I do this kind of browsing on Wikipedia, but totally random is kind of fun. I spotted a character encoding error, visible on Bangladesh, I think UTF-8 may be being interpreted as Latin-1? "Chicken’s Neck"
I set up my first Hackintosh in 2011 while on Spring Break in High School.
It was the most difficult computing project I'd ever done up until that point--partly because it was legitimately more difficult back then, partly because I was using a pre-built Dell instead of a custom machine with parts targeting Hackintosh, and also probably because I was a stupid teenager who didn't know what he was doing.
But once I was done, it was absolutely stable. Everything worked[1]. I installed every point release update[2] through the normal software updater without problems. This was actually my first experience with OS X, and I completely fell in love with the platform.
Many people who haven't used Hackintosh seem to assume it's an unstable mess, and it certainly can be a mess if you don't set it up correctly, or attempt to use not-quite-compatible hardware. But my experience has been that if and when you set it up properly, Hackintosh can be every bit as stable as a real Mac.
---
[1] Except for sleep. Getting sleep working on Hackintosh is very doable but usually annoying, and it's not needed on desktops.
[2] Ie 10.6.5 ==> 10.6.8. Upgrading Snow Leopard ==> Lion almost certainly would have failed had I tried it, although such upgrades are sometimes possible nowadays with Clover, and I assume OpenCore.
Thank you for this comment. I was looking for anything here that might be relevant to me, and it looks like we both had hackintosh builds at the same time / version of OS X. In fact, it was the Snow Leopard->Lion upgrade which turned me off from the whole scene. Great to know things have evolved beyond that in a positive way.
To be clear, whole version upgrades have still always been a crap-shoot for me (with Clover, haven't used OpenCore).
Total aside, I can't remember for sure if I ever upgraded my High School Hackintosh to Lion. I think what happened is I got it working, but decided I didn't like Lion as much, and restored an image of my SL install.
how about on laptops? not sleep itself but hackintoshing a laptop? i really want workspaces on whatever laptop i use but i don't want to pay through the nose for a macbook - i have a loner 2013 mbp right now and even those are still selling for like $800.
Fully working Hackintosh laptops are possible, but much harder. You can't mix and match parts for compatibility, and there's actually a lot of extra hardware that needs to work properly--e.g. you don't need a driver to change monitor brightness on desktops.
You need to make sure you get a laptop that other people have Hackintoshed successfully--and make sure you're clear on what exactly "success" meant for the other person. Does internal wifi work, or do you need to keep a USB dongle perpetually plugged in? Is the battery life terrible because OS X can't switch between the dedicated and integrated graphics? Etc etc.
I've never done it, although it's actually something I want to try in the near-ish future. I really want a tablet that can run OS X 10.9...
I did it with a Dell XPS 15 last summer and it was easier than installing Windows. Sleep worked fine, the wifi card was the only thing that had to be changed.
So this is a genuinely surprising attitude to me. You appreciate the software features and hardware stability of a platform, yet you do not want the creators to be paid for their work?
I mean, it must be obvious that doing these things well apparently costs tons of man-hours and someone needs to be compensated for it? How do you maintain that degree of cognitive dissonance?
I don't disagree with this sentiment, but Apple laptops can be limiting in a lot of ways:
* Want a keyboard with more travel? (Or, until recently, one that just won't break.) Too bad.
* Want USB A ports? Better track down a 2015 MBP.
* Want a touch screen? Go buy an iPad.
So, basically the same reasons you'd want to build a Hackintosh desktop.
Back when OS X releases were sold, though, I always made a point of buying and using a physical disc. I'm sure they weren't priced to truly cover development costs, but I felt like I was doing something.
Everybody has their pet peeves. Mine is upgradeability.
You can't get a Mac laptop where everything isn't soldered in.
You can't get a Mac desktop with built-in expansion options under $6k.
I don't begrudge Apple their design choices. I'm even willing to pay a substantial markup for their hardware. But deliberately crippling systems to prevent them from remaining useful over the long-haul is really unfortunate and wasteful.
Apple is a pile of cash that has a few developers on hire. Most of the developers who made the Mac really great left Apple years ago, and the Mac's been a third-class citizen at Apple for over half a decade. Some guy deciding not to pay for Mac OS, for whatever reason, isn't going to break the bank at Apple.
