Recommendation for new laptop?

[sohumc]

Hey everyone, I'm not a complete newcomer to hackintoshing, but I don't have much experience with laptops. I will buy one within the next couple of weeks and was wondering if anyone knew of a laptop that was hackintosh-able with QE/CI working. I'm looking for recommendations that aren't HP, Dell, or Acer, 15.6" or 14", and in the 600-700$ range.

 

[RehabMan]

Hey everyone, I'm not a complete newcomer to hackintoshing, but I don't have much experience with laptops. I will buy one within the next couple of weeks and was wondering if anyone knew of a laptop that was hackintosh-able with QE/CI working. I'm looking for recommendations that aren't HP, Dell, or Acer, 15.6" or 14", and in the 600-700$ range.

The best and easiest to hack right now is the HP ProBook 4x30s or HP ProBook 4x40s series.

 

[sohumc]

The best and easiest to hack right now is the HP ProBook 4x30s or HP ProBook 4x40s series.

Thanks for the input. I've owned a number of HP's and Dells over the years, and they all seem to fail on me pretty quickly, so that's why I'm a bit hesitant on them. I'm leaning more towards Samsung and Asus with i5 or i7 processors. Know any suggestions for these brands?

 

[RehabMan]

Thanks for the input. I've owned a number of HP's and Dells over the years, and they all seem to fail on me pretty quickly, so that's why I'm a bit hesitant on them. I'm leaning more towards Samsung and Asus with i5 or i7 processors. Know any suggestions for these brands?

All the brands pretty much have the same stuff inside them....
Build quality of the chassis varies and the need for a well built chassis depends on how much abuse the laptop takes.

As far as Samsung or Asus... have never owned one.

So... I suggest you look at a specific model then gather information about the hardware: CPU, chipset, WiFi, trackpad, bluetooth (if important), ethernet. The specifics of the hardware will determine how difficult it will be to hack. Details matter, sometimes down to small issues like the hardware rev or firmware installed for the trackpad (just an example). Often times WiFi will not work out-of-box, so you need to replace it. Some BIOSes implement a "white list" which limits which cards you can install. And with some of the more compact laptops, the WiFi is soldered to the motherboard or integrated with other components (combo mSATA SSD+WiFi, for example), making replacement difficult.

And then good idea before you purchase would be to look to see if there is a concise guide written for that model. DSDT edits are particular important for laptops. If you pick a laptop with compatible hardware, you can probably get it to work, but it is going to depend on having a well written guide or your own skills for finding the correct components.

 

[sohumc]

Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it. In general, which chipset for laptops is most compatible? It looks like I'll buy a laptop I want and go from there. I look forward to the challenge actually.

 

[RehabMan]

Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it. In general, which chipset for laptops is most compatible?

The ones with chipsets that are closest to those used on real Apple hardware.

It looks like I'll buy a laptop I want and go from there. I look forward to the challenge actually.

That's ok if you're prepared for the possibility that it will not work. Otherwise, do lots of research prior...

 

[rodionzissou]

FYI I know you don't particularly like HP but their Probook has served me well for about 2 years with not a single problem. I've hacked the crap out of it, replaced a monitor and wifi card and keyboard, (because i dropped it down some stairs and busted the hingeset, and later spilt water on the keyboard) and it's still running strong. It is also a highly compatible option for running osx. Not to mention it's very cheap and it has aluminum casing. The sandy bridge models can take 16gb ram, a 2.4 ghz i7 and it's sata III compatible. I think the newer ivy bridge models will support more ram and allow faster processors.

 

[sohumc]

FYI I know you don't particularly like HP but their Probook has served me well for about 2 years with not a single problem.

I'm just curious, how's the battery life holding up after 2 years?

 

[rodionzissou]

I get 3-4 hours of full brightness, constant browsing and medium use (CS6, VLC, ut*****t).

 

[dpg12]

I'm biased, but if you don't want an HP (can't say I blame you; I don't like HP, either, although to their credit, they did fix my PC under warranty and replace my motherboard when I was stupid and forgot my BIOS password and ran a CMOS-clearing tool that killed my PC), despite the fact that the ProBooks are the best supported "HackBooks" with an easy installer and a team doing the hard work like getting AppleHDA patched, then I would say ASUS.

Why? This list is from the experience of my own ASUS laptop running 10.8.4 (I will only try the next version when the first production release is out).

