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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

$800 for the base unit (i3/8GB/128GB SSD) is frankly ridiculous. Their price is roughly double what you'd pay for an equivalent NUC.

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I just built a 32GB, 8 core/16 thread, NVidia 1050ti discrete GPU, 480GB m.2 NVME machine with a premium power supply and case for exactly $800.

I always expect 80-100% markup on a Mac, and I've accepted it, given the integration and beautiful design; but this time they went way over the top, especially with the upgrade prices. To get an equivalent Mac Mini (ignoring that it's impossible to get 8 cores and discrete GPU), I would have to spend about $2100. That's about 160% markup on comparable components. That's a first in Apple history, as far as I can tell.

A comparable system would be rhe 1600 hackish-mac mini I outlined in my last post if you add a 700 USD eGPU on top. Even if you deduct 400 for the additional casings required, it’s just so far from competitive. As you wrote, up to 100% markup for macOS and all the Apple benefits is acceptable, but it has gotten a really hard pill to swallow now.

I've been considering going down the hackintosh route but now I'm considering something more extreme.

ESX system with MacOS VM and GPU passthrough. If this works, then I could have a standardized MacOS VM build that will keep working as I upgrade the underlying hardware. Still mulling this over...

I've heard that your proposed setup works great. Do it!

I’ve been running that setup as my main workstation for over 3 years. Use an nVidia gpu and a dedicated usb card for IO. You also need a second machine to do esx management, I have a laptop. And a second video card to see the esx console (handy when it isn’t working). Finally don’t use multiple drives for esx datastores, there is no way to remove them later (to upgrade or replace failed drives). I learnt the hard way, transferring 6TB of vms over usb 2 is not fun.

I'm about to try qemu/kvm for a virtualized macOS solution. I have a 1050ti as my primary GPU on Linux (arguably a bad choice).

What card do you recommend for GPU passthrough?

Cool! Do you perchance have a writeup of your setup?

I managed to get a High Sierra VM converted to Mojave yesterday. Previous attempts had been failing due to the VM not being APFS. This link was helpful: https://licson.net/post/vmware-apfs/

I started musing if trying to get an eGPU to work with a Mac VM would be possible but that might be pushing it too far. It looks like Thunderbolt 3 support might be hit or miss from what I've been able to find so far plus I do not see a lot of motherboards (Z390?) that are TB capable. Gigabyte just announced a Z390 based Designare which looked interesting. https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/gigabyte-launches-their-al...

Current plans are:

  * ESXI 6.5 or 6.7
  * 10G NIC
  * 32 or 64GB mem
  * mATX footprint
  * USB switch to control which machine keyboard/mouse goes to
  * MacOS VM with iGPU passthrough
  * Win VM with Nvidia GPU passthrough for gaming

I'm hoping this allows for my dream of having two machines in one without having to dual boot.

On a related note, I'm still annoyed that there does not seem to be a wealth of consumer MBs that have onboard 10G

I'd say Win 10 with WSL is now arguably a better dev environment. The only reason I still use a Mac at work is because I need to support Safari/iOS clients and Apple doesn't allow VMs. You are not paying a 100% markup for OSX, you're paying a 100% markup because Apple keeps it 100% proprietary.

It's the Thunderbolt / USB C ports I'm going to miss from your setup.

I don't suppose you have a pcpartpicker build list handy? It would be nice to compare against what I'm currently looking at.

that wouldn't run mac OS, which comes "for free".

... with what kind of warranty? included software?

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