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Hackintosh is almost dead

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Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#261

Post by blfr »

rpdillon wrote: post #169
bruce511 wrote: post #13

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…

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around yo…

I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't randomly pop up.

Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that.

Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#262

Post by greedo »

bluescrn wrote: post #195
duskwuff wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entry-level price for a new Mac, right now, is $700 (M1 Macbook Air at Walmart). It doesn't get you the best or the fastest, but it's a perfectly usable laptop. Or, if you're okay with something lightly used, a refurbished M1 Mac Mini is ~$500.

But Apple's entry-level Macbooks aren't intended to be bought. They have almost comically low amounts of storage and RAM for 2024 (8GB/256GB). It's all about the upsell on those non-upgradeable parts.

The M1 MBA being sold by Best Buy and Walmart are perfectly fine for 99% of the computing world. Maybe not for gamers (most laptops suck for this), or for someone needing to crunch large datasets, but when this first came out, tons of developers were perfectly happy using it, even with small storage. Hell, my iMac I used up until buying a Mac Studio only had 256GB.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#263

Post by jstummbillig »

rpdillon wrote: post #169
bruce511 wrote: post #13

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…

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around yo…

> the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless

You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise).

> But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car

Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#264

Post by dataflow »

Gracana wrote: post #222
rpdillon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around yo…

I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.

> I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out.

The problem with this approach is then you get a generation of engineers with tunnel vision thinking the One True Way to achieve your goal is the same way your GNU (or whatever) software did it.

Invest time in learning your technologies, whatever they are. There's valuable knowledge in proprietary stuff just as there is in OSS.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#265

Post by nerdawson »

izacus wrote: post #257
nerdawson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppleCare+ on the $2k 14" MBP is $279 or +14% for 3 years of coverage. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

So now you made it a 2.3k$ MBP didn't you? Funny how the 999$ MacBooks tend to explode in price when you configure them to make them useful.

Correct. It’s an insurance product.

Whether you take it is all about your risk tolerance and in no way impacts the usefulness of the machine.

I believe 14% is worth it.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#266

Post by lanstin »

fsflover wrote: post #227
audunw wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument doesn’t sound very convincing to me. How would I know an avoiding Ubuntu is reasonable? That still seems to be the go-to distro for many people I know that like to use Linux but aren’t Linux experts. How do I know which hardware is natively supported? With Windows 10/11 I’ve never had any problems, either with pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smoot…

> How do I know which hardware is natively supported? You buy preinstalled. Works for me.

Yeah preinstalled. And I never had issues with Ubuntu breaking in ways like arch or gentoo. Breaking includes trying to install some new thing or uograde and having random other stuff have to be googled.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#267

Post by raydev »

izacus wrote: post #257
nerdawson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppleCare+ on the $2k 14" MBP is $279 or +14% for 3 years of coverage. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

So now you made it a 2.3k$ MBP didn't you? Funny how the 999$ MacBooks tend to explode in price when you configure them to make them useful.

I don't understand how this relates to paid warranty or insurance. Your TCO for a non-Apple laptop can also include a protection fee or cost to repair with no insurance.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#268

Post by raydev »

nullwarp wrote: post #91
peruvian wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.

Isn't that the truth. For a site with the word "hacker" in it there seem to be so few of them. I can't imagine letting all that curiosity die out of me like the parent comment implies. I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had more time I'd still do it. If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.

> If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.

I wonder how many others had this exact same thought, before they lost their "hacker" drive while also preferring to continue living.

This may shock you, but people's interests and desires can evolve over time, even when those people don't expect them to evolve.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#269

Post by xcv123 »

nirav72 wrote: post #260
xcv123 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things down. All of that is automated now. https://atlasos.net

yeah, I've used plenty of community made tools to de-bloat windows. But that's not the point. We shouldn't have to do that. Especially when its a paid windows license, I shouldn't have to spend time dealing with Microsoft's effort at further squeezing out more revenue from their OS platform.

It was even worse in the Win95/98 era. I remember reinstalling the entire network stack multiple times in one day just to get TCP/IP working. The operating system was an extremely broken piece of shit and wasted days of my life.

Shoulda this. Shoulda that. This is just the reality of Microsoft that we have to accept, and it will never change. There are tools to deal with it. So I use the tools and move on with my life.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#270

Post by johnklos »

Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance, "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL / Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for years.

> While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...]

Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;)

Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on ARM systems at some point.

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