Soo i recently got myself an Iphone 11 pro and its been fantastic and now ive had the urge to play with hackintosh and it was a really nice OS although Hackintosh wasnt the best experience with USB ports not working and having to spend ages to get it all to boot and finally install, so im really tempted to just go out and buy an IMac and honestly im not sure what it is about MacOS im loving it just works and its simple,do you think it would be a bad idea to just jump the bullet with only a few days of loving OS/MacOS? since if i was todo so id be selling my Daily Driver machine + a GPU to be able to get the IMac + Accessories… and honestly its something im willing todo, is this stupid of me? or shall i just maybe try hackintosh and get it all working for a month or two to even decide if its even for me long term wise? since all i do on my daily machine these days is watch netflix/browse fourms and discord call people.
Definetly this. 
If you are into the Mac system, u could try getting into acpi, dsdt’s and kext’s. There is more than enough to tinker with Mac OS, Especially for a hackintosh.
Also you’re not alone in falling for the OS. The streamlined experience, hardware & software tweaks and a finely-tuned system overall, is hard not to like.
With some tinkering time, u could try getting things working Including missing usb support and other issues that u may have.
Honestly yeah ive been thinking about it and ill spend time this week config and tweaking MacOS hackintosh and hopefully have it all working, and since ill be using an i9 10900 i can use the IGPU for MacOS and hopefully not have too many issues
The Apple Ecosystem appears to have an all or nothing nothing approach which is sort of fine if you can afford it. The problem is, right now, you are not yet aware of the annoyances of its various systems and you are currently enjoying the honeymoon phase.
If ever the time comes when you desire to divorce yourself from its ecosystem, you may find that the systems put in place are designed to lock you within and the way out is tedious and painful.
Apple only desires to play fair with itself.
Right now, maybe wait.
Maybe you do love the ecosystem and you may like the long haul. Just remember, the longer you stay and integrate yourself within. The more expensive, tedious and painful the way out will be.
Caveat emptor.
Get an intel i3 (used if neccessary)
460-480 or 560-580 and upwards (Supported natively)
2-4 or 8gb ram, 90-120gb sata ssd.
Very affordable hackintosh for about 15% of price from apple.com (The MacPro)
If parts are bought used and perhaps some parts from leftover or received for free. That would amount to less than 10%. For a pretty strong introduction into the MacOS ecosystem.
I do have a i9 10900, 32gb ram + im able to get myself one of the older Radeon Pros such as the 5500 from work as we dont have a need for them anymore and what i think should be nativley supported by apple ill take a look into it all again and see if i can get it all working since it would be nice to get an Actual IMac since it would work and maybe il get one on the future if i love it 3-4 months down the road
If you can, definitely give it a good try before you dive in. My first week with Mac was all sunshine and happy feelings, but as time went on and little annoying things started to pop up, I find myself using my old ThinkPad it’s meant to replace. It may be just my OCD, old habbits and some subjective feelings but here is a short list in no particular order:
- You can’t snap windows left and right by dragging them
- You can’t see copy-paste transfer speeds
- Safari doesn’t fill the screen when maximized, possibly other apps too
- Finder can’t maximize, your choice of small or a bit smaller window
- If you full-screen an app, you can’t drag anything over it from the second monitor
- Keyboard pales in comparison to the ThinkPad, it’s shallow and to me it feels like remote control buttons (M1 Air)
- Why do I need two hands to forward delete? What if I want a third party (mechanical) keyboard with no Mac compatible Fn key?
- I miss dedicated Home, End, PgUp and PgDown keys
- I miss Insert key to a lesser extent
- Dongles piss me off
- Finder doesn’t support sftp. This, it needs to do this
- Terminal won’t Tab to autocomplete configured ssh hosts. Not even if you set /bin/bash as your default shell
- Some free open source apps such as Inkscape and Blender run notably worse (maybe just M1 issue, even tho Blender has Apple Silicon version)
- If you need something like install a specific PHP version, the solution is go get Homebrew
- Homebrew is a pain in the ass, you need to learn their terminology. Fuck you and your formulae, casks, bottles, kegs and cellars I say
- Some think Homebrew is a security risk. Granted it’s an old blog post and I couldn’t be bothered to learn about it so I just gave up
- There is no good open source hypervisor that you can just install and run. While UTM is a great effort, it’s not done yet
These are just off the top of my head, and while I’m sure many of these issues can be solved with (paid) utilities and some getting used to, I’m just not going to micro manage every damn little thing.
Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty to like and I’m just focusing on the bad here, and maybe I’m just too old for this drastic a change.
Hackintosh is a god-awful experience, if you’re thinking about it, don’t. It’s not getting any better, either.
I’d actually recommend you virtualize instead, if you want to give the MacOS a good look-and-feel. Or try and find a cheap second-hand laptop.
