[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