Gigabyte Z690 Aero G + i5-12600K + AMD RX 6800 XT

[trs96]

Just look back through the Alder Lake thread. It chronicles the journey and captures the bright eyed excitement as every obstacle thrown our way was overcome swiftly. How could we not relish an experience like that? How much did that enrich the lives of those who participated?

When I was contemplating building a hackintosh for the first time about 10 years ago, I read everything I could online and not many reviews were favorable. Most people didn't think you could really make something as stable and reliable as a Mac that Apple sells. They called them FrankenMacs and said they would be nothing but constant trouble. Then I read an article on the lifehacker site. One of the writers who had built one and had success said that "the best part of a hackintosh was knowing that you made it yourself. Every time you push that power button and boot up you get the satisfaction of using something you made that works well and brings you happiness." That's really what this is about. Not the benchmarks or LED lights it's about your active participation in making something great that is useful to you every day you use it.

 

[SAC12345]

When I was contemplating building a hackintosh for the first time about 10 years ago, I read everything I could online and not many reviews were favorable. Most people didn't think you could really make something as stable and reliable as a Mac that Apple sells. They called them FrankenMacs and said they would be nothing but constant trouble. Then I read an article on the lifehacker site. One of the writers who had built one and had success said that "the best part of a hackintosh was knowing that you made it yourself. Every time you push that power button and boot up you get the satisfaction of using something you made that works well and brings you happiness." That's really what this is about. Not the benchmarks or LED lights it's about your active participation in making something great that is useful to you every day you use it.

Indeed it is the making it yourself idea. The idea that they are contant trouble was always a crock of excrement. I have been doing this for over 14 years now since Leopard and the distros came out and for the life of me I just tried to think of the last time I had kernel panic or trouble at all, I cannot come up with it. The anniversary of my first retail disk to install with Leopard I bought is on the 7 Feb next year according to the images date in the Sites directory. This install has been upgraded through all the machines I have had in that time with all the OS releases made. My machines are just like the Energizer bunny they just keep going and going. Day after day, year after year it is the same they just work perfectly fine. Now I have always had firewire in my machines so the garbage sound you can end up with has never been a problem but that is the only disadvantage I can think of.

MacUser2525:~$ ls -l Sites/
total 16
-rw-r--r--  1 MacUser2525  admin  1150 22 Jan  2011 favicon.ico
drwxr-xr-x  6 MacUser2525  admin   192  7 Feb  2008 images
-rw-r--r--  1 MacUser2525  admin  2947 22 Jan  2011 index.html
drwxr-xr-x  2 MacUser2525  admin    64 18 Jan  2011 test

Edit and now it hits me the original Griffin FireWave I bought all those years ago to use with the Leopard just died a month or so ago. I put its backup in place and managed to find another to buy for a spare once more, new in the box even dirt cheap...

 

[MysticalOS]

Do I care that maintaining a Hackintosh is more involved than maintaining a real Mac? Heck no. Is a real Mac free of problems? Heck no. Just visit Apple’s online support forums

I can vouch for this. I have an M1 Max and M1 mini.
Mini had panic yesterday for literally no reason. it was asleep and had KP and simple google search actually found it's not uncommon.
M1 Max panics if I watch HDR on youtube....Granted 12.1 fixes that supposedly, I await and see.
My hack hasn't had a panic since I removed intel power gadget, it was literally source of all my instability and sleep issues. My only issue with my hack now is how dated Coffee Lake is. I'm definitely craving something new but it'll hold me over until the hopefully never ending supply constants come to an end.

I do use laptop more than hack though purely for efficiency sake. The power saving is huge and yes my hack has good power management but it still draws over 100Ws just doing basic work tasks. if I work on computer 12 hours that day that's 1.2Kw. Since I converted home to solar to operate off grid as much as possible, I actually am learning exactly how much EVERYTHING draws since I see it in app and have come to realize just how much a difference using the MBP over my hack makes. If there is anything apple has down, it's that.

 

[Sn0wMan]

I would not recommend that one. It’s usable with “AirportBrcmFixup” and disabling an internal injector. That module is too old now to recommend. If possible I would suggest using BCM94360NG such as this one:

Plug & Play Hackintosh macOS M.2 Wifi 802.11ac Bluetooth 4.0 Network Card - Newegg.com

Buy Plug & Play Hackintosh macOS M.2 NGFF BCM94360NG Wifi 802.11ac Bluetooth 4.0 Network Card Support Handoff & Airdrop & Continuity Wireless 2.4G/5Ghz 1200Mbps for PC Laptop Better BCM94352Z DW1560 with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

OK. Thanks.

