What was your primary reason for building a hackintosh?

[wstrohm]

My first computer was an IMSAI 8080A, which was mostly a toy with lots of switches. At work I used a Mac SE for a long time. Later I bought a Mac II (wow, color!) Then a PM8500, upgraded to a G3 motherboard. My last Mac was/is my G5.

I still have my PPC G5 2.7 GHz dual-CPU liquid-cooled with a couple of 1 TB WD hard drives and a good ATI Radeon graphics card, but I could only stay with the PPC for so long since Steve pulled the carpet out from under me in 2005. And now I'm mostly gaming.

No more room on the floor for a tower, plus I wanted an "efficient" (AC power-wise) computer. So small, but a "Mighty Mouse" kind of computer that fits under the monitor shelf on my desk. I started with Snow Leopard with tonymac's help, then Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and now Sierra. The first mini-ITX was a Haswell, and my present is a Skylake. The CPU's TDP is only 65 watts but it runs at 3.4 GHz. My new GTX 1050 Ti OC (low profile) barely fits, but turns 83 fps on "Valley" in High quality and 2xAA. And it uses about 67 watts. Good, since my power supply is only 180 watts. But it supports everything including a Blu-Ray writer, 2 SSDs, 16 GB DDR4 RAM, and my Noctua NH-L9i CPU cooler.

Building the hardware for both computers was very easy, but without tonymac's website I never would have satisfactorily completed either project.

My Haswell Mini-ITX now has a GTX 750 Ti (low profile) shoehorned into it, and it and my primary computer both run Sierra and both work fine.

[Edit Jan. 2021: My, these old posts do go out of date, don't they?]

 

[inequals]

Apple just aren't making the Mac Pro I need/want. If I can get my Hack Pro up and running nicely, then I'm going to sell my oh-so-very-trusty-and-loved non-Retina 2012 MBP, and get one of those MacBook (2016) retinas for my portable needs, and use my Hack Pro as my main creation station, later dual-booting Windows to do sexual VR things (VR was actually the main catalyst for all this)

edit My point is, I am in no way "losing faith" in Apple, I'm very much an Apple fanboy, thing is I also have a big thing for Windows and Linux and tech in general. Apple haven't cared about "pro" users for a while now - I kinda understand, I mean who at this point can really criticise Apple's business decisions? Anyone with more than $700bn in liquid cash reserves can, but as it is, I just love the things I love (AirPods, my jailbroken iPad Pro 12.9"), and live with the things I don't (getting rid of the analogue socket on iPhone 7 - I'm happy on my 6s until they hopefully blow minds with this iPhone X)

Also, just in case anyone questions my Apple fanboy statistics, I worked for Apple Retail as a Genus for 7 years... glad I'm not doing it any more though, as amazing as it was, it's still retail

 

[84mac]

originally started as a proof of concept, I suppose... surprised it worked...

well, I do it today... but you have to have balls of steel and be a little smarter than the system to use a hack as a mission critical, work producing, production machine - your opinion may differ... (use multiple machines for film music/post prod - no computer "oops" allowed or tolerated)...

 

[aarbot]

no BSOD?? thats what killed it for me. I had word and photoshop open for too long then CAPUT!

thank you tonymacx86 and the macman! setting my first machine up was a challenge but its still kicking today!

I just got some new hardware to test out today.

 

[SquishyTia]

I needed a system that could handle games on either platform, but preferrably in OS X, and all Apple offered was closed-ended systems with no upgradeability, overpriced RAM and storage options, no built in optical solutions (for HTPC use), and laptop parts in every corner of their lineup. Without expandability, upgradeability, good storage options (or fast storage options), I'd be stuck using mediocre settings for games even at 1080p, let alone 4k when I could finally afford moving to that resolution.

With my Hackwell Pro, the only component I'll need to upgrade anytime soon is my GPU. That'll be a 1080Ti, which would easily smoke several "real" Macs at once and have room for iPads for dessert. My next hack pro will be one with NVMe so that I can enjoy lightning quick loads in games and a zippy fast OS. I got a real taste of just how much faster even my "aging" Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD is the other day when I had to boot off of my backup bootable OS partition on my 3 TB HD after attempting to "fix" the 10.12.4 Safari/webkit freeze issue. It took a good four minutes to load to the Finder on the HD, and that's with it having been recently defragmented! Startup on my SSD? About 10-12 seconds at most once I was past the Clover 5 second post-startup screen timeout (that's the screen just after the clover volume select GUI disappears during automatic startup and before OS X's verbose mode comes up). Not even Apple's Fusion drives can offer that speed. Only their insanely priced PCIe/NVMe SSD options that you have to be a genius technician to upgrade yourself if you ever need to (if you're even allowed to - so much is soldered into the mobo now).

I want OS X. I like to game. I sure as hell ain't gonna do it on Apple's pedantic hardware.

 

[gorg]

Have had lots of Macs, as well as other computers/platforms since the early 80s. Built tons of various systems for relatives/friends/acquaintances, recommended even more to others. I started having a Hackintosh as my primary system once Apple abandoned PowerPC and digressed to Intel x86 technology. I mostly cared about MacPros back then but they were overpriced, too slow, too big, too noisy and their cooling system was suboptimal. Things turned interesting a few years ago with the cylindrical Mac Pro but Apple was still trying too hard to become "the American company" instead of "the international company" - I am not going to pay the multiple tax penalty for them. I was more than OK to pay the premium for a compact and efficient case and cooling system, but they went too far with the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD pricing and the currency exchange. Things don't look to change for the better in the future (Apple is listening to the wrong people) so I will keep using Hackintosh until it's not an option.

 

[untmdsprt]

I'm getting tired of waiting for the Mac mini to be refreshed so now I'm seriously looking into building my own mini to get back into using the MacOS. Besides I have a few PCs lying around that I'm attempting to install Lion on just to see what is involved.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like any of the motherboards support UEFI or being able to set the drives to AHCI. Only my newest computer can do that and it currently has Windows 10 on it and my main computer. Maybe when I get ready to build a VR computer, I'll re-purpose this computer into a Hacintosh.

 

[Anachronaut]

I want a quiet, do it all HTPC mini tower that Apple does not make. The Mac Mini is not a good option as it can be LOUD and is a mess of cables and extensions due to almost no internal options, such as a quiet DVD or Blu-Ray drive. I also like the fact that I can build one FAR cheaper than a new Apple Mac make and VERY reliable for my purposes. A chance to tinker with the computer is also a big plus for me.

I am waiting for Apple to introduce Mac OS 11 that will work on all modern X86 platforms from Intel and AMD so that all of this can be done legitimately. Wishful thinking, I know, but I can always dream.

 

[asiga]

I built my Hackintosh because I needed a good NVIDIA GPU and a Pro box with current specs. The Mac Pro was (and still is) outdated when I built my Hackintosh.

 

[GadgeteerUK]

I wanted to build a video editing PC which would have RAID 1 drives for storing our customer's files on. A fast SSD and fast GFX card. There simply wasn't an Apple machine that was capable of this without compromising on something, somewhere.