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Building a Hackintosh Pro

dancounsell.com

171–180 of 272 posts

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't know any developers working on compiled software. I do. I expect your next response will impose qualifiers on "developers" and "compiled software." :) > my OP - are from people who need a powerful desktop for work. Your OP said: > Problem is, Apple doesn't have anything for power users or developers right now. > I used to say that their laptops are fine My experience is that their laptops are still more t…

> I do. I expect your next response will impose qualifiers on "developers" and "compiled software." > I used to say that their laptops are fine > My experience is that their laptops are still more than fine enough for power users and developers. Well, [part 1] I don't use xcode, i touch type [part 2] and a lot of the stuff i work on involves looong builds and/or going through a few VMs. I also HATE fan noise and I wo…

Which apps do you use that make such heavy use of the function keys that makes any such difference significant? I'm not sure I'm aware of anything I use on a daily basis that uses the function keys. I use them so rarely, I usually forget that I need to press the fn key first to actually use them, and then I always have to hunt for the fn key; its placement by the home/end keys on my keyboard isn't exactly conducive to frequent use.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#172
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unclear whether a license can actually prevent you from running licensed software on the HW you like, if you buy said SW in the first place.

_When_ you're buying a license, you're not " buying said SW", and you will have to abide by the rules of the license. (As to the _When_, that can a point for contention, given that consumer software marketing material typically doesn't explicitly mention the license)

I was serious: you can't put any obligation you want in a SW license and hope it can be enforced against those who buy said license. And it has been debated whether restriction to run consumer general purpose software on specific hardware, especially when that sw can be obtained independently of any hardware, can be enforced or not.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#173
post #149
post #82

Just to provide a counterpoint, I recently did a new desktop build and installed Windows 10. It's not bad, and very different from the Windows 10 beta that I gave up on in frustration two years ago. With the Ubuntu subsystem I can do useful work right away. After turning off some of the annoyances (via the Services and Group Policy control panels), it really does a decent job of just working. You can download and ins…

Is there really a difference you can feel (not measure) between NVMe and SATA SSDs? I am just wondering. I myself don't dare to go Windows because of malware. Linux is where it is.

For me, I didn't notice much of a difference in performance. Ostensibly, the benchmarks say that it is ~5x faster, but on a day-to-day basis, I barely notice this - I rarely transfer files larger than ~10GB.

However, what I did appreciate was the (in-the-case) logistics difference of installing an M.2 drive; one screw, no cables, almost as easy as a RAM upgrade. Not having to fuss with SATA was a pleasure, and reminded me of the switch from IDE to SATA (you just... plug it in? Where are the jumpers?).

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#174
post #68

My concern with these hackintosh systems is safety. Tools like Unibeast/Clover and whatever else. They manipulate the OSX install image. It all seems to work but then you type in your credentials for the bank or work into a browser and who knows if the OS is compromised. Is it safe? That is the question.

Clover is fully open source. And it's not too complicated to follow along, so it's actually a fairly auditable piece of software. I've been using hackintosh for a while, and it's almost a vanilla OSX with the exception of Clover and FakeSMC. I doubt there's any malware in there...

> I doubt there's any malware in there...

Famous last words. Unless the builds are verifiable, they're not trustable. Open source doesn't do you any good if you don't know that the binary that you download and run doesn't do something weird.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#175
post #82

Just to provide a counterpoint, I recently did a new desktop build and installed Windows 10. It's not bad, and very different from the Windows 10 beta that I gave up on in frustration two years ago. With the Ubuntu subsystem I can do useful work right away. After turning off some of the annoyances (via the Services and Group Policy control panels), it really does a decent job of just working. You can download and ins…

I consider an operating system that randomly includes ads on their OS tools far from 'not bad'.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#176
post #82

Just to provide a counterpoint, I recently did a new desktop build and installed Windows 10. It's not bad, and very different from the Windows 10 beta that I gave up on in frustration two years ago. With the Ubuntu subsystem I can do useful work right away. After turning off some of the annoyances (via the Services and Group Policy control panels), it really does a decent job of just working. You can download and ins…

If you're relying on the Ubuntu subsystem to do "real work", why not just install Ubuntu?

Probably because of the myriad of things that have shaky hardware support on ubuntu.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#177
post #68

My concern with these hackintosh systems is safety. Tools like Unibeast/Clover and whatever else. They manipulate the OSX install image. It all seems to work but then you type in your credentials for the bank or work into a browser and who knows if the OS is compromised. Is it safe? That is the question.

Can this be answered by doing a security review of the Hackintosh installation? Would all that is necessary be to put the Hackintosh behind a network inspector, say Wireshark, to check if anything nefarious or unexpected is going on.

What if the traffic was masked - say certain "routine" DNS queries to kick off a request to get further commands to run? I wouldn't be worried about facile root kits, but higher quality attacks that are way harder to detect.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#178
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I buy Macs because they "just work", so a Hackintosh completely destroys the point of even owning a Mac for me.

Except that Macs don't "just work" any more. At best they "just work" until the day that Apple decides to deprecate a feature or an application that you have come to rely on (for me it's iPhoto) and then it stops working. It doesn't crash, it just says, "Sorry, this application cannot run on this version of MacOS." But from the user's point of view the effect is the same. [UPDATE] Case in point: one of the banking ap…

Agreed -- the new "productivity" applications are a disaster. If you shoot RAW, you have to either stick with an old version of Aperture, or switch to Lightroom (typical Adobe crap), because Photos doesn't do lens profiles. If you want to create a bound book, you can't use Pages, because it doesn't do inner and outer margins, only left and right. For now, it's less work for me to stay than to go, but Apple needs to pay more attention to their software.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#179
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was 5 months ago; perhaps things happened to change since then. :)

I installed Tensorflow 1.0.1 for Windows for the first time like, 3 weeks ago. I've never installed it before on any system and I never even had Python3 on this machine. I had to use Windows because it has my new GTX 1080. Short story: worked great, running in about 5 minutes. (With VSCode, I even get autocomplete out-of-the-box on the TF libraries, imports, etc.) I think it was much different before 1.0. Also, build…

> And Keras was far more annoying because it wants scipy, which wants BLAS, and I don't use Anaconda. I haven't gotten around to that one yet...

Christoph Gohlke to the rescue: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#scipy

I also don't think that the numpy installed via pip is using mkl, so his version of numpy should be faster too: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#180
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish I know what Apple was thinking. It's literally incomprehensible. Just make a really good fast desktop computer. They're one of the largest companies in the world now with essentially unlimited financial resources, and decades of core competency in making high end desktop computers. So like why don't they just fucking do it.

>It's literally incomprehensible. Just make a really good fast desktop computer. For the sake of argument, why? It's probably one of their worst selling products. Nobody defends the remaining iPod enthusiasts when they demand a new giant capacity iPod. Maybe we just need to accept that Apple doesn't want to be in the desktop computer business for much longer?

Every time someone brings up sales volumes, they don't seem to connect the shitty updates with correspondingly shitty sales. Of course the Mac Pro sells in low volumes; it's a frigging 4 year old computer now. Same with the mini. If Apple updated these on an annual basis (just the cpu/gpu etc) then maybe sales wouldn't look like shit.
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