[achairapart]

Twenty years ago people went to great lenghts to run the best OS available at that time on cheap commodity x86 hardware with hackintoshes. Fast forward to today, similar efforts are made to run linux on the best hardware available. It's funny how things turn around.

[philistine]

The various Hackintosh projects are on life support not because the interest for that kind of thing has died; it's because Apple doubled down on chain-of-trust and is abandoning x86.

Apple made it impossible to use iMessage on a Hackintosh without spoofing another Mac that's not in use. That pushed A LOT of people away from using a Hackintosh.

The second thing is abandoning x86. Apple has already announced that macOS 26 is the last release to support their Intel machines. That means that next year, there will be no way to run the latest macOS on any Intel machine. That's basically the end date for all these projects, as the Hackintosh crowd has always been about running the latest version of the OS. They're not interested in running System 7!

[morshu9001]

Even before the AS transition, GPUs were becoming more important and Mac OS GPU support was becoming even worse. At some point you were basically limited to a few AMD options. Very unattractive OS for a custom tower by then.

Like I did put a Nvidia 650ti? in my Mac Pro, and it sorta worked initially under OSX, but way slower and glitchier than in Windows and eventually just fully incompatible.

[philistine]

Yeah, Nvidia was forsaken by Apple after a kerfuffle where Apple blamed Nvidia for problems and Nvidia didn’t want to take that blame.

Only Nintendo and the OEM PC companies have been able to make an integration relationship work.

[morshu9001]

Well there's that (I think cause MBPs kept BBQing) and also Mac OS deprecating OpenGL and overall being different in ways that often prevent you from taking advantage of a dedicated GPU.

Which I'm fine with on my laptop or Mac mini, but if you're building a tower with a GPU, yeah

[fluoridation]

To clarify, people then and now have in common trying to run the software they prefer on the hardware they prefer. There's no objective "best"; it depends on what you need.

[wyager]

For the vast majority of customers' utility functions, Apple has the best hardware (both in absolute and per dollar terms) on the market right now. It's not "objectively best", but it certainly meets the most stringent definition of "best" that's still useful in conversation.

[fluoridation]

If that was the case, the vast majority of the world would be using Apple hardware and/or software, and yet that's not the case.

[rowanG077]

Not really, price is still extremely important and doesn't really factor into the definition of the best product. Taken to the extreme, Imagine a laptop a thousand times faster then the best there is now, with an extremely bright HDR screen with perfect blacks and a 1000hz refresh rate. It has a battery life of years, It's made of an unscratchable metal alloy and is fanless. It runs windows, linux and macos flawlessly. It's CPU can natively executable all major instruction sets. It's extremely light. Yet it costs 50 million USD. Sure there will be some super rich who may buy it. But never will the majority of the world use it.

[fluoridation]

>price is still extremely important and doesn't really factor into the definition of the best

Heh. Who says it doesn't?

>Taken to the extreme, Imagine [...]

Okay. Likewise, imagine a computer exactly like you've described, except it costs five cents and measures a cubic kilometer. Sure, there may be a couple people for whom operating such a gigantic machine is no problem, but the vast majority of the world will never use it. So the size of the computer also doesn't factor into whether it's "the best", right? And so on for any single property you care to name.

Yeah, no. The price is as much a part of a product as its physical shape. If Macs cost about the same as non-Macs, maybe they'd the most popular computers in the world, but they're not. And even in that case, they would not be the best. If, say, the program I need to run doesn't run on a Mac, the best computer for me would not be a Mac, it would be whatever computer is able to run it.

[rowanG077]

> Heh. Who says it doesn't?

Well, it’s not a formal definition, of course. But most review sites that compare products typically distinguish between best overall and best value categories. For example, if I asked gamers what the best GPU is, most would say the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Its price-to-performance ratio is terrible, but it still holds the crown.

> Okay. Likewise, imagine a computer exactly like you've described, except it costs five cents and measures a cubic kilometer. Sure, there may be a couple people for whom operating such a gigantic machine is no problem, but the vast majority of the world will never use it. So the size of the computer also doesn't factor into whether it's "the best", right? And so on for any single property you care to name.

I’m not describing a computer in general. I’m describing a laptop. What you’ve described wouldn’t even qualify for that category. And even if it did, size and weight are core quality factors for laptops. Portability is part of what defines the category.

> Yeah, no. The price is as much a part of a product as its physical shape. If Macs cost about the same as non-Macs, maybe they'd the most popular computers in the world, but they're not. And even in that case, they would not be the best. If, say, the program I need to run doesn't run on a Mac, the best computer for me would not be a Mac, it would be whatever computer is able to run it.

Price isn’t an property of a product itself, it's part of the product offering. If you have a laptop sitting on a table and you start using it, there’s nothing in the experience that tells you what it costs. If you can’t determine something by using the product, it isn’t an inherent attribute of it. Your cubic kilometer example also falls completely flat here, you can notice it when using the product.

So I'd agree with your point if we would be talking about the product offering. That includes things like pricing, warranty structure, on-site support, marketing message, availability etc.

The best laptop doesn’t have to match everyone’s personal needs. Your criteria may differ, but there are still objective qualities that most people agree are important in a laptop, build quality, display, battery life, input feel, and so on. In those respects, MacBooks tend to push these qualities to an extreme degree, more than any other laptop.

[pengaru]

Hate to break it to you but before the term "hackintosh" existed there was an army of folks making linux work well on cheap commodity x86 hardware, the success of which ushered in the dot-com booms - filling datacenters across the globe with cheap x86 hardware running linux. A reality persisting to this day, though with far fewer players thanks to decades of consolidation.

The hackintosh is a far smaller and more ephemeral niche hardly qualifying as ever orienting the proverbial table.

[bornfreddy]

> Fast forward to today, similar efforts are made to run the best OS available now (linux) on Apple hardware.

Ftfy.