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Hackintoshes reliability - audio production

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Hello guys! I have a 15 inch 2018 2.6ghz. 6 core MacBook Pro but the thermal are terrible! When I use heavy vst instruments it starts to sound like a jet engine. I tried everything including a fresh install of the OSX ,this laptop is just bad! I have had my eye on hackintoshes for a very long time and I wonder can they be used for a serious profesional audio work or shoud I sell my MacBook and buy an iMac i9 2018? I've never build even an ordinary pc by myself,but I'm a techy nerd guy and I think that i can handle it.

When you setup the Hackintosh are you done with it or more problems are to be expected in the future? Can it be as quiet as an Apple machine? Will I face any kind of problems with audio/audio interfaces?

Some people have told me that hackintoshes are trash? But why? In summary I'm asking about pros and cons of an i9 iMac vs i9 hackintosh
I will appreciate any advice , thanks!
 
Welcome to the forums,

The 2019 MacBook Pro models are supposed to be a big improvement over the 2018 models for thermals and noise. That said they are designed to be thin portable devices rather than desktop computers so all laptops are going to be handicapped for heavier use that is really better suited to a desktop computer with a suitable cooling design and implementation for heavier use.

There can be quite a lot of work to get computer running macOS well. The basic installation is generally very quick and can pass quite easily - the truth is that there are some important and in depth parts of installation to be completed after the OS is up and running in a basic state. A lot of users that try macOS more than likely never get their machine working fully, then they run into issues with graphics, USB or something else that doesn't quite work right.

For Audio use please note that *as far I am am aware* hot plugging of ThunderBolt devices does not work on hackintoshes at present.

Audio Section of the forum which will have lots of good information for you:

The Golden Builds section is where there are good build guides for various hardware configurations which will give you a good idea of what to expect on getting your system set up and what processes are required after the initial USB installation has been completed. As many of these guides have been going for some time it documents life with a machine over a period of time.

Do you really need an i9? Could an i7 not be powerful enough?

A real Mac is plug and play, has a good resell value - a PC does require some work, but you can design it to look the way you would like it to look and it is easy to add a graphics card of additional RAM or storage.

A production machine is best updated when your work commitments allow - don't update a production machine the moment an update becomes available from Apple. Leave it until you have time in your schedule and check that Apple haven't done something to cause the community problems - may take a day or two to find a fix. TMX provide update recommendations for each update but check that most folk have an easy update before you go and jump in. :thumbup:

Here is the 10.14.5 update thread - the first two posts detail what the update is understood to change and general best practice to go through for that update.

Reliability can be excellent, with many users saying that their Hackintosh is more reliable and performs better than their real macs over a period of time.
Apple do produce good computers so even if you decide that your main rig should perhaps be a Mac, why not build a Hack as a side project at some point to see if you like it.
 
I wonder can they be used for a serious profesional audio work or shoud I sell my MacBook and buy an iMac i9 2018? I've never build even an ordinary pc by myself,but I'm a techy nerd guy and I think that i can handle it.

When you setup the Hackintosh are you done with it or more problems are to be expected in the future? Can it be as quiet as an Apple machine? Will I face any kind of problems with audio/audio interfaces?

I'm running a Hackintosh with ProTools and Reaper (and the whole Komplete suite, so sh*tloads of VSTs) for many years now. No problems ever (unless I started fooling around, but by day I'm a computer guy, so ... )

I'm still running El Capitan, as it's the last one that my ProTools setup supports. Haven't updated in ages, and no issues either.

My sound interface is a Focusrite Scarlet 2i4, it works out of the box, and allows me to record a stereo track without problem (well ... no ... the only issue I ever ran into was protools choking due to a faulty hard drive, and the recordings and mixing gave me issues, until I popped that bad HDD out). I can probably record much more channels though (I did an 8 track recording on a smaller MacBook Pro, so I'm confident my hackintosh can handle the load)

Did I mention it's an old CPU I'm using ? i7 2xxx, from 2011 ... Still works like a charm (noisy though, but I'm using fans and no watercooling - noise isn't my concern so far).

Ah, and I mixed 2 complete albums on this setup, plus did a load of recordings (guitars & bass mostly). So yeah, hackintosh is rock solid and really good for audio production.
 
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