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Hakintosh or Macintosh?

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I would prefer to buy a real Mac any day but the sad truth is that the iMac's GPU is a joke (laptop GPU) and the Mac Pro is both unaffordable for normal people and very out of date (4 years now). If Apple does a decent small tower that has exchangeable graphics cards I will buy an Apple again.

Indeed! The current state of MacPro is a shambles to say the least. While the PC world is in constant progress, Apple is still selling 4year old MacPros at outrageous, no, insulting prices. The hacking community is the only answer to Apple's greed and shortsightedness.
 
The fact is: how % of market share CustoMacs are? Apple doesn't care until the part of this market share affect the financial year. When (if) this point comes, Apple will be create more barriers and lockers for OSX.
Until now, Apple see us like a bunch of crazy guys, students and experimental users (maybe could help Apple) to test hardware and others new techs.
or...
In countries if represents a "dash" in selling numbers on mac hardware, apple doesnt care too. For Apple, this countries doesn't exist. Apple is focus and concern all forces in iPhone.
Woz and Jobs started out as "crazy guys...and experimental users". Apple has long lost touch with its roots and the community that built the company. They only care about maximizing profit now with their ridiculous image of boutique elegance.
 
Woz and Jobs started out as "crazy guys...and experimental users". Apple has long lost touch with its roots and the community that built the company. They only care about maximizing profit now with their ridiculous image of boutique elegance.

Steve is dead, Woz... woz is wozzy! hahahahah
I'm living in Brazil, a dash market for apple computers. We have a most expensive iPhone around the world, and apple computers cost a more than twice price in dollar (so, the true is the real price is a 8 times: US$ x2 + 4X of exchange money price, belive it)... In fact, the only way to keep it in osX plattaform is using customacs :(
I have my old macbooks (2006 and 2010 models), but is unreal buy another one, except if you do it in "black market" or someone bring from US...

EDIT: In my case, I belive apple is happy with me: I don't buy a hardware, but buying many things in Itunes Store, like music and movies :)
I have a Apple TV too, and strange, has a decent price in Brasil :)
 
IMO the only interesting thing that Apple provides nowadays is Mac OS. I used to like Macbooks and iMacs a lot in the late 2012, until Apple decided to remove the DVD player, and then the USB 2 ports, and even the RJ45 port. It's like the iOS, compatible with nothing ... except itself. Beside this, Apple's iMacs has become even more closed than most laptops. You buy it all-in-one, and you throw it when it's out of date. The only thing you can change/upgrade is the RAM, otherwize you have to unstick the screen (and lose the very short warranty btw). Apple has no respect of it's customers, anyway all apple addicts will always buy their products no matter the prize and compatibility.
The only reason I use Mac OS is because of its realiability and compatibility with a lot of the best professionnal media softwares (design, 3D, music, video), otherwize I would be on Linux, long time ago. Except for videogames, Windows is not an option.

So. Hackintosh, Customac, or whatever could run OSX is the best choice to me. It's worth the energy and time learning to hack it.
 
I've been using Macs since around '91 - all through the really bad times for Apple. This wasn't about being absurdly loyal, it was simply that I was familiar with how things worked and liked the software. As time went on I also realised that the machines I outgrew still worked perfectly well and so the majority of my Macs were passed on to family and friends to carry on being useful for many more years. Yes they looked OK, but primarily they worked and kept working long after friends' "off the shelf" store bought PC's and laptops had died and burned. Of course the same does not apply to nerdy folks building custom PC's, but that's comparing apples and oranges ;)

For me the difference between a hackintosh and a macintosh is simply how many hoops I have to jump through to get it to work reliably. Reliability is key as my main hobby/semi-pro work is working with audio. With audio there's a ton of highly technical things to focus on and the last thing I want to be doing is messing with the computer when tracking or mixing.

One could argue that Apple themselves created the current interest in hacking their OS - if they hadn't made a bunch of extremely cynical decisions that scrapped support for perfectly useable machines (such as my Mac Pro 1,1 which I'm writing this on in El Capitan) I personally probably wouldn't have given much thought to alternatives. In other words, for nearly twenty years I was a perfectly happy Mac user. Apple made a series of decisions that forced me (despite my essential laziness) to look elsewhere for answers.

The other side of things is that at some point Apple went insane with the whole form over function thing: deliberately designing computers to work less efficiently and reliably in order to meet some stupid aesthetic.

