My experience using Hackintosh low-end PC for 3 years | Hacker News Reader

My experience using Hackintosh low-end PC for 3 years

my-site.now.sh

55 pointsdevcriollo44 comments

Really reminds us who are able to pickup RAM or a graphics card for a few quid that not everyone in the world is so lucky.

Very impressed with what Jhonny managed to do.

It does beg the question though - what's next for Apple's cheapest Mac, the Mini.

I think there is a real opportunity for Apple to release a low powered Mac Mini say the size of an Apple TV which is ARM based and allows schools, universities and folks unable to buy the latest and greatest to have a stable, Unix based development and media platform to work on.

I don't know, I was under the impression that Macs are almost Veblen goods, expensive to raise their status in the eyes of the customer. A cheap Mac could break that impression and cause damage to the brand.

> It does beg the question though - what's next for Apple's cheapest Mac, the Mini.

If the MacBook Pro is any indication, a price increase (due to the addition of Thunderbolt 3 ports and an Intel CPU with Iris Plus Graphics) and zero user-upgradeable parts (soldered RAM/SSD)?

If the new entry-level Mac mini has a Fusion Drive or 128GB SSD as standard this would also result in an additional price increase.

I can see more and more people going the Hackintosh route as Macs generally become more expensive.

Apple really need a SKU that is step up from the mini using full fat processors in a SFF case - if they did I think our place would defiantly buy them as replacements for our aging mac minis.

Apple just reduced the price of the 13" MacBook Pro to $1299. That seems to be inline with PCs from Dell with similar specs.

> Apple just reduced the price of the 13" MacBook Pro to $1299.

The 13" MBP is now $200 cheaper because Apple cut the SSD capacity in half (256GB > 128GB). If you want the same size SSD as the 2016 base model had you still have to pay $1,499.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/10/review-apples-new-...

Apple cut a big corner in the device's on-board storage to reduce the price to $1,299 —and we feel that it shouldn't have. If you own the 2016, you have at least 256GB of storage. We feel that the 128GB is a big step backwards for those considering the 2017 who already own a 2016.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/08/2017-vs-2016-macbook-pr...

Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro lineup this week with Intel's seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors and faster standard graphics options from Intel and AMD. There's also a cheaper 13-inch MacBook Pro with function keys starting at $1,299 with 128GB storage, compared to $1,499 for the previous base model.

Oh well. I should have known.

It's funny because while I'm typing this I'm watching the WWDC keynote recording and I just saw them announce the "new configuration" of the MacBook Pro.

It's not at all surprising that Apple went back to 128GB for the base model. Flash memory is pretty expensive right now, and 128GB is actually usable for a lot of purposes. They'll most likely go back to 256GB when they're able to transition to 3D NAND flash memory.

If I'm going to spend $1500 on a MacBook Pro, I would rather get 16Gb RAM/128Gb SSD than 8Gb/256GB SSD. I can always add more external storage if needed.

Really interesting to hear this story and to leave the personal context to the end makes it even more impactful. The perseverance and creativity that this person obviously had to show to get this to work for so long are really inspiring, even if lots of other people have done similar things before. I really hope things get better for your country soon.

Thank you.

It is not true you cannot use Store or iCloud because it is not a real Mac. I have been running a hackintosh for half a year now and I use iCloud, Store even iMessage works.

I am pretty sure that you need a Board Serial Number (SN) from a real Mac. At least about a year ago this was the case. Did you use a SN from a real Mac? If not, then you probably got lucky.

I think there is also the possibility of calling Apple's support hotline and letting them manually activate a randomly generated Serial Number.

For the Store and iCloud you do not need anything. For iMessage you need to generate a motherboard SN and other stuff, it is not so easy but doable with the right tutorial.

It's hard to make it work, I've tried it many times.

Linux would provide support for old hardware far in excess of what Apple provides. It's an OS for the many, not a priviledged few; and needs your support.

It's also a big security gamble downloading these hacked OSX images from questionable sources.

Linux ran on 80386 until not long ago. Now it requires an 80486.

486 was released 28 years ago

Yeah but spare a thought for people who can't afford CPUs that recent. What's my pop-pop with his 386 gonna do?

FreeBSD.

I love linux and I also use it, but I'm a fan of all operating systems.

>Later on I got to read a lot about the Kexts that basically are the equivalent of the drivers in microsoft windows and look for the ones that would serve me for my video card, Everything worked fine.

>A few months passed until Yosemite came out, with a renewed interface a lot of improvements, and even included support for my set up

>But I did the same again when buying my new GT520 card. And to this day everything has worked perfectly

This makes me wonder whether his hardware happened to be used in some Macs or Apple deliberately made those drivers for Hackintosh users?

The NVIDIA drivers are written by NVIDIA. I'm sure they use the same codebase across platforms because I've seen the same shader compiler crashes (doh!) on OS X with NVIDIA as on Windows and Linux. They have to support a pretty wide array of hardware in case somebody plugs it in to one of the PC-style Mac Pros which nobody seems to remember.

Apple tends to ship drivers that will work with almost any GPU from the same product family and generation as the chips Apple is actually using. They could definitely do more to lock things down if they wanted to.

I suspect that the slight lost hardware revenue is significantly offset by the App Store revenue and long-term benefits of keeping users on the Apple platform, so Apple doesn't have strong motivation to get in the way of Hackintosh use.

Someone should send this guy an iMac

That's a wonderful idea. If somebody sets up a gofundme I'd be happy to pitch in.

Thank you. Here in my country is very difficult to buy a real mac. It costs about 50 minimum monthly wage salaries.

He isn't missing much by not having the app store. I've used a mac as my primary computer at home for since before the app store opened in 2010 and have yet to find a indispensable app on the app store.

I started using macOS 2 months ago (iOS development) and had the impression I needed the app store for OS upgrades and xCode.

I there another way?

At least Xcode is downloadable from the developer portal. Not sure about OS upgrades.

You can get XCode and OS Updates through https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ (you need a login, but it's free AFAIK).

EDIT: Actually just checked, looks like there is no update for el capitan or sierra on the dev portal. Drats.

My app store works on my hackintosh so I never actually had to use the dev portal anyway ^^'. I used an old mac's ID.

Nice to know.

I heared much FUD about hackintoshs, I'd just want a mac for work without much hassle to develop. So I kust bought a mac book pro from 2013.

Have you tried the softwareupdate cli tool? https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/apple-mac-os-x-update-software...

Is this a standard blog design or is the author of this post also a very creative designer? I am really impressed both by the content and the design of this post.

As the author noted at the bottom, it's taken from https://rauchg.com (the guy behind now.sh)

Nothing beats minimalistic design. Too bad the majority thinks more is more.

It's very hard to read for me due to the low contrast and monospace font.

The black on white monospaced font? As a programmer I found it great.

Looks like this for me http://i.imgur.com/XNvYDk7.png

Probably font rendering issue at your end. It looks like this: http://imgur.com/a/9ArvB

However, it uses mac-specific fonts first, the free fonts (dejavu sans mono, bitstream vera sans mono) and then it falls back to Courier New and browser-set monospace font.

Fixed

Out of the curiosity, what was the cause?

Courier New is ugly, but not that ugly. Was it necessary to finetune the cleartype parameters?

Ah, I concede - mine was rendering black.

I like minimalism I'm a fan of rauchg.com and zeit.co

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