Modern 'Hackintoshes' Show That Apple Should Probably Just Build a Mac Tower (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Andrew Cunningham via Ars Technica: Apple is working on new desktop Macs, including a ground-up redesign of the tiny-but-controversial 2013 Mac Pro. We're also due for some new iMacs, which Apple says will include some features that will make less-demanding pro users happy. But we don't know when they're coming, and the Mac Pro in particular is going to take at least a year to get here. Apple's reassurances are nice, but it's a small comfort to anyone who wants high-end processing power in a Mac right now. Apple hasn't put out a new desktop since it refreshed the iMacs in October of 2015, and the older, slower components in these computers keeps Apple out of new high-end fields like VR. This is a problem for people who prefer or need macOS, since Apple's operating system is only really designed to work on Apple's hardware. But for the truly adventurous and desperate, there's another place to turn: fake Macs built with standard PC components, popularly known as "Hackintoshes." They've been around for a long time, but the state of Apple's desktop lineup is making them feel newly relevant these days. So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used -- and what they'd like to see from Apple.

Comments

Why a Hackintosh?

[kaka.mala.vachva]

For Hackintoshes to become popular, presumably, there is some software on a Mac that isn't available elsewhere. What is driving the Hackintosh need? Personally (note the qualifier), I totally fail to see the need for a Hackintosh - I think all operating systems are fairly advanced and usable now, and it doesn't take long to be proficient in Linux or Windows (or FreeBSD or whatever). Why push a path that isn't supported by Apple? Just use Linux (or Windows) instead - whatever alternate platform your preferred tools work on.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's called OS X.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[GuB-42]

Final Cut Pro is Mac-only. There are probably other examples.
Artists in particular tend do like OSX and a Hackintosh is an interesting option if they need a powerful machine.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[guises]

Well, for starters, iOS development requires MacOS. Other things which Apple does tend to tie into MacOS as well - you can use iTunes in Windows, and technically you can make a couple versions of it work in Linux (sorta), but it only works well in MacOS. Just don't use iTunes, you say? That's fine as long as you don't need to "activate" an iPhone. Etc.

Obviously, given this bullshit, it would be best to steer clear of Apple products all together, but some of us need to make money.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[rs1n]

For Hackintoshes to become popular, presumably, there is some software on a Mac that isn't available elsewhere. What is driving the Hackintosh need? Personally (note the qualifier), I totally fail to see the need for a Hackintosh - I think all operating systems are fairly advanced and usable now, and it doesn't take long to be proficient in Linux or Windows (or FreeBSD or whatever). Why push a path that isn't supported by Apple? Just use Linux (or Windows) instead - whatever alternate platform your preferred tools work on.

Final Cut is exclusive to Mac OS. A lot of folks who work with audio and visual media will likely find Final Cut useful and perhaps necessary.

But beyond that, because is is much more "closed", has a much more uniform interface. Look at the hodge-podge of different widgets for a Linux desktop system. And on Windows, it's the same -- even the interfaces aren't uniform between different MS products, let alone between different vendors.

My own personal preference is that it has a nice UI and was built on top of *nix. As someone who used to be a die-hard Linux fan, OS X has become a preferred operating system for reasons above.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[DRJlaw]

I totally fail to see the need for a Hackintosh.... Just use Linux (or Windows) instead - whatever alternate platform your preferred tools work on.

There's a horde of video production people out there who prefer OS X for tools such an Final Cut or Adobe Creative Suite.

Why push a path that isn't supported by Apple?

Because the path is supported by Apple, just very poorly. It's one method of protesting for better support.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[PhunkySchtuff]

It's familiarity with the platform that is the #1 driver.

I've been using a Mac since the 90's, it took me a while to become as proficient with Mac OS X as I was with Classic MacOS when it first came out, by now I've been using the OS for so long that there are a multitude of tiny things that all add up to make a significant difference.

I'm sitting at my desk here - I have a 2013 Mac pro and a newly built PC with i7 7700K, fast SSD, Decent GeForce graphics card and Windows 10 Enterprise.

