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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%. |