Live data from Hacker News

Hackintosh is almost dead

aplus.rs

121–130 of 543 posts

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#121
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL. Go ahead and try to…

So what re: workarounds? It’s not Linux, it will never be Linux. Systems are allowed to be different and do different things.

Well that's fine, but Windows isn't Linux but everybody treats it like such, hating on it for not being Linux while people often praise macOS for being "Unix". For macOS, it doesn't have the installer system that Windows has, so solutions like Homebrew are created to try and graft Linux things on it. Usually, the trouble is that Apple has made some asinine decision with the default tooling installed or some other strange limitation.

And because Apple is constantly breaking software, it creates a lot of churn on macOS. From PowerPC to Intel to Arm, from ObjectiveC to Swift, from Cocoa to Metal, etc., they're constantly upheaving the ecosystem and OS. Meanwhile, it provides very little to the end user other than normally increasing the size of Apple's walled garden.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#122

I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me. Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)

It is a bit funny, the hacker energy once was there for running OSX on anything, now it is there for running anything else on M1, haha.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#123

I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me. Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)

I’m fairly unaware of the current state of Linux on Apple M hardware, but I’d want a Linux partition on Apple hardware more than a Mac partition on x86. These days I have two devices though.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#124
post #67
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games (for now).

Sure, nothing beats bootcamp but that is not strictly macos. Apple's GPTK released last year seems to have greatly advanced gaming compatibility. Probably lots of games still don't work but it looks promising and is getting better. Hope Apple can continue to put resources into that.

I do hope that they would steer some of their resources from Apple Arcade into cross platform porting toolkits.

I think the fundamental problem still remains that games unlike softwares are media and cannot be substituted with equivalents. By pushing their proprietary tech and neglecting native macOS ecosystem over the years, Apple has willingly pushed themselves in to the same corner as with console makers where they cannot compete with the value proposition of PC because of the overwhelming majority of exclusive titles that only run on PC. It's either all or nothing in terms of game coverage, because that's what ultimately allows consumers to "buy one device for (mostly) everything" for a hobby that takes significant upfront investment unlike netflix and hulu for example.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just works".

Cost of ownership of an M3 MacBook Pro is like $300-400 a year. Even if you have the time, it's just not worth it anymore like it used to be.

I assume people would do this to get a powerful machine and not comparable with one of the cheaper Macbooks?

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#126
post #35

Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm still surprised this requires special interaction with the hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.

> doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.

Why should it? Apple only supports their own hardware so the software should never run into this problem.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#127
I feel like hackintosh virtualization is a better investment of time. Currently it's onerous to run Apple OSes on anything but Apple hardware. Being able to spin up a hackintosh VM in any cloud provider would be pretty sweet. Of course that probably violates Apple OS terms of use so not sure if AWS would shut you down if they discovered people were doing that.

But actually, as others have pointed out, I'm much more interested in Linux running on M chips than Mac OS running on non Apple hardware. There's nothing particularly compelling about Apple's OSes (except maybe their new VR sorry I mean "spacial computing" OS)

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#128
post #8

I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now. Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around. Now if we…

What’s wrong with the web. You just use chrome or safari and everything just works.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#129

Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using. Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work. Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was f…

I don't understand. Do you imagine there isn't a young generation of time rich cash poor tinkerers now? Why would the idea of a hackintosh suddenly become obsolete because you can afford one now and don't have time? Nothing about your statement logically follows.

I guess the commercial success of the platform has increased the offering in the second hand market.

Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the purchase of a mac.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems reasonable when you consider TCO, but you still have to pay 100% up front. Not everyone can drop $2k on a laptop, most people don’t need to.

They have lots of monthly payment plan options here in Canada, and probably in the US too. It even used to be zero interest. Not sure about the rest of the world.

Apple Card offer this in the US, but you have to get the card. I buy all my Apple gear this way. 0% loans are great.
Post reply on HN