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Niche ?

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Jul 23, 2012
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Motherboard
Asus Prime X570 Pro
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Ryzen 9 3900X
Graphics
RX 590
Mac
  1. iMac
  2. MacBook Air
  3. MacBook Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
  2. iOS
Hi

Is it me or has it become increasingly difficult to build a fully functional hackintosh since the past couple of years or so?
I don't want to complain or anything but I remember I waited until 2012 to first try to set up a rig because the required knowledge and competance was just too high before that. Then there were what I would call "the Golden years" where all one had to know is to buy relatively compatible hardware (the choice was vast already) and check a few options in multibeast. At some point I was recommending the experience even to very tech unsavvy friends.
Now it seems to me that we need to go through very complex (for noobs) steps of patching stuff and looking for appropriate settings in a haystack to get crucial elements working, like IGPU or USB... There are much less things that are (or can be) automated apparently.

I wonder what happened. Is it Apple making things harder for the community in the hope of selling more hardware? Is it the variety of components becoming so great that there is just too many stuff to fix (I doubt that). Is there a desire of experimented hackintoshers and developers to prevent too unexperimented users from going on this journey (I doubt that too)

Let me know what you think and what you know.

Thank you very much in advance for your feedback.

Sincerely yours,
Old-ass A
 
Hi there.

I understand where you're coming from. All these DRM and GPU problems. USB configuration, power-management, wake-from-sleep etc etc.

It's not an easy prospect for a first-time hackintosher and must seem very daunting to new people coming on board. The Golden Builds section here doesn't feature as much lately (although I'm impressed there's a Z390 in there now!) so clearly getting to the Golden Build level isn't easy.

I think there are more tools available for us nowadays to get around all these problems. I mean look, instead of having to create our own bespoke SSDT for CPU power-management, all we have to do nowadays is tick a plug-ins box in Clover Configurator. Simple as. Superb work by all the developers who have helped us keep going. And that's just one example. The Lilu kext plug-in system is another. Not forgetting UniBeast and MultiBeast which are quality products.

In a lot of ways things do seem to have gotten harder. Maybe it's just the sheer variety of components available nowadays and shoe-horning them into something macOS will recognise? For sure the switch way from Nvidia GPUs has hurt us a lot, with no further drivers being provided. I ran Nvidia GPUs for years but have now switched over to AMD Radeon for ease of compatibility.

:)
 
The change from Chimera bootloader to Clover and UEFI booting, around the time of Yosemite, El Capitan seems to be when the shift happened. The motherboard manufacturers now had the ability to add so much more to UEFI than they could ever fit onto a tiny ROM BIOS chip. Hence the need for Clover then, just to be able to even boot macOS on PC motherboards. Apple did drastically change their USB implementation in El Capitan but I don't think that Apple is doing anything to prevent or reduce the amount of people running a hackintosh. It just seems so much more complicated because you can do so much more with Clover. You can really fine tune a build so much using Clover and UEFI hot patching (with custom SSDTs and config.plist edits) that it's easy to simply click update in the App store and not have to worry about breaking your install.

I also started back in the legacy BIOS days of early 2012 and really liked using Chimera based on it's simplicity and stability. It did seem that my first Z68 hackintosh was incredibly easy to setup using Unibeast and Multibeast. If I were starting out with a first build today it would take a lot more time to get a new build (Z390) fully working. That's why the current guides and User Builds take so much longer to implement. So many more hoops to jump through and much more technical jargon to learn. It might actually be a good thing. New people that come here and just want a "cheaper version" of a real Mac find out that you really have to make a seriously concerted effort to get a PC working as smoothly and trouble free as a "real" Mac.
 
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Then there were what I would call "the Golden years" where all one had to know is to buy relatively compatible hardware (the choice was vast already) and check a few options in multibeast.
I remember this time well. They really were golden years. The Buyer's Guide was primarily just a few Gigabyte motherboards that all had custom edited DSDTs. You can still view them here: https://www.tonymacx86.com/dsdt-database/

The very first Unibeast had just come out. Editing a config.plist was very simple. Very few changes were even necessary. Made my first Hackintosh a dream come true. I had expected to face a lot of problems but had a completely opposite experience. That Z68 system still runs like a dream today over 7 years later.
 
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Thanks for all this :)

I must admit, since you mentioned Windows, that Win 10 feels OK for me. It's the 1st Win that seems to make sense to me (I went 95-98-XP-7-10). I like the way they slowly and gradually morph(ed) from the Win7 UI to what they want Win10 to become. For now it's still kinda hybrid but that's OK to me.

I liked macOS very much since the early days I started using it (around 2003). Nowadays it feels like all the newest features are not for me. I don't have an iPhone, I don't use cross-platform apps or continuity or whatever this is called. and I use almost no Apple apps actually. But I like the way macOS generally feels stable and smooth. It's not the same story on my current hacks though... Currently I'm fighting to setup stuff like USB ports, headless iGPU, AI CS6 is randomly slow... I got KPs coming out of nowhere, I have no idea if I should or should not enable TRIM on my APFS SSDs... And I won't even talk about power/sleep, I disabled sleep completely out of sanity. I might want to dig into this one if I get to configure my rigs right up to this point, though... I am not working in IT or anything like that but I learned with friends/mentors who do and obviously also a lot online (most of it the hard way ;) ). I remember back in 05 or something when my GF got back home with a WiFI AP, threw it a me and said "My dad gave me this thing. I want wireless internet now". I had no idea what an IP was. I knew nothing about networks, DHCP servers, and such then. I still know very little but I'm considered by most as etremely tech savvy... If only they knew ;))))

Well...

Thanks again :)
Have a great one
-a-
 
Well....
Maybe opencore bootloader will make setting up a hackintosh simple again (for people like me).... Fingers crossed...
Maybe it won't and it's gonna require even more knowledge than using clover... Time will tell.
 
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