1. I’d wait for the new keyboards first. The Airs and 13-inch Pros still have the faulty ones.

2. I’d get a low-spec MBP13 or MBP14, whatever comes out next.

The keyboard is a fair point. I had mistakenly assumed they fixed them with the recent update but there they are on the list of models with free keyboard replacements.

As for 2, I already have an MBP13 2017 and I want something even more portable. That was why I was interested to hear people’s experiences programming with it’s lower spec CPU.

I haven't used an Air for development, but I do know that its power supply is 30w instead of the MBP's 100w. That's a big difference. Beyond the CPU's official specs, I'd bet some throttling happens there.

That said, I recently upgraded to a new MBP because my 2013 MBP had gotten really laggy for certain things, particularly the web (and the inspector, etc.). This was weird, because on pure-compute tasks it still did pretty okay. But basic sites like Twitter were visibly laggy, and the Chrome debugger was like mud.

I did some research and ended up concluding that it came down to the integrated GPU. The processor itself was still significantly faster than a brand-new Air, based on benchmarks, but integrated GPUs have made huge strides in the past 5 years (and web pages have gotten significantly heavier) and I guess that has a more noticeable impact on basic tasks than the CPU does.

Anyway. If you're only doing the occasional, light web dev then I would guess you'll be fine. It'll be noticeably slower than your 2017 MBP, but probably still passable.

I paid around 1600 USD for everything. Counting the parts I reused from my old hackintosh, around 2000. A similarly specced Mac Pro 8-core is around 7200 USD.

thank you. A very useful contribution that neatly answers the question of why anyone would go through so much trouble. I would have guessed the difference in price was "only" a few hundred, and obviously would have been quite wrong! I never would have guessed 3.5 times!

In a way this isn’t a “similarly spaced Mac” though - it’s using Xeon CPUs, ECC RAM, server motherboard with 6 memory channels, professional GPU, etc.

The problem is if you want a Mac tower desktop they don’t offer anything with consumer components.

I had 5 or 6 screen replacements on mine. Most of my friends had this issue too.

Try a couple of thousand dollars. My build is 1K cheaper than a similarly specced Mini without an eGPU. A comparable Mac Pro (yes, Xeons and ECC) is 7.2K USD.

That just means your config wasn’t properly made to support your hardware. Mine was rock solid for 6 years.

Can you elabarote more on 'config' ? Especially if someone plans to follow your build and this will be first hackintosh. Any more links to hackintosh resources/community? (technical ones :)

Also: could you write which models of components you bought:

a. 580 gfx card ? /nitro? pulse? others :)/

b. in terms of 5700 youre planning to buy do you have exact model?

c. which exact memory (size of one) and 3600 was base or overclocked

Not true. I’ve had my 2014 hackintosh updated regularly without issues.

Screenshot shows 3 GBps for both read and write under Windows. Windows has 3.5/3.3.

Correct. Also for curiosity I did a test on my host and Mac VM. Program reported on both Windows and Mac VM same speed of ~500 MB/s (which translates into 4.8 Gbps for OP style). On Linux I got ~450 MB/s. I used Total Commander in all cases (my normal file manager) and used my Witcher 3 .iso file as test (66 GB in size).

> which translates into 4.8 Gbps for OP style

I think you are misreading/misunderstanding the performance of modern NVMe SSDs.

SATA based SSDs which it sounds like you have, top out at around 550MByte/sec.

However a PCIE 3.0 NVME can easily achieve 3500 MByte/sec throughput. That's saturating the PCIE 3.0 x4 link. PCIE 4.0 based SSDs are even faster, with advertised 5000MByte/sec throughput (but in testing may top out slightly slower than that)

Yes, modern SSDs are stupid fast.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/review/1893-pcie-4-vs-pcie-3-ssd/

Aye, it's SATA. PC is from 2013, old badly, planning this year to make a new one. But it covered me in past 7 years quite nicely. I made a quick math with my wife when she complained why I need a new one since this one is still good. Calculated that in past 7 years she paid 20% more in her cell phone subscription then me in buying/upgrading the PC all these years. And it was the work horse with at least 10 hours daily running, average of 16 and plenty of times stayed on for days.

See one my of other comments please.

Dual boot. Two SSDSs.

You don’t need to. If anything fails you just install a new part 1 hour later instead of waiting a week for Apple’s support to sort it out.

Not really. The biggest point of failure will be the drives and they’re universal. The only truly Mac-specific part is the motherboard and there’s plenty to choose from.

There is no Mac that supports my needs, used or new.

Video cards as well; anything newer than High Sierra only supports AMD cards.

I'm genuinely curious -- what needs do you have that a used Mac would not support?