Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#51

Post by mattkevan » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

Don't know if it's the 'best' but I've got El Capitan working smoothly on my second-hand Thinkpad T440. The trackpad and display are crap compared to a MacBook Pro, but hey, it was less than a sixth of the price for similar specs.

Took about an evening of tinkering and reading the TonysMac86 forums (really helpful community) to set up and has been trouble-free since. Sleep/wake works with the lid and it even supports dual batteries. Battery life is good too.

Hackintoshing a laptop is harder than a custom-built desktop as you don't have much choice over the hardware. For example often the internal wifi and bluetooth cards aren't supported - I have to use a USB dongle on mine. However, there's some good resources on TonysMac on which laptops are the most compatible.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#52

Post by cloudjacker » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

st3v3r wrote: post #47

cloudjacker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting sued isn't the end of the world The risk is $400 of hardware and a $99 dev account for the possibility of making way more than that releasing your own apps and making that much on a daily basis developing apps for other people. Risk meet Reward

If you're gonna do that, develop for Android, and don't worry about running unlicensed stuff.

do both on the hackintosh

Risk, meet reward

You are debating over contract privileges that aren't even enforced and have very minimal consequences even if they were

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#53

Post by TillE » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

gxs wrote: post #27

I realize this is not what you asked for, but the non-touch entry level macbook pro is in apple stores now. Go check it out before you take on the headache that is working on a hackintosh. It's still somehow better built than dell's XPS and the space gray color is nice to boot. Since it's the "entry level", it doesn't have a touch strip and instead has a full function row, including the esc key. It felt fast from my…

That's a decent machine, but amusingly the Macbook Air has more ports and potentially a better keyboard. Depending on your actual needs, the 13" MBA may be quite sufficient for $500 less.

I wouldn't really want it as a primary computer if you're only doing iOS development, but as an ultraportable that can run Xcode, sure.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#54

Post by gxs » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 4:53 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #53

gxs wrote: post #27

I realize this is not what you asked for, but the non-touch entry level macbook pro is in apple stores now. Go check it out before you take on the headache that is working on a hackintosh. It's still somehow better built than dell's XPS and the space gray color is nice to boot. Since it's the "entry level", it doesn't have a touch strip and instead has a full function row, including the esc key. It felt fast from my…

That's a decent machine, but amusingly the Macbook Air has more ports and potentially a better keyboard. Depending on your actual needs, the 13" MBA may be quite sufficient for $500 less. I wouldn't really want it as a primary computer if you're only doing iOS development, but as an ultraportable that can run Xcode, sure.

Agree to disagree I guess.

I always buy hubs/docking stations anyway - you can run 2 5k displays off that tiny macbook (don't think you can with the MBA, could be wrong) and thunderbolt has good speed for all your peripherals.

For me personally the deal killer is the touchpad and aspect ratio. PC touchpads are still mechanical and you still have to click on the bottom 2/3rds of the pad to get a crisp click. Similarly, there is only one 16:10 pc laptop out there that I know of which is the surface book. A nice machine, but I personally don't like the detachable/touch screen stuff yet.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#55

Post by benmcnelly » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 4:54 PM UTC

Please, please don't kill me - I know there are people who love the Mac Ecosystem (I have a macbook too!) and don't like linux, but I switched to Mint Linux with Cinnamon Desktop, and its pretty darn great. For people who live in containers, virtualenv, node, and many other types of dev, you will feel at home in no time. I bet there is a slider of where the things you like about mac go from unix like environment to "it just works" and if you are even a bit on the "it just works" side, don't go with linux, it will be an adventure. A worthy adventure, but maybe not profitable for everyone.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#56

Post by upbeat_addict » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 4:56 PM UTC

selectodude wrote: post #34

DonHopkins wrote: post #28

How wise and straightforward is it to run OS/X in a virtual machine on a Windows laptop? How recent a version can you run, and what's the best setup to use? What limitations does it have, and what kind of graphics cards can it take advantage of, if any? For my purposes, I only need to build apps with XCode, not do anything graphically intensive.

The entire UI is GPU accelerated, which isn't supported in a VM. It's pretty painful to use for more than 2-3 minutes.

Have you used Beamoff to disable beam sync? Once it runs, the performance is drastically improved.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#57

Post by gcb0 » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

edko wrote: post #3

If you are a professional app developer (you make a living out of it) then Hackintosh is a bad alternative. It can get your developer account, and apps, banned by Apple. On top of that, you can get sued.

does it really?

the eula, which is hardly enforceable anyway, says literally "xcode must run on Apple hardware". just that. they'd have a really hard case if you used a apple keyboard or pen drive...

but, I'm not a lawyer and the lawyers at my company didn't want to test it themselves

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#58

Post by lucideer » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

If you're an existing Mac user, the recommendations here to "just get a Mac" may be better, but I'll throw another possibility into the mix:

I ran OSX in VirtualBox for a good while in order to use some locked-in iOS dev tools. It was slow, but that was largely just because my underlying machine wasn't very new at the time, it was easy to install, and I never encountered any stability issues. It would free you up to get the best machine without worrying about hw compat.

Disclaimer: This was OSX Lion days. Have not tried recently. Ymmv.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#59

Post by joenot443 » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

I'll go against the grain here and say that I used a HP Probook 4530s as my sole development 'Mac' while I was in high school and shipped three iOS apps with it.

Was it time consuming to set it up? Yes. Did it break after most updates? Yes.

That said, when you're working as a dishwasher, a used $250 HP is much more realistic than a $1300 Macbook.

After second year of university, I bought a 2015 MBP and haven't looked back.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best Hackintosh laptop for ios app developers?

#60

Post by wadeanthony0100 » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

As much as I love the idea of playing around with getting hackintosh-es working, does anyone else feel like it's a little backwards for software developers to use unlicensed software to produce (presumably) profitable software? I'm all for hacking for fun, but doing it to make business seems unethical. Just my $0.02...