How long life time will a hackintosh have?

[LazarX]

Here's the thing... Hackintosh machines are fun to play with... but if my livelihood depended on them, I'd buy a real Mac. Hackintoshes dance a minefield with every software upgrade you put into them, and it's not that hard to terminally screw yourself up. or the machine to suddenly go wonky with a hardware glitch. So if you're going to use them for work.... build 2 and make sure you are saving your work to a drive not tied to your machine.

 

[Smidoid]

I've owned a variety of machines over a long career in IT - and the one thing I can say about the most recent Macs is that quality control seems to have gone out of the window. Many manufacturers are cutting back as the market is really saturated now but seems that Apple have been taking the micky a bit. With one notable exception (a 24" Core 2 Duo iMac that was almost never switched off) the most recent macs have been hugely unreliable and the newest one - just two years old and lightly used is now dead and in need of a new PSU or perhaps even a mobo! Rarely starts and has been plagued by RAM issues from day 1.

We have three 2008 Mac Pros and all of them - plus one more I service on occasion - have eaten their ECC RAM which is highly expensive and hard to get a hold of.

We've had numerous other issues so my love affair with Apple is truly soured. Now I'm on GNU+Linux boxes based on quality "PC" hardware. The latest one, a used HP Z620 (16 cores, 32 threads) rips most Mac Pros to shreds on a benchmark and costs a fraction of the price. Also has an upgrade path to more powerful processors/GPUs. It looks as pretty as an airport but what do I care? If anything goes wrong, I can get at most of it to do repairs and the HP workstations are tool free!

So far, it won't run a hackintosh (nVidia "Pascal" issues) but I expect that to change over time.

 

[zangadao]

Seven years ago unibody Macbooks came to stores, and I instantly bought one. For price of 1100 €, it was an amazingly good purchase. Three years ago I installed a SSD drive, and I'm still using my old good Macbook.

Now I think it's finally time to buy a new computer. I have an iPad, so I don't need laptop anymore. (I use my Macbook as a desktop, with external keyboard, mouse and screen.) Unfortunately, Mac Minis seem to be outdated, and the cheapest iMac with SSD costs more than 2300 €, which is ridiculous (and that's even without retina!)

So, if I build a new "Mac Mini Deluxe", following strictly Tonymacx86's suggestions, how long lifetime is my new hackintosh likely to have? Is it possible to use it 5-8 years without severe problems?

How often will I have problems that will need fixing and spending hours in Google and forums? Every week/month/year or never? I know something about computers, but definitely I'm not any kind of nerd.

To put my guestion in other words: I'm planning to use my next computer for 5-8 years. Is it sensible to build a hackintosh, or should I buy a genuine Mac, because it'll "pay itself back" during following years?

So, depends. I have a core2quad hackintosh, has a 9 years old, I guess, perfect working here. Today running 10.10.6 (started with 10.5 (or 10.6 I don't remember) Kalaway distro). The original build has Asus P5k Deluxe, Q6600, 8GB RAM, a NVIDIA 8800 GTX 512 ram, and in the middle of road I change to Asus GTX 660 2GB, and two years ago change the system to SSD. Still a good machine for day-by-day, but don't compare with my new one rig for working. The advantage of hackintosh is can upgrade some components (I brought a used Q9550 three years ago) and GPu, no regrets. I thing this rig has a two or three good years from now, until the end of life. I don't have a plan to upgrade de system to 10.11 or 10.12.

 

[yoki]

I have a very old sony vaio VGN-FS640/W Centrino, Intel Pentium M 740, 1GB Ram, GMA900... First hacked with 10.4.1 in 2005, and now still up and running OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, the last OS X it can run.

 

[batutta]

Here's the thing... Hackintosh machines are fun to play with... but if my livelihood depended on them, I'd buy a real Mac.

My livelihood depends on it...which is why I built my own Hackintosh. More customizable, easier to upgrade, more bang for your buck, and I actually think it's MORE stable than any mac I bought previously. As long as I don't try to upgrade the OS in the middle of a project, I'm fine. I've never spent more than a few hours upgrading anyway, which I do during downtime, and I always clone my hard drive before trying. Now instead of having to buy a new mac every few years, I just swap in a new GPU, or a new graphics card when I need more horsepower.

 

[powerpcg5]

Here's the thing... Hackintosh machines are fun to play with... but if my livelihood depended on them, I'd buy a real Mac.

Same here, my livelihood depends on my computer. Self-employed, running a couple of businesses -- my computer is important to my operation. I have a real iMac 27" here in the office... guess what? Logic board died. What's the solution? Buying another iMac computer? Hell No! If my business depended on that real iMac, I would be dead in the water right now.

Prior to Hackintosh, I have a real Apple PowerPC G5 dual cpu. Guess what? Liquid cooling developed a leak, always overheating... couldn't do work. Couldn't fix it. So between deciding buying another Apple computer, or trying out this Hackintosh, I went the Hackintosh route back in 2011. Never looked back. This computer has been rock solid 5 years now. (my signature)

This year, built another Hack with 4790K and GTX970. Looks like it's going to be a winner too.

 

[fivos1996]

My old 2009 MSI G31 LGA 775 mobo and 2011 Palit GT 430 GPU still work great with El Capitan but I need a GPU upgrade as it isn't supported on Sierra.

 

[GBuys]

I built my Hackintosh just a few months ago and i actually like it alot! I actually got all up and running with latest Sierra 10.12 with Clover boot loader, However took me 5 hours to set it up, (I'm lucky) and it is FAST!! but the only problem is that you can't type (@) on it so i have to copy it from Google. otherwise I dual boot it with Windows 7 and it works! I use (CPU: Intel Core i5 6500k, 3.2 GHZ) (Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170-Gaming K3) (RAM: 8 GB) (Graphics: built in)

 

[Ridolph]

Seven years ago unibody Macbooks came to stores, and I instantly bought one. For price of 1100 €, it was an amazingly good purchase. Three years ago I installed a SSD drive, and I'm still using my old good Macbook.

Now I think it's finally time to buy a new computer. I have an iPad, so I don't need laptop anymore. (I use my Macbook as a desktop, with external keyboard, mouse and screen.) Unfortunately, Mac Minis seem to be outdated, and the cheapest iMac with SSD costs more than 2300 €, which is ridiculous (and that's even without retina!)

So, if I build a new "Mac Mini Deluxe", following strictly Tonymacx86's suggestions, how long lifetime is my new hackintosh likely to have? Is it possible to use it 5-8 years without severe problems?

How often will I have problems that will need fixing and spending hours in Google and forums? Every week/month/year or never? I know something about computers, but definitely I'm not any kind of nerd.

To put my guestion in other words: I'm planning to use my next computer for 5-8 years. Is it sensible to build a hackintosh, or should I buy a genuine Mac, because it'll "pay itself back" during following years?

Going on 8 years now. Started at Lion, now on Yosemite. Some issues, mostly when restarting. But generally runs for weeks at a time using FCP and other production software, so I'm happy with it. About to replace it, 7 generations later.

 

[sebecam2000]

I built my Hackintosh 2 years ago. I used recommended hardware and it works like a charm. At that time, I struggled with Clover installation but now that it is integrated into the Unibeast, you will have no problem.
If I may give some advices based on my xp:
1- Use hardware recommended by TonyMacX86 and prefer Gigabyte to any other brand (even if it is more expensive, trust me it's worth it). If you are hesitating, copy the config of an active user of this site, and check on google that people do not report too many problems. For the graphics card, choose nVidia, with a model that is known to be fully hackintosh-compatible.
2- Use Clover (integrated in Unibeast)
3- Ask your questions in this forum in case of problems