What was your primary reason for building a hackintosh?

[hockeylove]

I love to build computers and try new things.

 

[dewynter410]

Due to the nature of my work I need a computer with lots of large high-speed internal drives. With a standard PC tower I can do that. Unfortunately chaining external drives via Thunderbolt/USB/FireWire from my MacBooks is not an option - way too expensive and way too many cords. So MacBooks are for mobility and non-heavy usage and hackintosh for heavy desktop work.

 

[bcarlzson]

I built a couple of hackintoshes quite a while back. I found a forum on I believe Insanely Mac to turn a Dell D620 laptop into one with snow leopard and just about everything worked. Then I found this place and dual booted my i3 2100 pc at the time.

Then I came across a post about the PovoMac. Building the cheapest mac you could, and I duplicated it for about $110 IIRC. It was based off an 1150 socket Celeron and I believe a 8400 video card. I ended up selling that to a teacher who needed a mac and couldn't afford one.

Then I sat dormant for a few years until recently a friend had an issue with his iMac and I couldn't get Sierra on a flash drive for him to reinstall (the old conundrum of you need a mac to fix a mac) So I wangjangled an old Lion virtual box image I had saved on my network drive on a PC to get some bootable media working. Once I fixed his iMac I realized I have access to copious amounts of free parts and decided I'd build my current hackintosh for a whopping $30 out of a free optiplex 790 sff and a GT 710 I got as an open box for $23 and then $6 for the USB sound card. I don't use OSX every day but I threw in an ssd to dual boot win10. It's now a sand box machine and also doubles as my 2nd monitor stand. I was surprised how easily I got the newest version of sierra running on it. It's already come in handy a couple of times when I needed to test something with OSX.

 

[Dukelipedia]

I think that the first two reasons are related. I was on the market for a mac mini but I realized that for the price I wasn't getting the hardware I wanted.

Nailed it. For the price of a mac mini, I built an iMac equivalent (obviously, not as pretty to look at).

 

[Coffeeguy]

I would like to know what your PRIMARY reason was to build a hackintosh.

I currently have a 2007 iMac 24" Duo Core that has begun to show it's age, as it is beginning to panic and crash randomly, especially when I start editing our Church service footage in iMovie. It overheats, and the USB connectivity is no longer 100% reliable. I had considered getting the 17,1 iMac with the big GPU and CPU, but spending 3+ grand for non-current hardware does not sit right with me. I maintained our Windows systems at the lab before getting "retired" after we were taken over, so the notion of building a video editing system running Mac O.S. appeals to me.

 

[Wingfat]

Was searching for a new OS. Was fed up with windows after being abused for years. Always tested new OS's ..Linux, OS/2, BeOS, FreeBSD, OpenIndiana, etc.. Finally I decided I wanted a GUI based system that was stable and had a large number of applications.. About 7 years ago I built my first hack and have never looked back. Better late then never..

 

[mariomannz]

For me it was the cost/value issue. Unless you buy the top models you don't seem to get much bang for your buck! I was looking originally at getting a mac mini about the time they did their latest 'upgrade', but the price seemed over the top for the what you got. Also with that version there was no way to upgrade at all down the track if I wanted more memory. So I built a Hackintosh based on the customac model, it runs super fast and very stable. I don't think I'd buy another true mac to be honest unless I was getting a laptop machine.

 

[MikeHoward]

Being a software developer on Microsoft technologies since 1991, i was getting bored. OSX community has grown in our country tremendously since 2005. Not being able to put together a budget, the alternative was to use my existing X86 machine. Spent almost 9 months testing , trying and reading up blogs and blogs of posts. In 2012 I decided to jump.

Worth investing the time !!!. Since then I'm as happy as a chappy .

All family members have iphones, even apple TV and macbook. Imacs are too expensive, build 2 iMacs .

 

[PashZ]

Fed up with:
1. Incustomability of all modern macs: can't upgrade or change memory, video etc etc
2. Prices
3. When a part of your mac goes out of order, have to bring the whole computer to a service center, can't just change the faulty unit and keep working. It costed me almost 2 weeks of work on iPad (!!!) when my MBP broke. In similar case, e.g. videocard failure in my current hackintosh, I'd just go and buy a new one in any closest PC store and keep going.

Also, it turned out to be interesting

 

[grafiko]

Yes but I will be select this answer too: "Apple does not sell systems with the specs I want." But I have only one choice... thank you all for this site to help me to building my hackintosh system!