Hacker News Reader

This is really helpful, thank you. What you say puts some form and empirical evidence to my concerns about Hackintosh. I guess my gut had it right this time, which is unusual. So you can brick your fancy new homemade, warranty-less PC!

Anyway maybe one day I'll do it for fun on a crappy laptop I get off Craigslist. Sounds like this pays off most when it's a low-risk effort.

View on HN

That's probably for the best. I bought a laptop with a known-compatible processor, and confidence in my past experience in hardware that I'm not too worried about frying my machine. For someone technical who knows in advance about possible hardware damage, I'd just say that while damage is possible, this is mostly a danger for when you'll be "patching" the ACPI configuration files that define to OSX how it should interface with your processor. So if you aren't careful, you could be telling OSX to send voltage down a line that shouldn't have voltage on the line. I mean you're not gonna smell your mistake, but you won't be using that CPU ever again. And of course as you know, essentially pounding a square peg into a round hole like you are doing when trying to fit Apple's device drivers to your particular hardware, the possibility for damage is there, too. That all being said, if you enjoy a technical challenge and learning a lot about how OSX works, it's a great opportunity to work up a sweat, with relatively little risk to your hardware if you approach the problem the right way, prepared to grok what the guides and documentation is really saying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com