Remember, it’s not just the software, but also the hardware that makes a Mac into a Mac. So the only way to be sure you’ll love it, is to have a Mac.
I was thinking of doing a hackintosh recently. What makes it a bad experience?
Well… Short version, it’s an order of magnitude easier to get Arch Linux running on that thing, and Arch will probably provide a better user experience once you do get it running, too. You will need a specific set of hardware and a specific version of MacOS. Unless you’ve actually bought parts to explicitly be a hackintosh, chances are low you will get anything other than the basic integrated circuit graphics to work.
To add to that, Apple is slowly withdrawing support for x86 as a whole, and you will soon be stuck with a dead machine with no upgrade path. Yes, Apple is not joking around, you either pay the Apple tax or go home to cry now.
Just save yourself the hassle and see if you can rent a Mac or something. It’ll give you a much better feel for it.
I agree with @regulareel I have a couple of friends with macs and they like them they are their main machines but I have gotten to look over the shoulder of a daily user and it definitely is not all milk and honey.
Not going too far either, it is like any system it has its good and bad. If you happen to exist in the areas where it is good you will love it. If you have to deal with the parts that are bad you will be less happy.
I would say try find a way to long term trial using a Mac and see how that life is, like dive in and forget you have options, see how it works out then and if all is good make the trial permenant. Unfortunately I don’t know how this can be done. I know you can rent time on remote machines, actual real hardware, but not sure if that is a good idea for actual personal potentially sensitive use, that would be better with hands on physical hardware that you can wipe after the trial.
Hmm, Rental does sound like a good idea, although looking in my area they only rent out 2009 mac pros and that generation of devices so thats off the table sadly, Apple does have a 14 day return period and well i have a GPU ive been wanting to get rid of for a while i could sell for a Mac or Maybe try trade for it since i havent looked at the option either, since ive seen one sell on ebay near me for 1600 the other day, so maybe i could swap/sell the GPU for a Mac
It has been years since I regularly used OSX, but I still miss:
- that consistent system-wide global menubar
- non-buggy Miller Columns,
- application-centric vs window-centric UI (ex: GUI program can stay open without any windows)
- command key (ex:
Cmd+Cto copy in Terminal) - Quicklook
The main thing that has really kept me away from OSX, now macOS, (aside from cost) is my desire for open source.
Increasingly it seems as though closed source acts less like a way to protect implementation trade secrets (clever algorithms, painstakingly refined codepaths), and more often as a way to keep control of a computer/device away from its owner.
In earlier days, Apple covertly modified
DTrace to prevent iTunes (and presumably its DRM) from being examined too closely.
More recently, Apple appears to be planning on enabling client-side image scanning; while ostensibly for a good cause, I think Snowden describes it well as an attempt to, “permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to [the developer/manufacturer]”.
A computer/phone is a tool, and much like a hammer than scans what you build with for bomb materials or a pen that records everything you write, looking for the wording of a death threat, I find recently developments too creepy to buy into these products anymore. However, you might have a different opinion on such things.
In terms of other considerations; the lack of user-replaceable SSDs on modern Mac hardware is also worth considering; if going the Hacintosh route, I would personally first look at what software is needed there and how trustworthy it is, since I think much of that runs in kernel mode (.kext) or in prekernel firmware (.efi). I do not know if most/all/none of the software used to run Hacintosh is open source or not.
As @wertigon mentions, the move away from Intel should be considered as well; once the last Intel is removed from Apple’s store lineup, you might only have a few years before the latest version becomes ARM-only; in light of Apple’s recently inconsistent security updates for older macOS versions running an older version that still receives updates might not be the wisest choice security-wise.
For comparison, the first non-PPC OSX version released ~3 years after the last product line moved to Intel.
It really is a shame; it is very satisfying to see people cajoling unsupported hardware into running software.
If most of what you’re doing is content consumption an imac could be a great experience. Right now macs are the only things with a halfway decent hdr pipeline and the displays on the imacs are really nice. I know, I know, windows can do hdr, but it’s still a rough experience compared to mac.
One note that while Apple’s ecosystem is often considered a walled garden, for many people (myself included), macOS has been a gateway to Linux and BSD simply because it is technically a Unix derivative under the hood and shares a lot of the same tooling.
Honestly these days my daily driver is overpowered for what I need it to be for Netflix/web browsing and discord 90% of the time and we’ll if I need to game I stream it from our gaming server/machine over parsec what also has a mac app iirc. So I would do great with an iMac I think, but my friends giving me her iMac Pro to play around with for 2 weeks to see if I actually enjoy macOS and it’s quirks what will be fun!
Let us know how it goes, I’m curious to hear your thoughts after the honeymoon phase.
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