its SSD failed really grinds my gears) Apple is overpriced to an obscene point. Maybe less so in the used market, but high specced devices that aren't very old are less likely to be found there, someone who bought a 24GB mac mini with 2TB of storage isn't selling a year old model on the market unless they're doing something like switching to PCs and regretting their decision to buy a mac.

In fact it's highly likely that those only-a-year-old mac mini you can find on the market exist because someone thought they could make do with the base configuration and realized 8gb of ram is total garbage but using an Apple computer they're left with no choice but to buy a wholly new computer just to fix that mistake.

The base mini, brand new, is 699, which is a price I actually find reasonable for a computer with that level of performance and the nice form factor. But it only comes with 8gb of ram, which is abysmally unusable for anything other than "I browse facebook in one tab" kind of computer usage, and at the same time the rest of the computer is so good it makes no sense to sell this much hardware just to open facebook on a browser. So, you configure it for at least 16gb and now it's 929 euros. If you want 24gb of ram, it's now 1159 euros. Ouch. Stings. It's +460 euros just for an additional 16 gigs of ram, ridiculous, ram has never been cheaper than in the past few years, the same goes for SSDs, yet Apple prices their SSD like this :

512gb +230 euros

1TB +460 euros

2TB +920 euros

Wat? You can get a Samsung 990 pro PCI-E 4 with 4 TB of storage for 300 euros.

This is called a total ripoff.

[diffeomorphism]

> Maybe I'm just too rich to appreciate it these days but a, say, 1-year old used mac mini m2 looks like it can be snatched for around $499 on ebay.

Unfortunately, no. The dell has ram slots and two ssd slots. So a config with 16 or even 32 GB of ram and 2TB of storage is about $600. A mac mini has exactly none of these and costs $1600 with these specs.

And Apple knows this. They charge $200 for the ram upgrade precisely because they know the "base" config is so limited and just for marketing. The actual base config is $1000 with okay ram and non-crippled ssd.

[goosedragons]

There's a trillion other mini PCs for less from companies like Beelink and minisforum. And once you start equipping the Mac with a decent amount of RAM and storage the value quickly evaporates.

Like look at this: https://www.amazon.com/MINISFORUM-Mercury-6400MHz-PCIe4-0-Co...

For $400 you get a brand new system with 4 times the RAM, twice the storage. And it can be further upgraded down the line to more RAM and storage if you need it.

[BuffaloBagel]

Now try upgrading that Mac mini's SSD and memory.

[tracker1]

Now upgrade to 32 or 64gb of ram...

[jwells89]

I could easily see someone preferring macOS to Windows, with how ad-ridden and pushy 10 and 11 have become. To me it would’ve been more understandable if someone preferred Windows back in the days of 7, which I liked even as someone who’s long been disinclined from Windows.

For macOS vs. Linux it’s more fuzzy, but there are still some ways the macOS experience is a bit smoother once everything is up and running, like dodging the tinkeriness of X11 and awkwardness of the transition from X11 to Wayland… for example, you’ll never see blurry XWayland windows because someone forgot to update Electron.

That said I haven’t hackintoshed in several years. It stopped feeling as necessary after M1 came out, with my reasons for doing so being lack of power and bad cooling endemic to late 2020s Intel Macs. These days I use real Macs alongside a custom built gaming tower running Windows and ThinkPad X1 Nano running Fedora.

[tracker1]

I will say I love the touchpad experience in macOS... Nothing else compares.

I have an mà air for my personal laptop, still running macOS though.

[wutwutwat]

I had to unwillingly sell my m1 MacBook Pro months ago because finding work has been a struggle and it came down to selling anything of value.

The only compute I had after that was an old thinkpad x270, dual core with 8gb memory.

I ran Debian with kde for awhile, but I like the macOS workflows and key bindings too much. I like the quality polished native apps folks build. I like homebrew casks, etc. It’s running opencore and Sonoma right now. For me, it was a way to get the OS I am productive in while no longer being able to afford the expensive hardware.

I fear that with Apple making their own arm chips now, hackintoshes are on numbered days. It’s only a matter of time before the OS no longer runs on x86_64 and they are already starting to drop support here and there.

[refurb]

I found it odd as well. macOS on non-Apple machines is clunky. I could see it as a hobby, but for the average user? It's likely trying to run Linux.

[pjmlp]

It is basically the same mentality as putting Ferrari logos on a Fiat Coupé.

[parski]

Please explain.

[pjmlp]

Fiat Coupé vs Ferrari price, and what the owner would like to have.