I accept I'm a little slow so I only properly realised this the first time I took apart my 2011 MacBook Pro and saw first hand how incredibly bad it's cooling was - while at the same time clearing half a ton of dust blocking the tiny vents from the fans. Since then of course the discrete graphics GPU has fried, kinda making the point for me. So then I'm booting into archlinux to do hacks on the EFI to switch off the discrete graphics and I have an HD3000 MacBook "Pro" - which is only even slightly useable because its now effectively a hackintosh! Certainly if left up to Apple the machine would have been scrapped.

So both my current legit Macs are only working cos they're "hackintoshed" - and that's not counting the mac mini we have doing media server duties (Free NAS), and an old Core2Duo MacBook (though still 64bit!!!! Grrrr Apple!!) given a new lease of life with Ubuntu Mate/Studio.

I guess my point here is that I really didn't want to learn all this stuff about hacking Macs or the OS - if Apple had behaved differently I'd probably still not have given it a second's thought. I guess you reap what you sow.
 
IMO Apple simply left a group of users high and dry when they introduced the new 'trash can' Mac Pro in 2013 and abandoned the old tried and true aluminum tower model. The new Mac Pro was absurdly over priced and limited in hardware upgrades. That left those users with few options, stay with their older Mac Pro towers or hackintosh. I've personally been fooling around trying to hackintosh laptops and desktops on and off for ten years. It's been fun but frustrating too. It's certainly come a long way in the last five to six years though, I couldn't believe how easy it was to get this system up and running but I think the adoption and maturity of clover had a lot to do with it.
 
I’m aware I’m resurrecting a fairly dead thread but I thought I’d weigh in on the Mac vs. Hackintosh question.

I’ve been an exclusively Mac user since the “cheese grater” 2003 or so PowerMac G5.
I am in college for my Batchellors in Art which is a field that from what I have been told is still very much Apple based. I currently have the G5 a 2011 MacBook Pro i7, 2017 iPad Pro 12.9 and a 2009 Mac mini. All of which if I can I’d like to upgrade and keep running as long as I can.

So, needless to say I’m thoroughly in the Apple ecosystem. What made me lean towards Hackintosh was that nothing that has come from Apple on the desktop line made me want to upgrade. That pushed me to the Hackintosh side. Plus, after resurrecting the MacBook. I got a taste of the basics of building a computer and liked doing it so I thought since I had the G5 collecting dust it might be useful to resurrect that too. But, with updated parts to use for Photoshop art based projects.
At Apple’s current prices, and the design issues with the newer models. I’m more than likely going to try to resurrect the G5. I could have something pretty robust for less money than Apple charges that could essentially do more, faster.
 
I’m aware I’m resurrecting a fairly dead thread but I thought I’d weigh in on the Mac vs. Hackintosh question.

I’ve been an exclusively Mac user since the “cheese grater” 2003 or so PowerMac G5.
I am in college for my Batchellors in Art which is a field that from what I have been told is still very much Apple based. I currently have the G5 a 2011 MacBook Pro i7, 2017 iPad Pro 12.9 and a 2009 Mac mini. All of which if I can I’d like to upgrade and keep running as long as I can.

So, needless to say I’m thoroughly in the Apple ecosystem. What made me lean towards Hackintosh was that nothing that has come from Apple on the desktop line made me want to upgrade. That pushed me to the Hackintosh side. Plus, after resurrecting the MacBook. I got a taste of the basics of building a computer and liked doing it so I thought since I had the G5 collecting dust it might be useful to resurrect that too. But, with updated parts to use for Photoshop art based projects.
At Apple’s current prices, and the design issues with the newer models. I’m more than likely going to try to resurrect the G5. I could have something pretty robust for less money than Apple charges that could essentially do more, faster.

That being said, there is something to be said for turning on a machine, being able to do work, and having a warranty.
 
That’s true, I’ve been lucky so far I haven’t had to use my AppleCare. That said, what happens if there is a big flaw in your brand new multi thousand dollar computer that makes you not able to turn on or get work done regardless of the warrantee? Either way you could be out money how much is up to you.
However I do still like Apple products for the most part, don’t get me wrong. I started off with the idea that I have a nice aluminum G5 case and a few big hard drives laying around I figured I’d use them. If I built it I have a better chance of essentially being able to fix it. I still have a MacBook Pro and the iPad. There might be some issue that stumps me but with forums like this I can iron them out. I don’t plan on making it the primary machine unless it is stable but I am in need of something, like I said to run Photoshop. Why not use what I’ve got.
 
If Apple doesn't want to support it's computer line, then it should become a software company and support Intel based systems. Go to Apple and buy a copy of O SX and install on PC, legal Hackintosh?
 
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