I have been forcing myself to use the PC on a regular basis to become more proficient with Windows 10, but there are so many little things that are just different that it makes life harder for me. It's not even application support, other than Sketch (which I don't really use) all the major software I use is on Windows and macOS - Office 2016, Adobe Creative Cloud, Fusion 360, TeamViewer, Sublime Text, Chrome, Firefox etc... I've even got a bash shell running natively in Windows 10 for when I need it.

I won't deny that I find the Mac easier because that's what I know - but I have grown to work with what macOS delivers and when Windows doesn't do this, it grates.

Little things like automatic spelling and text replacement that on macOS largely gets it right. I'm not a perfect typer and macOS usually doesn't get in my way (except, of course, when it does) when correcting mis-typed words as I'm typing. Support for adding extended characters and emoji easily to text. Built-in password management with the Keychain.

Even some of the built-in apps - I much prefer Terminal.app over cmd.exe by defaults it uses a more readable font and it wraps text nicely (although I think Windows 10 now wraps text in cmd?)

It's also the general look of it - Windows 10 looks sharper (largely due to it's font rendering trying to align on pixel boundaries) whereas macOS is a bit softer, but to my eyes at least, easier to read (again, probably due to font rendering not aligning to pixel boundaries for individual glyphs, but trying to space characters more closely to the printed page)

I've begun the path to a hackintosh, but honestly it's too much trouble considering I've got a perfectly good Mac sitting on my desk at the moment.

The main driver for hacintosh builds that I see are either creative professionals that want to tinker and don't mind wasting some time faffing around trying to get things working and are happy that they can save some money over the cost of purchasing a comparable Mac (when you factor in your time to get it working, this equation doesn't look so one-sided) and professionals that need more than Apple is able to offer - current generation, fast NVIDIA GPUs (for CUDA), expandable internal storage and RAID, lower-cost M.2 PCIe SSD storage. Whilst some pros are getting last-generation tower Mac Pro workstations and upgrading everything in them (faster Xeon CPUs, PCIe SSDs, GTX 1080 graphics cards etc), others prefer to deal with newer hardware and work though the hassles of hacking it to run macOS.

Re:Why a Hackintosh?

[brantondaveperson]

It does, but it's still a long way from quicklook - With quicklook you just push 'space' and preview your document, complete with a little 'send to' button, a fullscreen option, and an 'open in....' thingy too. With the preview pane, you click to turn it on/off, and it's limited to the right hand side of the window, and so you end up resizing it all the time. You have to remember to turn it off, or you end up previewing everything you click on, which you don't normally want to do.

It's another example of a feature being more or less present in both OS's, but being basically just a pain in Windows.

What they'd like to see

[farble1670]

So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used -- and what they'd like to see from Apple.

2TB NVME m.2 boot drive (+2x NVME m.2 slots)
Intel Core i7 6950X overclockable liquid cooled
2x NVidia Titan X
4x empty drive bays for expansion
8x PCIE 16x slots
Subwoofer built into case
RGB lighting
-------
$900

Re:What they'd like to see

[by (1706743)]

I think it's safe to say OP exhibited a humorous and very intentional disconnect from reality...

Rubbish

[sit1963nz]

If the small (yes small) number of people who use Mackintoshes proves that Apple should build Towers, then the small (yes small) number of Windows Phone users proves we should all be using Windows phones. Stop believing that YOUR needs/wants = the majority, they aren't.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

This says nothing about what people "should be using".
This is about what Apple should be providing to the people who would prefer to be using MacOS X (whatever number of people that is).

Reading comprehension - give it a try.

Re:Rubbish

[StikyPad]

You don't have to "make full use of" something for it to be worthwhile. My car is parked for 95% of the day.

Built One Was a Hassle

[Anonymous Coward]

Built a powerful hackintosh a few years ago. Gathered all the parts from tonyosx86.com (or something like that) and kludged my way through an install of OSX. Every update required more hacking to keep the thing going. I eventually gave up and went back to Windows (10).

All in all it was more of a pain in the ass to keep this thing running with sub optimal driver support, more tricking of the boot loader, and staying behind the time for patching that drove me away from bothering again. Apple will never build a desktop for the masses outside of their Mini line (which works well for desktop work). People who want to game on Mac's go get a MacBook Pro. Getting one of those trashcan towers is ludicrous.

