Be careful if you choose not to follow the guides, though! There's a reason most Hackintoshes use Gigabyte motherboards, Atheros wireless, etc.
- Just another happy Hackintosh user.
The time and effort required to introduce technical preventative measures far out-weigh the "loss" from the Hackintosh community (which is still a minuscule niche in comparison to their genuine markets).
The margins on selling the OS were never very good. Apple has always made the majority of their money from hardware sales.
Where is this case? In my experience, something I saw online simply wasn't available to me, like AirDrop, for instance. I upgraded my mid-09 MBP to 10.7, looked for AirDrop and couldn't find it.
Same for Handoff and the Bluetooth-required new features in Yosemite. Apple doesn't go out of its way to inform me my hardware is out of date; features talked about in the media are just missing.
edit: Also, your post sounds dangerously close to the uninformed "Apple purposefully makes iOS n perform worse on device x", as if that's a smart business move.
Given that, it makes me wonder how the unmodified Mac mini and MBA perform.
To be fair, I also suspect that widespread piracy in the early days of personal computers actually contributed to Microsoft's monopoly by creating a price point that nobody could compete with.
If you needed to build some machines that you don't necessarily care about updating (like some networked "macs" for compressor or rendering) then I think these would be great. I may end up building another one but I really can't justify it with a retina macbook pro. I don't game and that's the only reason I'd go back.
Otherwise I don't have any issues. I'm running the latest Mavericks, could install updates etc.
I have a 2013(?) Mac Mini that was running Lion (and then Mavericks) and it did the same thing with HDMI audio on every single unsuspend. It took months for an update to come out that finally fixed it. Not saying your problem isn't due to hackintoshing, but getting the real thing (since 2005 and the first mac mini, for me) hasn't been problem-free either.
Software updates are a pain. Most of the time they work fine (especially now that Apple has more commodity hardware and public OS betas). Sometimes there are issues though and it is just always smart to wait a few months while they are figured out. If you are the sort that always wants to be running the latest OS version you'll find this frustrating or you'll spend a lot of time updating. My MacBook Pro was running Yosemite from day one. My hackintosh is still on 10.9.5. There are a few other minor software issues that come up.. iMessage is always a chore to get working.
On the hardware end you get much greater build to order flexibility. You are limited in hardware to largely things that Apple uses somewhere in their product line but this still gives you quite a few options since there are a few very useful combos that Apple just doesn't sell. My configuration is basically an iMac without a screen and with the Mac Pro graphics card. A Mac Pro would require me to buy ~$2000 of Xeon hardware and a second GPU, neither of which I need. An iMac would saddle me with a mobile GPU and non-replacable glossy screen. As a bonus I have 5 different internal SATA drives (with room for more) and a Blu-Ray burner.
That said, there are a lot of things about Apple hardware that I miss. I don't have any Thunderbolt ports though and the graphics card is full of legacy DVI ports instead of useful DisplayPort ones. The machine is large and uses way more power and throws off way more heat than an Apple machine. I had to do some careful design work to get something quiet and it is still not as quiet as Apple hardware. Sleep has never worked reliably. Boot screen support for my graphics card doesn't exist so I have to physically unplug video cables if I want to see what is happening during boot up (say if I want to reboot in Linux or Windows or from a recovery partition). The audio ports don't have the third contact for a headset like Apple's do so I need a USB headset.
Overall, as a desktop solution for home use, non-commercial software development, and gaming it lets you be more cost efficient with your computing hardware at the price of time spent researching and tinkering. Particularly so if your use case is one that Apple doesn't cater to like gaming or anything that thinness isn't a top priority. Once it was set up I don't tend to have problems. My hardware was ordered with Hackintosh compatibility in mind though. Problems typically tend to be clustered around OS upgrades or hardware changes rather than day to day issues (except for issues due to hardware constraints like sleep/wake and boot screens). It is otherwise pretty stable.
I'd never recommend it for a laptop, a non-technical person, anyone who has more money than time, or anyone who needs something reliable/with manufacturer support/help. I wish I could justify a Mac Pro for my use case but I can't at 3-4x the price. I have a MacBook Pro for serious work which lets me take on more risk of having the desktop out of commission due to any issues.
Worth to note that the latest Mac mini has dropped to $499, that makes Hackintosh even more unattractive
http://www.nextofwindows.com/buying-a-cheap-mac-mini-vs-buil...
The problem for me is that while I think I'm perfectly capable of handling the technical issues with setting up a Hackintosh, the extra value of that customisability it's isn't there for me. I'd rather pay a few hundred quid more and have a solid, supported system than spend a few days of my time setting a machine up and then a few hours every few months fixing niggling issues.
I fully understand why people with specific needs go the Hackintosh route, for them it's worth it. Maybe I'll be in that camp some day, but not for now.
I suspect this is why Apple doesn't bother killing Hackintoshes. If people, are wiling to spend their own time and effort doing it, they're probably not going to instead spend the money with Apple. They are still paying a cost though, so that's the market in action. The alternative would be Apple spending Engineering effort fighting them. Again, that's not an efficient or economically useful way to spend that time and money.