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Hackintosh is almost dead

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Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#351

Post by philistine »

jupp0r wrote: post #215
mid-kid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Custom drivers trip some security features and "taint" the kernel.

How does that impact iMessage? Are parts of it implemented in the kernel?

I'm not a specialist, but there's a chain of trust you need to maintain to have the full set of features. If it's ever broken, you're sent to the gulag. I broke the chain when reinstalling like an old-timer on my M1 Macbook Air and was then forced to enter my password twice to unlock the Mac.

I had to reflash with a second Mac to restore the chain.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#352

Post by jwells89 »

endymi0n wrote: post #302
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…

Spot on for me, but there's a different argument at play: At the beginning of the OSX on x86 times, Apple had an OS with a stellar user experience, but the hardware was just completely overpriced, so Hackintosh made complete sense. Fast forward to today and I think Apple managed to pivot this almost to the complete opposite end. I think the hardware is incredible value (that's debatable for sure, but my M1 aluminum m…

Value was the driving factor for some of my early hackintoshing (Core 2 Duo era), but what pushed me to do it from 2015-2020 was the abysmal state of higher powered Mac hardware.

The Mac Pro was still the un-updated 2012 trash can, the 15” MBPs were too thin for the CPUs they housed (perhaps Intel’s fault for getting stuck on 14nm for so long, but still) and were hot with terrible battery life, and while the 27” iMacs weren’t terrible and probably the best of the lineup, they still weren’t cooled quite as well as they should’ve been. My 6700k + 980Ti tower in a Fractal Define case with a big quiet Noctua cooler was just flat better and made a far better Mac than anything Apple sold at the time.

That said, I did eventually grow tired of the tinkery-ness of it all and in 2020 picked up a refurbed base model iMac Pro, one of the few Macs in that timespan that wasn’t a mistake, for about half its MSRP. It was about as powerful as that tower, surprisingly even more quiet, and of course just worked without the tinkering.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#353

Post by lupire »

rpdillon wrote: post #223
Gracana wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a great point. I sort of detest becoming an expert at proprietary stuff, because I know they'll just change it before long. I've lamented about this elsewhere as modern software creating "permanent amateurs". Even those that want to invest in expertise often find their knowledge outdated in a handful of years, and those that don't want to invest can easily justify it by pointing out this effect.

Microsoft, at least before Cloud happened, supported their tech stacks with backward compatibility for decades.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#354

Post by dylan604 »

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…

This is a gross misunderstanding of the GP's point though. It's not that they are against doing any of these things. In fact, they said they were more than happy to do it in their youth. I am in full agreement with the GP's sentiment as well.

Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have.

But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it.

your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#355

Post by internet101010 »

shagie wrote: post #157
j33zusjuice wrote: post #92

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.

Buying a new MacBook Air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/13-inch-m2 $999.00 or $83.25/mo.per month for 12 mo. With a footnote: > Monthly pricing is available when you select Apple Card Monthly Installments (ACMI) as payment type at checkout at Apple, and is subject to credit approval and credit limit. Financing terms vary by product. Taxes and shipping are not included in ACMI and are subject to your c…

8gb model doesn't count as a usable computer. It's absurd that it is even being offered in 2024.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#356

Post by jwells89 »

shantara wrote: post #142
hparadiz wrote: post #28

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".

I started my developer career on Hackintoshes many years ago. No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop, it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest Xcode. Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over th…

The first hackintosh I built back around 2008 I was able to get working actually perfectly. Somehow the hardware and software bits all aligned and everything worked great. It’d run for months on end without issue.

Nothing since that one were quite as good. Had a Dell laptop for a while that was almost perfect, but would lock up and require a reboot once every couple of weeks. A tower I built in 2016 was also almost perfect, except I never could get USB working 100% right and later on the Nvidia drivers got flaky.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#357

Post by dylan604 »

afavour wrote: post #318
chasil wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter…

> This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps. I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to…

> Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly

to the point that I know people that still turn their computers off when they are not using them.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#358

Post by mrcsharp »

chasil wrote: post #292
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…

If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter…

Let's get this out of the way first: "the five 9's" is not a requirement for personal computers. That argument therefore is invalid.

But even then, Microsoft is testing "Hot Patching" windows installation so critical updates install without requiring a reboot [1].

When that comes out, I wonder where the goalposts will be?

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#359

Post by goosedragons »

shagie wrote: post #116
asdff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.

> I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a lot of utility in it that hasn't depreciated significantly in the 2 years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the role that…

There's still lots of utility in 9th gen intel PCs. And it's cheap to get extra utility. The resale value of the Mac mini is down to the brand cache and that there's not a glut of them on the secondhand market from businesses upgrading overtime.

You can also get PCs in a similar form factor to the Mac Mini but they still have RAM slots, M.2 slots and sometimes a 2.5" drive bay. You could get one that's powered off the USB C PD from the monitor requiring only a single cable and could be mounted on the back of the monitor (mount included!).

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#360

Post by Klonoar »

bmitc wrote: post #121
Klonoar wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 str…

> 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".

Because even being partly Unix (or technically, full Unix) is easier to deal with than Windows entirely different stack. ;P

> 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.

No? Homebrew was just the creation of someone who didn't like the way MacPorts did it back in the day. MacPorts is literally the FreeBSD ports tree cloned to work on macOS, and back in the day was partly funded by Apple.

(MacPorts arguably worked around the macOS-isms better than Homebrew does, but people chased Homebrew and here we are.)

> Usually, the trouble is that Apple has made some asinine decision with the default tooling installed or some other strange limitation.

Unless you can actually note one of those choices or limitations, this isn't much of a point.

> 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.

PowerPC to Intel to Arm happened over the space of multiple decades, and "Cocoa to Metal" doesn't even make sense in the context of tech stacks.

Your entire comment is just complaining because an alternative solution doesn't fit your built-in mental model of how things should work.

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