Hackintosh 2022 and beyond - Is there any point now?

[pastrychef]

The idea of a "server" in personal computing has been replaced by various incarnations of very-low-cost appliances and the "cloud". Server, at a personal level, is now a euphemism for a economical headless box that serves a narrow purpose. At an industrial level, server is defined by the rack, be it remote or local. Whether you choose to administer your "server" via Mac, Linux, or Windows, is purely a matter of taste. None does anything the others can't with respect to server administration. If you look at where Intel has taken Xeon, it has nothing to do with personal appliances. It's about cloud provisions.

Case in point, a month ago I bought a new Beelink mini PC (NUC) with 4 core Celeron compute equal to 2008 Mac Pro, 16G, 512G SSD, 4K x3, USB3 gen2, and Windows 11 Pro pre-installed for $180 US retail, at a sale price. So the idea that there's any cost factor prohibiting access to a capable new PC is absurd.

Yup. I picked up a little barebones HP ProDesk and stuck an i7-7700T in it with some RAM and storage I had laying around and it's now my "server". It's running macOS Ventura. It runs 24/7 and runs about two dozen services for me with plenty of headroom for even more applications. It runs silently hidden in a corner and I do all administering remotely from my primary system on my desk. The whole thing probably cost me less than $200 since I had stuff laying around like RAM that I repurposed.

 

[chiefhowie]

I do it for the pure joy of hacking. And I enjoy building case mods, so paying for brand new M1/M2 computers is way beyond my budget. I don't game, and I am not using any of my builds for production, so I can get by with minimal hardware at super discount prices. I have also started to build upon my original Mac collection and doing some retro computing. If Apple were to discontinue Intel support tomorrow, I would still be building Hackintoshes for another ten years to come, and probably beyond.

yep ! 82 yrs old. my fist PC Sears store, was 8mm tape. just play time for me dell desktop ! now Catalina on USB Drive.