Apple could make nothing from the Mac and it'd still be more than worth it for them to continue maintaining it because of the benefits it brings to their mobile ecosystem.
> you do not want the creators to be paid for their work?
Er, no, likely more like "I have what hardware I have, and zero money to buy better. I would like to find the way to tune my existing hardware [e.g. by installing different operating systems] to give me the best possible experience that I can without putting any money into it, because I don't have any. When I have money, then I'll actually buy the thing I think is the best; but for now, a simulacra of it will have to suffice."
You know, the same reason college students pirate Photoshop instead of using GIMP.
It's a shame that they do not have a cheap baseline Mac anymore. When I was in college, I bought my first Mac (2007). I didn't have a lot of money, but I bought a Mac Mini for 499 Euro or thereabouts. It was also relatively cheap to upgrade memory afterwards. I actually bought the Mac Mini because my brother and I were experimenting with Hackintosh. It didn't work on my computer, but it did work (somewhat) on his Dell laptop and he was raving about it.
With the Macbook Air 2020, they finally have a laptop that I can recommend again and isn't much more expensive than the MacBook I bought later in 2007 (which was a base model white MacBook, just above 1000 Euro).
The new Mac mini is a decent machine too and while it’s not quite at 500€ it’s still relatively cheap.
I was considering buying that thing but before that decided to see if I could get macOS running on my old desktop, which turned out surprisingly well. Basically everything except sleep and WiFi works.
I’ve now ordered a compatible WiFi card (my dorm doesn’t have ethernet) off AliExpress for 50 dollars. That should be it for a usable Mac workstation. The Hackintosh experiment ended up saving me a few hundred euros.
1. apple is a hardware company not a software company. to wit: they do not sell mac os and if they did i might buy it.
2. i don't care a lick about any other features or "stability" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22845629). i simply said that i appreciated the workspaces feature. can i buy this feature ala carte? i would gladly. can i pay the devs that built it for their work? i would gladly.
3. i maintain my cognitive dissonance the same way you do when paying a 2x markup for commodity hardware.
edit: man every day i can't help but feel more and more that people in tech (at least as this site reflects) are some of the most self-righteous.
I'm with doteka on this. I think techie entitlement is a bigger problem than self-righteousness. As Kyle Mitchell (kemitchell on HN) put it recently in his essay "No Thanks" [1]:
> From outside software looking in, “software freedom” walks and talks a lot more like “coder entitlement” or “coder privilege”. In short, a hacker on a tear should never hear the word “no”. Not when breaking into offices to steal parts for a train set. Not when contending with a printer they didn’t develop or pay for. Not when building the next hot web or mobile app … again. Not when building a war cloud or optimizing a baby-photo reinforcement schedule for grandma.
Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?
And no, I've never done a hackintosh, either virtual or physical.
I read the full essay. I don't think his points are wrong, but I think his conclusion is. It's not that "techies" are entitled, just that most of the world isn't going to understand the benefits "software freedom". That doesn't mean they shouldn't care.
A few months ago, I read Cory Doctorow's short story "Unauthorized Bread"[1]. It's an exceptionally preachy story about a refugee in near-future America, but the point it gets across is this: closed computer systems are a tool for the powerful to control the powerless, and the consequences will be felt by both tech-enthusiasts and technophobes alike.
Personally, what I want is for more people to become adept at using their computers, so they become capable of taking advantage of open platforms, and with it, agency over their lives. That's one reason I was volunteering at Girls Who Code before the Coronavirus shut everything down. I don't necessarily expect all the 10 year olds I work with to grow up to become programmers, but if they're comfortable making quick edits to a python script in order to better accomplish a mundane task, that's a really powerful skill!
>Do we not realize how entitled and selfish we are?
jesus christ what are you talking about. i should feel morally obligated to a corporation? or maybe tim cook himself? this isn't a moral quandary or question and never will be. you people have deeply internalized a relationship to money and corporations that is perverse. like any good business person would say: it's not personal it's business - if they want to prevent me from using their software in a way that violates the EULA or whatever then cool they can try to stop me (note: they have in the past and will continue into the future and so the world will turn).
re those poor poor apple engineers: apple's market cap is 1.24T (that's a capital T for trillion). oh no will someone please think of them and their margins! i'm (100-epsilon)% sure that not a single apple engineer will ever suffer any hardship from a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of their customer/user base building hackintoshes.
