[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.