Re:Built One Was a Hassle

[omnichad]

It's better now. Get a good EFI bootloader (Clover) going and you can run the Apple updates directly - all the major differences between your hardware and the Mac hardware are abstracted away by the bootloader. You have to do major release upgrades by building a thumb drive with some extra tools, but otherwise it just works. That is, at least if you're buying hardware that already has OS support.

There is Mac only software that people need

[SuperKendall]

To start with of course, all of the MANY developers for iOS need to use Xcode, and that is absolutely Mac only - not to mention a huge base of people who want compiles to be as fast as possible.

Also some software that has become very popular with designers is Sketch, which is Mac only.

But on top of that, even if you are using something like Photoshop which is cross platform, you may well just prefer how OS X works over Windows.

Obviously Linux is simply a non-starter for any people that need a professional platform that is not primarily for development...

Re: There is Mac only software that people need

[SuperKendall]

OSX is a terrible interface, riddled with plenty of gotcha's that just frustrate the user eventually. Maybe its better now, but I used it back in 2008 or so.

That was a quite a while ago - who gotchas? I've not really found any, and I came more from a UNIX than a Windows world.

I've only ever owned one Mac, and I installed Gentoo on it after about a month,

Why do that when you could just use the BSD tools that come with it along with an X-Windows server?

Even if I could use OSX in the same way (in a VM)

You can.

while theoretically possible, it's very slow.

Why? The whole point of the VM is they are not slow.

Re: There is Mac only software that people need

[TheRaven64]

OSX is a terrible interface, riddled with plenty of gotcha's that just frustrate the user eventually. Maybe its better now, but I used it back in 2008 or so.

Care to expand on that? A few counter examples:

The buttons in dialog boxes are all the correct way around. The 'proceed' item is on the right, the 'back' equivalent is on the left[1]. In contrast, Windows has them the wrong way around and Linux DEs have them inconsistently ordered (which is even worse: at least with Windows you eventually get used to the counterintuitive behaviour).

Dialog box buttons are all labelled with verbs. For example 'print' or 'download' not 'okay' for the forward action. If a app has unsaved data that will be lost on exit (rare now), the dialog on attempting to close will say 'cancel' (shortcut: escape), 'exit without saving', 'save' (default). Research has shown that most users don't read the dialog box text, just the button text.

Most apps now support sudden termination, so you can kill -9 an app and have it restart without losing any data (this is used with the OOM behaviour - apps that opt into this will be killed. The window server keeps a copy of their window content and when you switch back to them they're restarted. The user doesn't notice this, they just notice that they're swapping less. Oh, and it also helps defragment the heap). This means that accidentally exiting an app is unlikely to result in data loss.

The default is 'ask forgiveness, not permission'. Only dangerous actions prompt the user to confirm, the rest are all expected to support undo (and NSUndoManager is sufficiently easy to use that most third-party apps do as well). This includes settings changes and so on: they're applied immediately and support undo, rather than teaching the user to always hit 'okay' to every dialog that pops up will changing settings.

The menu bar is at the top of the screen, where it gets a Fitts' Law bonus for hitting it. In contrast, Windows not only puts it in the window but also hides it unless you hit alt, so you need to press a key then move the mouse to a small target.

All menu items (including submenus) are searchable. Type a word into the text field in the help menu and it will find help items[2] that match the term, but also menu items, so you can always find the relevant menu item even from a deeply nested menu in a few keystrokes.

All common actions in all applications have keyboard shortcuts and these are consistent.

Command-space brings up the Spotlight search box, which searches into items and also includes plugins for quickly viewing many kinds of document (e.g. searching for a person's name will show their address book entry in the pop-up, searching for an arithmetic expression will show the result and let you either open it in the calculator or copy the result). Most document-driven applications ship with Spotlight and QuickView plugins to support this.

[1] Actually, I think they're the wrong way around in right-to-left reading order locales, because older research indicated that this preference for rightwards meaning forwards was dependent on reading order. More recent research indicates that it's universal.

[2] And man pages in the Terminal app.

Re:Pro = expandable

[ewhac]

You say "cheese grater" semi-sarcastically, but I rather liked that box. It was very well designed, solid, easy to get in to, and plenty of expansion. Its only real drawback was that it was heavy.