• Lots of their laptops use the ALC269 Realtek codec, so getting AppleHDA working with them is pretty easy. Mine came with the ALC663, for which there is practically no information available for on the Internet, but after going through my codec dumps I realised that it's pretty much the same as the ALC269 so I was able to use the ALC269 instructions to move away from VoodooHDA (which I will always love, except for the fact I used to get distortion at high volumes with it).
• Most either come with Elan touchpads or Synaptics. There are good drivers available for both. However with my Synaptics, I have to reload the mouse kext sometimes because my mouse stops functioning. A bit annoying, since I'm not sure why it does it, but it takes me two seconds to enable it again. To be honest, I'm finding it sometimes stops working in Windows when I'm transferring files to an external hard disk through USB 3.0, so *shrug*
• There are two documented ways to convert the battery status registers into 8-bit so that you can see the battery status without having to downgrade AppleACPIPlatform.kext.
• In addition to that, most of the main hotkeys work with a kext - the volume keys, the brightness keys, the key to quickly turn off the display, the Fn+sleep button combo, the disable wireless button and the media keys. With the newer AppleACPIPlatform.kext, by default, the brightness keys (including display off) stop working. EmlyDinesh fixed the brightness keys, I found a workaround for the display off keys BUT the workaround doesn't seem to work with newer ASUS laptops, like the Zenbook. My workaround also fixed the lid state detection on my laptop with the newer AppleACPIPlatform.kext so that I could go to sleep by closing my lid again (I think Zenbooks didn't need the workaround for that, but that's just an assumption based on a few chats with a Zenbook owner).
• You can get fan and total CPU temperature readings in HWMonitor. I also don't need any solution to control fan speeds as my ASUS laptop does a pretty good job of it by itself under OS X - it remains silent most of the time except under a heavy CPU load and even then it gradually rises according to the CPU load. However, on some forums, people do have a problem with the fan speed of the Zenbook and do want manual fan speed control, which has actually been implemented for Windows.
• You don't need a "shutdown fix" in the DSDT. I use one nevertheless (it's only one line, really), as I found I did need it with an old version of GenericUSBXHCI that caused my computer to restart when it was about to shutdown but now that that's been fixed, I could take it out of my DSDT and still shut down fine.
• Provided that you've set up power management properly (AICPUM fixed/BIOS patched, proper smbios.plist definition, SSDT patched), sleep works like a charm.
• All brightness levels are available with a kext, the only downsides are that there are six levels that don't do anything (MacBooks have about 16 brightness levels, ASUS DSDTs only return 10) and the brightness is at the lowest setting on boot.
• My VGA port works after patching the table in the Intel Sandy Bridge framebuffer kext. However, it seems it cannot detect when I have removed my VGA cable and I haven't tested the HDMI port and nor do I know how the Ivy Bridge FB kext is patched.
• Updates are really easy. To get full-functionality (well, as full as it can be) back after updating from, say, 10.8.3 to 10.8.4, all I need to do is reinstall RehabMan's battery kext, patch AppleHDA again (much easier now given that all I have to do is drop back in my previous zlib files, patch the info.plist of one kext in there and patch the AppleHDA binary) and the Sandy Bridge FB kext for my VGA port.
• There's no idiotic card whitelist. You can swap cards freely.
• On the Zenbook, the ambient light sensor works for keyboard backlight.

Downsides:

• I can't watch DVDs. While I managed to fix this (or so I had thought) once, it stopped working and whenever I attempt to seek in a DVD when the drive has spun down, DVD Player will hang.
• Unless you're using a popular laptop, you can say goodbye to BIOS updates from ASUS. My laptop has a bug that causes it to hang when entering sleep mode in any OS (even the bare-bones install media of Arch Linux) in UEFI mode. I reported it to them, got a reply back from the support team but yet to see a fix from their programmers in the form of a new BIOS. Meanwhile, they're updating the MEI firmware and CPU microcodes and enabling AES-NI in new BIOS releases for their other laptops. I had to do these things myself.
• Not always specific to ASUS machines: On the subject of patching BIOSes, you will need to patch ASUS BIOSes for CPU power management. I did it manually by following a guide, but I hear PMPatch is all the rage these days. The alternative is patching the AICPUM kext every time it's updated.
• The battery life on my laptop has always sucked, even in Windows, so I get about the same amount of time from both, but an owner with a Zenbook says his battery lasts about two hours less in OS X.
• Not always specific to ASUS machines, either: Odds are you will have to swap the internal card out for working Wi-Fi. On my ASUS laptop it was really easy and took me 10 minutes (I imagine it will take normal people two minutes). However, on the Zenbook due to its size, you have to do really odd things with the new card to get it to fit. I replaced my Centrino with an Atheros and, to be honest, this thing sucks. Hell, blued even causes a kernel panic once in a while when shutting down. I do wish I could use my Centrino in OS X. I also cannot turn off the Bluetooth in Windows and in OS X anymore. OS X I expected as it uses a generic BT driver for Atheros BT chipsets, but I did expect my Fn+F2 combo to work for Bluetooth, like it did with my Centrino. Maybe the EC firmware is looking for the IDs of my Centrino. Maybe I'm talking out of my other orifice. If you don't need Bluetooth and can find a card that fits, look into a Broadcom Wi-Fi card instead.
• Not specific to ASUS machines, too: I get graphical glitches once in a while with my HD 3000. They don't render the display practically unusable, but they are annoying.
• Also happens with some real MacBooks: This site causes display flickering with my HD 3000.
• Not just an ASUS thing: It is 99% likely that you will not be able to use your discrete graphics card. I think lots of the gaming range of their laptops use the discrete card to power the display, but, otherwise, trust me, I speak from experience having tried many things to get my NVIDIA chip to work, it is very likely that you will have to use the Intel HD 3000/4000 under OS X as Optimus will not work.
• From an end-user point of view, this won't matter (and it doesn't to me), but the hotkeys are handled through the WMI interface rather than just plain keycodes. This means I cannot use RehabMan's PS/2 kexts to handle hotkey presses, but as mentioned above, there is a driver anyway (sadly the source hasn't been updated in a while) that will enable the use of the keys anyway.
• Some laptops have card readers that just aren't compatible with OS X (the Realtek range comes to mind). The Alcor one in my laptop just presents a plain Mass Storage device, which works fine, and I even get a nice little SD card icon on my desktop after modifying AppleUSBCardReader.kext.
• Not really a downside but I think almost all of their laptops use the ASMedia USB 3.0 chipsets. There is no native support for them in OS X, like there is for the Intel USB 3.0 chipsets, but GenericUSBXHCI works absolutely fine with them. I did have to update my USB 3.0 chipset firmware first, though, before it actually became useful and I could start using the ports (slow speeds, frequent disconnections, unable to recognise devices were common occurrences before updating).

Here's the changes to my DSDT so that you have a feel for some the things you have to patch with an ASUS laptop (some of these things are just the renaming of _T_0/1 to T_0/1, GFX0 to IGPU and the making of NonSerialized methods that iasl wanted me to change to Serialized): http://pastebin.com/bQ1Rti3C