But my question with piracy is always, where do you dry the line? Is pirating Photoshop okay? What about Affinity Photo? What about Omnigroup, which makes fantastic software, but also has to charge a lot of money for it, and was forced to do a round of layoffs recently?
What if the app is made by a single developer, but you don't like his or her politics? Or what if it's a single developer charging too much? How do you determine what "too much" is, and are you really able to be a fair judge, given that you have a personal financial stake in the outcome?
As a Hackintosh user, I don't have all the answers. I tell myself Hackintosh is okay because I used a real Mac to download the installer, but that's still a moral judgement I'm not able to make impartially. I do try to avoid pirating all forms of digital media, though, even when it means there are products I simply cannot use due to lack of finances.
> But my question with piracy is always, where do you dry the line?
this has already been hashed out during the late 90s and early 00s in the context of media piracy: software and media are non-rivalrous goods. me pirating the good does not prevent anyone else from purchasing. it is not a loss to the developer or content creator because i was never going to purchase it in the first place.
> but that's still a moral judgement I'm not able to make impartially
there are zero moral issues implicated here. property is outside of morality.
> it is not a loss to the developer or content creator because i was never going to purchase it in the first place.
How do you know that you were "never going to purchase it in the first place"? There are lots of products where I initially looked at the price tag, thought "that's ridiculous", and walked away—but eventually came back and bought it, sometimes kicking and screaming.
Again, I don't think I can make a fair judgement about what I "would buy" when I have a financial stake in convincing myself one way. And I don't think anyone else can actually do it either.
> Again, I don't think I can make a fair judgement about what I "would buy" when I have a financial stake
i'm at a loss for to how parse this let alone how to respond to it. who else but you "can make a fair judgement" about whether you'll buy something?
i don't have shifting perspectives on whether i'll buy something - i either decide to buy something or i decide not to buy it. if i decide to buy something but i don't have money for it i save money and buy it eventually.
to drive home the point: i pirate movies instead of going to theaters. if some movie that i was interested in seeing never gets released on some torrent site i do not buy that movie i simply do not watch it. on the other hand i do buy books even though i could pirate them easily.
You can pay these devs by purchasing one of the machines the software comes bundled with, that’s what pays their salary.
Apple is an integrator, they are not in the business of selling you just commodity hardware. People who buy their products do so in large part because the experience is better than what they would get buying the same hardware from random Chinese OEM 274.
But if you’re on the commodity hardware spiel: I challenge you to match the specs of any laptop Apple sells in a laptop by another manufacturer (and actually match, not replacing NVMe ssds with some random SATA part etc) and come anywhere near 50% or even 70% of the price.
>not replacing NVMe ssds with some random SATA part etc) and come anywhere near 50% or even 70% of the price.
this has been done over and over again. i'm not going to go through the tedious process just to have you ultimately declare victory anyway when i can't source their superduper proprietary butterfly/centipede/tarantula keyboard or their retina/cornea/myopia display.
I used to use Desktops[1] when I still used Windows. I’m not sure whether windows supports full screen apps these days so it will be slightly different experience.
This really sinks the value proposition or a mac tower. You are getting comparable performance for 1/4 the price...
I had the old mac pro, and I did love the quality of the build and ease of drive installation.. But still.
"Single-core score: 1,121
Multi-core score: 11,769
The scores for my Hackintosh with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8 GHz are:
I switched to linux for the most part at this point (My work machine is still a 2015 MacBook though..) I had a hacintosh tower 8 year ago but I was always nervous about upgrading it.
Nice article, however, you may want to think about changing the color scheme of your website, the gray text on a gray background makes it a bit hard to read.
Oh it seems as if your theme is using prefers-color-scheme to detect if the user is using dark theme and setting the background based on that. If I change from dark to light theme in system preferences, the background of your website also changes.
It works very well. I have a Clover Hackintosh (not OpenCore) on my [edit: cheap pre-built generic] desktop (i5-7400, iGPU, macOS has its own SSD). It works great, even allowing me to upgrade from Mojave to Catalina and forget that it's not a real Mac. My monitor always looked pink, but if I change my monitor's input color format to YPbPr it works fine. The patch that I used to fix that in Mojave is broken in Catalina, but I don't really care.
Aside from that, it works just like a real Mac in basically every way.