Hey, Apple! If you're really interested in maintaining control of the HW design -- and I mean in a meaningful way, not the cheeseball gee-whiz pretentious way where indicator LEDs are entirely absent because they disrupt the "line" of the machine -- then may I suggest you start selling... Motherboards. Yes, design a motherboard you're happy with, then stick it in an anti-static bag alongside an OS X DVD. The owner can then add their preferred CPU, RAM (quad-channel DDR4, natch), and GPU, and put the whole thing in a case that meets their needs. Hell, you'll probably be able to squeeze even higher margins out of the thing, since you won't have to design or build custom casework, which can get kinda spendy.

Re:Pro = expandable

[Dogtanian]

You say "cheese grater" semi-sarcastically

Damn right- have you ever tried grating cheese with one? They're completely useless.

Re:I pulled all that shit out ...

[bill_mcgonigle]

... from a law firm back in 2000.

When I hired on there, users showed me that it took 5 full goddam minutes to pull up a document and print it.

I spent about $100,000 replacing all that shit with a Windows NT server, 45 Compaq Pentiums with Windows 98 and a shitload of HP printers.

Were these Mac Pluses on PhoneNET LocalTalk (a matter of hardware generations?) Did you have the skills to run a Mac network?

The PowerMac G4/400 was the first to have gigabit on the motherboard that year, so probably everything installed was 10/100. Appleshare/IP 6 was slightly slower than Netatalk but either could fill a print spooler at near wire speed and I doubt a law firm was generating gigabyte print jobs such that 100Mbps would be a problem.

If your printers were Old AF and had puny rendering engines that really has nothing to do with the client or spooler.

n.b. I ran Apple, NT4, Novell, and Unix networks at that time. None of the users were tolerant of slowness.

Re:Pro = expandable

[phantomfive]

That led me to this ad. It reminds me of a time (up until around OSX 10.6) when every single release was faster, more efficient, and clearly an improvement over the previous system.

That is no longer true.

Too Little Too Late?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

I went Mac-exclusive in 2001 and stopped buying Apple products entirely in 2014. No Apple laptop made since my 17" 2010 MacBook Pro is as durable or expandable. No Apple desktop holds as much storage as my 2010 Mac Pro, and iPhones are no fun to use if I have to run iTunes on Windows. I've made peace with the notion that Apple makes more money selling gateways to their 30%-commissioned walled garden than they do by selling tools to people who write code and run lots of virtual machines. Rather than selling me a $3000 machine every other year, they passively collect constant income from easily-distracted end-users. Even if the numbers didn't make sense, the reduced level of effort certainly does. See also: Valve and why Half Life 3 is vaporware.

In the time since it became really clear that Apple didn't want to chase the business of people like me, I've switched away from software that's OS X-specific. I built a CentOS desktop and a Windows 10 desktop to see which one I'd run next. Either is fine. I'd prefer FreeBSD, but graphics and power management are a little behind the curve.

You see, Apple's disdain for pro customers isn't new, and it comes in long stretches. When they had the educational market in the US sewn up, they didn't need professional users. When that dried up, they successfully sold GUI Unix to hackers. If they need us, they know how to get in touch, but until they need us, they won't.

That said, I do love my last two Macs. They mostly Just Work. They're not fast anymore (8 years of software bloat will do that), but they're acceptable. I lament that they won't be replaced by other Macs, but life goes on. In the interim, I have work to do that I can't do efficiently on a single-disk/single-screen machine or a tiny notebook with soldered-in storage.

Re:I pulled all that shit out ...

[Gr8Apes]

So the short answer is: "Instead of figuring out what the problem was, I got to spend $100K of someone else's money to play the to toys *I* wanted".

MS sucked big time in 2000. You couldn't reliably format a printed job, something that I'd think a law firm would have found a necessity. Nothing like Joe printing something on Printer A, and Jane printing the same doc on printer B, and then referencing something on page 221 second paragraph... wait... what?

And no, there were no solutions for that other than to run non MS software.

Re:Hackinmoshes are HIGHLY ILLEGAL

[chipschap]

legal is a binary property. Something cannot be highly illegal. It's just legal or illegal.

Wrong, it can also be "undocumented."

Re:I pulled all that shit out ...

[mjpaci]

Is that legacy app a command and control server for a bot net?