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Building a Hackintosh Pro

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Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#131

Post by derefr »

valuearb wrote: post #56
CPLX wrote: 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.

And they clearly make substantial profits on the Mac line, so again why don't they just fucking do it?

My theory is that they strongly believe PCIe-over-Thunderbolt (now -over-USB-C) will obviate all need for internal expandibility/upgradability, and they went all-in on a form-factor (the garbage-can Mac) to take advantage of that... and then the market has stubbornly refused to co-operate by releasing Thunderbolt peripherals equivalent to internal components. So they're playing chicken with said market, probably under Intel's repeated promises to make it happen.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#132

Post by dom0 »

coldtea wrote: post #50
bitexploder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore? Size constraints I understand as I fly on airplanes a lot, but weight constraints can really be annoying. At least for higher end machines its okay for a lot of us to have an extra bit of weight for more features. It can be both.

> Yes, are technologists so effete that they can't handle a 5lb laptop anymore? Apparently they are. Just read this effete technologist's comment: I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. (...) I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A no…

> I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat.

Any reasonably well built desktop PC does that. It's a matter of applying a modest amount of care when selecting and assembling components.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#133

Post by haxxorfreak »

rsync wrote: post #112
jwr wrote: post #5

I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get really weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again... Unfortunately, the information is still very fragm…

"I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get really weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again..." As the owner of an early-2009 octo-mac-pro, I am…

I have the same Early 2009 octa-core model and have done a few upgrades here and there and I have to say I find the system nearly as responsive as the new 2016 MacBook Pro I use at work.

The first thing I added was a CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 SATA3/USB3 card. This gives you two internal SATA3 connectors (bootable) which I'm using for my macOS boot SSD. It also has two eSATA ports and 2x USB 3.0 ports and only takes up a single PCIe slot. They've since come out with a new card that adds a USB 3.1 Type-C port. No drivers needed, it "just works".

Next was a NVIDIA GTX 970 card, this works perfectly in 10.11/10.12 once you've used the GT120 card to install the NVIDIA Web Drivers. You don't get the boot screen unless you get the card ROM flashed by macvidcards.com ($$) but I haven't found this to inconvenient as I have left the GT120 in a spare PCIe slot so if I need to use the boot selector for some reason I can just swap the mini-DisplayPort cable over. You can go up to a GTX 980 Ti but you're limited to Maxwell cards as NVIDIA hasn't released macOS drivers for Pascal.

Finally I picked up 64GB of DDR3 1333 MHz ECC RAM on eBay that was pulled from server for under $200, this was mainly to fulfill my dreams of being able to say I have 64GB of RAM but I run a lot of VMs for network simulations and it really helps to have the extra memory.

I've also flashed the SMC so the machine thinks it's a MacPro5,1 of the 2010+ generation, you'll need to do this if you want to upgrade the CPUs (I haven't yet) but has the added benefit of letting 10.12 install without any hacks or modifications to the OS. If you're on 10.11 now you'll have to disable SIP temporarily to run the firmware update but it was otherwise quick and painless, this is the best place I found with clear instructions: http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.0.html

All in all this is the best Mac I've ever owned and it amazes me it works as well as it does being almost 8 years old now.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#134

Post by rsync »

haxxorfreak wrote: post #133
rsync wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I used to use a Hackintosh. It was a time-consuming thing, I feared OS updates, and I could never be sure about the reliability (you can get really weird problems sometimes. I then switched over to a Mac Pro (cheese grater) and was very happy with it. Unfortunately, since the trash can Mac Pro I'm left out in the cold, so I'm considering running a Hackintosh again..." As the owner of an early-2009 octo-mac-pro, I am…

I have the same Early 2009 octa-core model and have done a few upgrades here and there and I have to say I find the system nearly as responsive as the new 2016 MacBook Pro I use at work. The first thing I added was a CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 SATA3/USB3 card. This gives you two internal SATA3 connectors (bootable) which I'm using for my macOS boot SSD. It also has two eSATA ports and 2x USB 3.0 ports and only takes up a si…

Great - many thanks - this is very helpful.

"Next was a NVIDIA GTX 970 card"

How many PCI slots does that card take up ? I currently drive four monitors with my mac pro and the single slot aspect of the gt120s makes that easy ...

"All in all this is the best Mac I've ever owned and it amazes me it works as well as it does being almost 8 years old now."

I know, right ? I regularly have 20+ chrome tabs open along with 1-2 VMs running in vmware fusion and I have never once felt like the system was slow. My only issue is that I have only ever run snow leopard on it and now chrome no longer has updates, so I need to move to ... mavericks maybe ? I feel like mavericks is the most stable/sane OSX release since SL ...

