[hackety]

I have a hackintosh, and it's a nightmare.

Even though I copied a "gold build" from "TonyMacx86" (the "hackintosh authority"), the machine freezes randomly every hour, sometimes a week. But it will freeze and I'll have to do a hard reset.

Also, many of Apples services won't work with a hackintosh. iMessage and FaceTime, for example. To fix it, you'll need to call Apple and convince them to whitelist your fake generated system ID, risking getting your apple ID banned.

Something also happened during the installation so I have to have a Mavericks USB drive attached at all times to boot the damn thing.

Oh, and don't forget you have to reconfigure the whole thing when you apply an update.

Had I known these things I'd just have saved up a little more and bought the real thing.

[roeme]

That's strange.

I built one last year, and it's far from being a nightmare. I also followed the builds from the site you mentioned, as best as I could in my country (local dealers are cheaper, or on-par to amazon around here) - the few deviations I had to make just require me to replace the NIC and Graphic kexts after an update (but I can do this on the same system, it's not unusable without them). The only other problem I did not bother to fix yet is that I can't watch hardware-accelerated movies in the browser (really not required with the work I do this machine).

But still, it was for fun. I'd never use them as a substitute to the real thing, the price difference is too small IMHO – I do factor in the time I "waste" on a system.

So I don't quite get where people got the Idea that a Hackintosh is worth the hassle to be used as a substitute. C'mon, it's even in the name.

[johnpowell]

Mine works perfectly fine. Installing OS X was pretty painless and the only problem I have is that point updates break audio but that is a two minute fix. iMessages and Facetime work as expected.

The first time I built one I had lots of problems like you described but that was pretty much due to me not really knowing what the hell I was doing.

[Gracana]

Is something wrong with your hardware? That doesn't sound right at all. I have a hackintosh (not the gold build, just my own uber-cheap machine based on their recommendations) and it has never had an issue.

[hackety]

That's what I thought, but it runs ubuntu and windows without issues. Many people have similar issues. I actually think the freezing has been solved with a new kext i installed recently, but how can I be 100% sure?

[gbrhaz]

That's a shame. I built one for fun and it works perfectly. There were a couple of tweaks I had to make to get dual monitors working, the sound working, etc, but it didn't take longer than a few hours.

[nicholassmith]

This is one of the reasons why ponying up the extra money for a Mac system is a good deal, you get a box, you open the box, you press the on button and you're ready to go.

[hackety]

Indeed. I get a little depressed thinking about the hours I've wasted on the tonymac forums looking up solutions to the problems I've having and trying random things to see if it worked.

Time I could've spent much more productively.

[WorldWideWayne]

This is also a good reason to not use a Mac at all and instead use an OS that does not lock you into a single line of hardware.

[nicholassmith]

In my experience with other OS' (Windows 3.1 -> Windows 8, Ubuntu 4 -> Ubuntu 13, half a dozen other Linux varieties), I've never been able to open the box and get to work within half an hour. There's always been some niggle. It's a bit trickier now that the dev tools are an optional download rather than a CD/setup option, but in practise I'm usually good to start working with a fresh Mac in about half an hour. With Linux there's a lot more tinkering to get it just so, and with Windows there's generally a lot more to download and configure to get it working comfortably.