 

[chabotc]

And let’s not forget how much you can learn about how macOS and computers in general work by building your own hackintosh

Hack the planet!

 

[etorix]

A unified processor architecture means:

• No memory slots
• No external GPU
• No ability to upgrade the system

Wrong! The Silicon Graphics O2 has a unified memory architecture, yet it features

• eight RAM slots,
• an upgradable CPU (on a daughter board, one may even upgrade from the R5000/R7000 generation to a R10000 or R12000 MIPS CPU),
• one industry-standard PCI-X slot,
• two slots for user-replaceable HDDs (standard 80-pin SCA connector, while not the most common interface it lets you use non-SGI-rebranded drives),
• an interchangeable AV module (just audio or audio + video capture).

The O2 was a stylish, low cost (for the manufacturer… let's say "lower cost") workstation with amazing capabilities thanks to its unified memory architecture (real-time background replacement in a live video stream was a big "wow!" in the mid-90's). As outlined, above, it was perfectly upgradable, and very easy to service (just pull at tab and the motherboard slides out on its tray…) although some parts were proprietary and came at SGI prices (aargh! 239-pin SDRAM modules).
If Apple can pull out a mini-Mac Pro that fits every item of the above description (stylish, relatively low cost, amazingly capable, upgradable) with modern equivalents (say, DDR5 RDIMM, E1.S storage and the SoC on some Apple proprietary variant of an OAM GPU module), it will be a cult machine, just like the O2.

 

[CaseySJ]

I should mention that I posted those thoughts about an Alder Lake Hackintosh after watching this:

I’m still a fan of Snazzy Labs. I just believe he thought only one move ahead when creating this video.

 

[dehjomz]

@CaseySJ

Just to chime into the discussion:

Another thing to keep in mind too with hackintoshes is that we get to bypass any Apple firmware updates that are part of the OS upgrade process. As we have no Apple firmware to update.

But real macs don’t have this luxury. With Big Sur -> Monterey, there were firmware updates that failed on some real macs and bricked them. A really terrible experience. Worse than malware when you think about it, because no one expects an OS update to corrupt their firmware and brick their machine.

Also, our hackintoshes by definition can run multiple OSes and can be repurposed into multiple use cases. For those of us that are gamers, we can game in windows on some days. Use macOS on most other days. Dabble in Linux on some days too. You can sort of do this on Apple Silicon, but only in a VM, not natively yet.

As long as Intel continues the IPC increases and delivers its products on time, long x86 shall live despite the impending ARM invasion.

Apple prides itself on performance per watt, but with how expensive the latest m1 pro/ m1 max MacBook pros are with their level of performance, it seems that Intel is winning the performance per dollar side of the equation. Apple Silicon Mac Pros are very likely to be very expensive.

So what do you prefer performance per watt or performance per dollar? Tradeoffs. And so we have to make up our own mind as to which tool to use for the job. I must say my apple silicon m1 max MacBook Pro is the best laptop I’ve ever owned. No complaints at all. It will last several years.

But on the desktop side, I prefer a hackintosh to any desktop machine that apple manufactures. And given that open core has been updated to make all P + E cores + hyper threads available to macOS, hackintosh will continue to flourish as Raptor Lake comes with even more E cores. Long live hackintosh. Glad Intel is coming back.

 

[faithie999]

Edit and now it hits me the original Griffin FireWave I bought all those years ago to use with the Leopard just died a month or so ago. I put its backup in place and managed to find another to buy for a spare once more, new in the box even dirt cheap...

Very interesting! I assume the setup software still works with modern macOS's?

 

[trs96]

Just to chime into the discussion:

One other thing I forgot to mention. The best part of owning and operating a hackintosh is the fact that you learn so much more about how a Mac functions on the software and hardware level. You get to learn from teachers like CaseySJ that can help you get through the grey areas that you may not know how to navigate on your own. You don't find anything like this on the Apple support forums.

Then there's customization. Once you buy your M1 Mac mini, it looks exactly like everyone else's Mac mini. A boring square slab of machined Aluminium with the Apple logo on top. You can't do much, other than to put some vinyl skins on one.

When you get to choose your own case, fans and lighting the options are unlimited. This is really important to many that go the hackintosh route. Finally what I don't like about the mini or the iMac, all the USB ports and power button are in the back. Reaching around to connect anything is a struggle. Yes, you can use a USB hub but then you ruin the minimalist, clean aesthetic that these Macs are supposed to give you.

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