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#135

Post by derefr »

nottorp wrote: post #110
Razengan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple doesn't have anything for power users or developers right now. I'm a power user and a developer and I find the 2016 MBPs to be the best laptops around. My only misgiving was the hefty price. The only "dongle" I needed was a single USB/USB-C adapter but I really don't have to use it most of the time; everything I have — phone, tablet, portable hard disk — works wirelessly. The battery time (I think you mistype…

First, you're defending the laptop, not the desktops. The laptops are still almost okay. Now for some point answers... > The battery time (I think you mistyped "life time") estimation was dumb, never accurate or consistent, and people don't mind the lack of it on billions of other mobile devices anyway. It was accurate as long as you kept doing the same task . For example, I knew how much longer a gaming session or a…

Don't think of the touchbar as a keyboard-shortcut bar at all; the F-keys have basically been "killed", not changed. They're gone like FireWire. The new thing that is there displaced them, rather than being an upgrade to them; it just emulates them as a sop for the few people who might need them, while app developers take the hint and remove F-key bindings from their apps.

The touchbar is really there to be a little touchable display, like an iPad, or the bottom screen of a Nintendo DS. It's for virtual knobs, rather than virtual keys: it makes perfect sense once you use it to scrub or drag-select in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. It's basically a shrunk-down embedded platform for those "live controller" iPad apps (DJay Pro; that thing Bret Victor built in the dead fish video; etc.) to run on.

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#136

Post by nottorp »

Razengan wrote: post #128
nottorp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another one that defends the laptops when the original article is about a Mac Pro replacement :) > Can display at-a-glance status such as time, battery etc. You look at the keyboard when you type? Not my demographic then, i type too much for that. It's probably fine for you. > All of the over-a-dozen developers/tech-oriented people that -I- know prefer the 2016 MBPs to everything else. They've also outsold all other…

> 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 work from home in a quiet room. Part 1 disqualifies the emoji keyboard, part 2 disqualifies anything with laptop-like internals, namely the laptops and the iMacs. I hope that's enough qualifiers :)

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#137

Post by mark_elf »

There are some comments here as to motivation: why go through all this? I make video money using after effects, mainly. I'm chained to the oars. The choice of intermediate codec (ProRes) is surprisingly important, there are other solutions that don't make it for my workflow. And it's not just codec, lots of things about windows 10 make it an unprofessional choice. I was planning to build a windows box anyway, with i7 6900K, 128GB ram, ASRock X99 Taichi, GTX 1080, NVMe, all that. When I overlaid that over a hackintosh, it seemed a bit past what is possible, at least from a cursory look at tonymacx86. It's worth a week of work to me, maybe I'll look harder. Thanks for listening!

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#138

Post by Klover »

wmf wrote: post #97
matt4077 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite easy to do now, but the community is incredibly annoying. The software is usually on sourceforge or something even shadier, it's rarely actually OSS-licensed, and configuration/documentation/interfaces are a nightmare of incomprehensible incoherence. There cannot be a software community less professional. I've seen Minecraft plugins by 8 year olds much better in these categories.

Android ROMs are the same way. Maybe something about the semi-illegality of it brings out the old DOS scene culture.

There's no reason to say an Android ROM is illegal. Or whatever semi-illegal might be. Maybe it's like semi-falling-off-a-cliff? Semi-hit-by-a-train? I don't mean to mock.

I always guessed Android ROMs were such a misery in the community aspect, because they're very easy and relatively useless. All you need is a computer, which is easy enough, then some open and free software, and you're ready to go and compile your own ROM. The source code is often available, and you can change a color here and there and maybe change some of the Linux kernel parameters so you can say it's for better battery life, or more free RAM if you're into that.

That's the easy part. Now the relatively useless part: phones don't last long. Someone who is keen on tweaking their phone will probably be looking for a new one every year, or every other year. At best they last about three years. The changes to the software is minimal at best, and every custom ROM is practically the same. There is no marketability in these ROMs. There's not millions of dollars of potential revenue to be gotten out of a server that has to run with 20 years of uptime, that a company can jump into and support, like you can see with other uses of Linux. Red Hat supports for like 10 years? Android devices get discarded in two. Therefore there is little professional attention to third party, open source distributions of Android.

Google develops it, companies alter it a little bit, then ship it. Hobbyists from all around the world take the open source aspects of this and maybe add some new stuff here and there. There's no need to expect professionalism from hobbyists.

(I find CyanogenMod, or LineageOS or something now, to be pleasant to use on a phone. It gives the option to run apps as root, and it comes with a terminal, and it tries to remain as open as it can.)

Re: Building a Hackintosh Pro

#140

Post by Nexxxeh »

lisper wrote: post #84
nateberkopec wrote: post #28

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…

I think Macs "just working" has always been a myth. Ask anyone who gets paid to fix Macs.

Sure, I see less of them, but hardly unexpected considering people buy fewer of them (and they're less targetted by malware).

On the other hand, I hate dealing with them because they can suffer from the same "it should work but doesn't" crap that Windows machines do but without the critical mass of support via Google.

And unless you get your issue escalated, the Apple Geniuses are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

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