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What was your primary reason for building a hackintosh?

What was your primary reason for building a hackintosh?

  • Cost. Apple hardware is just too unaffordable.

    Votes: 334 26.2%
  • Apple does not sell systems with the specs I want.

    Votes: 509 39.9%
  • I already owned a PC and wanted to try macOS.

    Votes: 107 8.4%
  • I've been burned by Apple hardware failures and have no faith in their reliability.

    Votes: 20 1.6%
  • I like to tinker and learn.

    Votes: 261 20.4%
  • Other.

    Votes: 46 3.6%

  • Total voters
    1,277
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I always wanted an apple as main system (miss my old power mac 7100av) but just could not keep up with the cost, once i got the Z68X-UD3H-B3 with Lion, been hacking since 5 years plus - super stable and still fast with Sierra. And will start a kabylake system soon as its fully supported. Thanks tonymac and members for being very helpful.
 
For Logic Pro

I bought Notator Logic for the Atari 104STE in 1992. I have been with the application through its many iterations through to Emagic Logic 5.5 PC until 2010. Then I bought Logic 9 and built my first hackintosh. I dual boot Windows/OSX and haven’t looked back.
 
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I've been building and refreshing one or more PCs because work requires that I keep a Windows/Linux system, but personally (and work in the few times that require it) I always preferred using Macs ever since I was smitten by an SE/30 running System 6.x, then 7.x, 8.x... 9.22, then OS X from 10.0 to El Cap (haven't updated to Sierra yet).

Assembling/refreshing PCs were kinda fun back in the day when it was challenging (sourcing parts, making stubborn things work, etc.), but since the turn of the century, any monkey can get all the parts from Fry's and build a new one in 30 minutes, so it's lost interest since then, and I've been just doing it for work's sake.

About 10 years ago, in order to reduce the number of boxes I keep at home, I decided to downsize by trying to keep one box that could triple boot Windows, Linux and OS X. And also because I was stung after shelling out about $5,000 for a cheese-grater Mac, then finding out my off the shelf, triple booting PC performed much faster. Nevertheless, I tried to purchase bona fide Macs as much as possible, but mostly the new Macbooks.

But it was when Apple started messing with Mac Mini models, and after realizing that Intel NUCs made for better Mac Mini's that I found myself fully onboard with Hackintoshing. I have a Mac Pro-like desktop using a Gigabyte board/core i7/GTX 970 for any heavy lifting, but I find I'm doing 90% of my work with my Broadwell-based Intel NUC running El Cap. To me this is the perfect Mac.

The trash can Mac Pro is a waste, the Mac Mini line is dead, and the Macbooks are one disaster after another. Every year, I wish Apple would introduce a worthy Mac, but every year they disappoint, so I stick with Hacintoshing.
 
Honestly for me it was a combination of price, missing the hardware features I wanted and the fact that I would not have been able to game on a iMac. iMacs sure are pretty, but considering the price I just couldn't justify spending that much money on something that is not upgradeable.

So last year I decided to build a PC which I can game on every once in a while in Windows 10 and that I could use for productivity work in Sierra, and it worked like a charm: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...pha-i7-6700k-4-7-32-gb-3-2-gtx-980-ti.219776/

I can only recommend going down the hackintosh path ;)

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I mostly entered to hackintosh-ing because my brother needed a Mac, and since they're so expensive (and also there's the huge import tax on my country, plus a 3rd world salary) he asked me to research how "good" and "stable" is a hackintosh compared to an Apple product, and here we are. He runs sucessfully a Sierra desktop with a Skylake processor on a H110 chipset, so I think it fulfilled our needs.
 
I built my hacintosh to replace an old MacMini in 2013. As a graphic designer, working on a Mac is a must. And after investing less than the equivalent of an 27" iMac (around $1,600) I ended up with all of the advantages of a very powerful MacPro with 2 working OS's (OSX and Win8). I only use windows for gaming, that is a bonus.
 
Started building with Windows in the 90's. Once Tiger came along, I dropped Windows forever as I abhor Microsoft. Linux, for me, remains inscrutable but was helpful in learning about Macs. I've never considered dual-boot with any of my hacks.
 
I do scientific computing with a lot of fairly large data sets (e.g. 150+ gigs of network traffic logs) as well as music and video production for fun. I was in the market for a new Mac and had money to buy one but saw nothing that met my needs. Simply put, I needed good single and multi-core performance, a metric f-ton of RAM, and freedom to toss in increasingly large m.2 nvmes as cost comes down. I waited until the latest MBP came out and when I saw the RAM limit hadn't increased I decided to go build a machine and try to hackintosh first with plan to fallback to linux and run a headless server on the same hardware using an 2010 MBP + SSH. Hack worked great and I have been able to use it as my primary home right and I haven't regretted a thing. IF and when Apple releases a decent desktop that is upgradable and goes though at least one year of refresh so I can be sure it's not going to be summarily abandoned I will buy one. But I'm also entertaining leaving Apple at this point as they have no interest in building machines pros use.
 
I built my first Hackintosh with a GA-P55-USB3 and i7 750 back in 2012. Back then I was a big-time Apple hater (Didn't have money to afford a MacBook) but wanted to show off I can have a Mac without paying for it.

Years later I'm running a X99-Gaming5P and i7 5930K + GTX 1080 as a deep learning machine. Because I don't like to deal with Linux's incompatibility with a lot of proprietary software and still have the UNIX UI and compatibility with most bleeding edge machine learning frameworks.
 
After decades of loyalty to Apple, I felt betrayed when they abandoned us pro-editors and let us high and dry with FCP7. I understand their reasons ($$$$). So I will never buy any hardware from Apple again. I'm attached to their software for several reasons, and thought to go to Windows, but thanks to Nvidia new drivers for their powerful GPUs, I will give it another chance with a new rig soon.
 
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