Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 218 posts

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#71

Post by sp0rk »

vbezhenar wrote: post #37

May be it's just me, but I don't really care about design at all. I'm perfectly fine with huge tower or some reasonable fan noise. What I care is price, durability, extendability, repairability, and, of course, performance. I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad. I'm actually opposed to thin things or design aberrations like trash can mac. I'm paying for that after…

> May be it's just me, but I don't really care about design at all.

> I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad.

I think it's safe to say that you fall outside of Apple's target demographic.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#72

Post by hellbanner »

Operyl wrote: post #40
dawnerd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's for developers they don't have to guarantee it. I'm happily running a hackintosh right now. If they made it a little easier we wouldn't have to do weird hacks to spoof hardware ids just so messages work.

Those weird hacks exist because of the spambot problem they're trying to prevent. It's enough of a hassle for us that iMessage spambots are practically nonexistent as a result.

Can you explain further? SMS spam bots can still exist, right?

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#73

Post by andrewmcwatters »

vondur wrote: post #66

Apple could literally just release the new Mac Pro in the old case, with updated hardware and ports, and if it was priced closer to reality, it would make a lot of their pro users happy. I doubt it would cost them much to do so too. I'd start it off at around $1500 for an entry level 4 core Xeon with an mid-level graphics card (GTX 1060 or Radeon 480).

Makes too much sense, isn't courageous enough, and certainly doesn't have a high enough margin. I'd love this, however with an updated case.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#74

Post by ericfrederich »

lightedman wrote: post #3

Apple did. It came with a G5 processor. Most people didn't want to pay the exorbitant prices that Apple wanted them to pay for things like Apple-compatible AGP graphics cards and such when PCs got the same thing at literally 1/3 the price, and they pretty quickly fell into irrelevance. Apple would probably go the exact same route as they did the last time and fail just as miserably.

Wasn't this use case exactly what was part of their justification for switching to Intel?... the ability to keep up faster.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#75

Post by coldtea »

Xyzodiac wrote: post #15
peatmoss wrote: post #11

For people wed to commercial design apps, I can totally understand the draw of running macOS on commodity hardware. But as someone who skews more to the hacker end of the spectrum and doesn't depend on commercial software, the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. Ditto OpenBSD, etc. I'll never go back. At least it does if you've already come around to using a deskto…

It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. I will say though, I've always loved running Linux on desktops where this isn't the use case.

>It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs.

It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles).

Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is.

Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#76

Post by Synaesthesia »

vondur wrote: post #66

Apple could literally just release the new Mac Pro in the old case, with updated hardware and ports, and if it was priced closer to reality, it would make a lot of their pro users happy. I doubt it would cost them much to do so too. I'd start it off at around $1500 for an entry level 4 core Xeon with an mid-level graphics card (GTX 1060 or Radeon 480).

I believe that's probably what they will do in 2017 from Tim Cook's comments.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#77

Post by peatmoss »

fps wrote: post #52
eropple wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhhh. I put my time in with a Linux desktop for nearly a decade until a job bought me a Mac and there's no way I'd go back. And I think my "hacker end of the spectrum" bona fides are pretty good--but those bona fides aren't incompatible with a preference for a pleasing UX that has been considered with users in mind, which for my money no open-source desktop environment has even approached (and I have my beefs with O…

I've found Gnome-terminal to be better than iTerm2 in the areas that matter to me - speed, color/font rendering, and configurability. I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and i3 because I was tired of how slow iTerm2 was compared to Gnome Terminal, and haven't regretted it even slightly. My main workstation is a Lenovo Thinkpad with dual 1440p external monitors, and haven't run into issues losing heads, however, I wrote my…

Yes, magic is a great way to describe it. Sometimes it's delightful and benevolent magic, while other times it's more like a trickster's curse.

For me, there came a point when making Free nixen do what I want became easier than making macOS not do what I didn't want. Returning to Linux/*BSD from my decade long sabbatical to macOS, I've been delighted by the things that have changed, but even more delighted by some of the things that haven't.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#78

Post by potatolicious »

gnicholas wrote: post #48
azeirah wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's just me It is. I don't care a lot about design either (although I care a lot about user experience), but many people /do/ care for design, and are willing to pay a premium to get that design.

Honest question: what percent of Pro Mac users care more about design than performance? I get that lots of creatives (who might care about design) use Macs, but in the Pro community the sense I get is that performance (and expandability) are relatively more important. That's why the trash can Mac Pro was not particularly popular, to say the least.

The trash can Mac Pro is definitely too much form for too little function - but letting the pendulum swing back the other way is IMO also bad.

The previous tower Mac Pros are massive machines - massive beyond the point of practicality for many purposes. They're also insanely heavy to the point of impracticality. Not all pros want/can live with something 3 feet tall that consumes several square feet of floor space.

The "right" path forward for the pro-desktop Mac is IMO something in between - something that maximizes extensibility and versatility without completely embracing the gigantor-ATX-case-on-the-floor direction.

I'm wondering about the practicality of something more like mini-ITX - small enough to be practical, but allowing access to all the core bits (RAM, CPU, GPU, HDDs).

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#79

Post by JimDabell »

vbezhenar wrote: post #37

May be it's just me, but I don't really care about design at all. I'm perfectly fine with huge tower or some reasonable fan noise. What I care is price, durability, extendability, repairability, and, of course, performance. I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad. I'm actually opposed to thin things or design aberrations like trash can mac. I'm paying for that after…

You don't care about design, size, or noise, you want something cheap, you want repairability, you don't like the designs Apple favours like thinness and the Pro design, you aren't into macOS…

Why do you want a Hackintosh? It sounds like you want the exact opposite of a Mac.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#80

Post by xenihn »

markaius wrote: post #68

I purchased this ( https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Dell-In... ) laptop from the Microsoft store, paying right around ~$700 with a student discount. I bought an m.2 solid state and a wifi adapter that is known to work well with hackintosh's (the stock wifi card wasn't compatible), and another 8gb of ram for another ~$150. I followed this ( https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-dell-inspiron-15-…

Thanks for the post, do you know what other 4k laptops are currently a popular choice for hackintoshing?
Post reply on HN