I've had my Hackintosh for six years now and it's been fairly stable. It's sometimes done a bit of freezing up after a boot and I'm used to something failing after I've had the system running for a while. Like after 30-60 days of uptime, the audio stack might just stop working and I need to reboot the computer to get audio back. Not really a big deal and I'm really happy with how much computer I got for a thousand euro back in 2014.
I think this is a difficult question to answer because MacOS is built for specific hardware configurations, and Hackintosh has to build unofficial support for all sorts of non-standard configurations. Your experience with a hackintosh really depends what hardware you're trying to install it on.
There are people who publish hardware ‘QVL’ lists for Hackintosh builds — stick to the list and it’s smooth sailing. Venture off the list and you end up on page 16 of some forum convinced you need to dump your DSDT tables to edit some voodoo magic.
I’ve been on developing on Hackintoshs for work full-time (both desktop and laptops) for many many years now with minimal hiccups. 4K HDR touchscreen laptop in 2018, yes please!
1) Many of the reliable community sites post buying guides; without wading into which I find reliable just search for “hackintosh buyers guide 2020”, “hackintosh compatibility list”, etc.
2) My now-preferred route is following developers on Github who post their hardware and EFI folder. It’ll be obvious which repos are from engineers who depend on it for their day-to-day based on stars/forks.
My current laptop I found out about from a blog (#1) then stumbled into a flawless and well-maintained repo (#2) — best of both worlds!
Mind sharing what laptop and setup guide you used? I'm still on a MBP 2012 for work which I like, and I'm thinking ahead to my next work laptop -- looking for similar ports/etc as my MBP 2012 (doesn't need to be latest specs, and I'm a creature of habit).
Tri-boot Catalina/Win10/Ubuntu19 on Dell XPS 9650 (i7-7700HQ, 32gb RAM, 1tb NVMe, touch 4K UHD w HD 630 & GTX 1050). Two caveats are WiFi card needs replaced for iCloud (30$ on eBay) and fingerprint scanner only works under Win10.
Re: guide -- DuckDuckGo/Github/Google is your friend -- this model in particular is rather common, but which guide is right depends on your comfort level.
Linus Tech Tips does one every few years, the last one was pretty recent I think. As far as I remember, almost everything worked really well. Notably, Facetime was really hit-and-miss.
Do you recall the issue? Was it FaceTime specifically or all-things-iCloud? The latter is one of the most common last-mile issues since you need to present Apple servers with hardware identifiers that iCloud agrees are real (i.e.: from your old MacBook gathering dust).
Just to add to this: it's not strictly necessary to pull an MLB from a real Mac, although that can certainly be a shortcut.
If you present Apple with computer information that makes sense, and you do it right the first time, they'll usually accept it as real. I've done this around five times now and it has always worked. I can actually enter my made-up serial numbers on Apple's website, and they show up in the system as real computers[1]!
The serial, MLB, hardware model, etc all need to match, and you need to get it right on the first try! Apple seems to get suspicious once you've fed them weird data.
[1] When I tell people this, they always ask if I'm sure I didn't collide with a real serial. The possibility that this happened--especially every time I've done it--is incredibly small, so I'm quite sure that isn't what's happening.
This is fascinating to me. Surely Apple has a databases somewhere of all the S/Ns of all the computers they've ever sold. Why would they accept a made up one and insert it into their database?
I've long wondered that too! I have to assume that, for some kind of manufacturing reason, Apple either doesn't have such a database or doesn't trust its accuracy.
If anyone with more knowledge of supply chain dynamics knows why this might be, please feel free to chime to chime in!
Happened yesterday in my company. :(
Big tech company, 2000+ people, central Europe. First registered patient with COVID-19 in my country is from company I'm working for.
We all received notice to work from home.
It will be huge test now for remote work. I bet lot of people doesn't even know how to connect from home. (people from administration etc)
What doesn't change is raw data. In general maps are not like photography, maps are simplified diagrams so that things can be easily distinguished, and that makes them much easier to compress using lossless methods, so using a reduced amount of colors will not be really noticeable, especially if colors are properly chosen.
Using a 8 color palette instead of 256 on xnview results in a 50% reduction. A 16 color palette results in about 40%, but the result is much better. So it does save memory but not that much.
Also, emails on my phone is big no after working hours.