Re: Why do you want to build your own Hacintosh?
I've been a mac user my whole life-- and I admit to loving their industrial design. It all started with my parent's IIsi... and I've been an evangelist (I would not call myself a fanboy, this was before it was "cool" and I don't ignore Apple's faults), when appropriate, since.
There are a few reasons why I'm building a hackintosh:
- I love to tinker. I remember overclocking an old Mac tower (I think it was a G3 300, but it might have been G4 dual 450) by messing with jumper blocks on the motherboard over a decade ago. Great fun, and didn't burn anything out. About a year ago, I bought an eeePC netbook because Apple didn't make what I needed for travel/work: lightweight, small, cheap, long battery life, minimal power machine I wouldn't be upset about losing, breaking, or having stolen in some of the dodgy places I travel to. That was my first hackintosh introduction-- and I'm typing this post from 10.6.5 on this perfect little machine.
- Apple doesn't make a product that I really want at a price point I feel great about buying. My current desktop is an aging iMac C2D 2.16 w/ 4GB RAM and 256MB VRAM. It's treated me well, but with my photography, and increasingly video, work, it can't quite keep up. I also don't like the idea of relying on Apple if one component burns out, or one component becomes a major bottleneck-- hell, I can't even replace the HD without major surgery (see: ungluing foil wrapper, etc). I don't NEED 8-core or 12-core dual processors, and I can't afford it anyway.
- I am moving to Germany in the spring, and the cost for Macs being in Euros (I will continue to be paid in USD) puts even a 27-inch, 4-core iMac further out of range. I can't buy a machine like that here and bring it to Germany (how to transport).
... So I'm going hackintosh. It solves all the problems: much lower cost for much better performance, not locked into a whole system-- I can upgrade/replace components, easy enough to buy components in the states and bring them over(while avoiding zoll)/euro penalty on components isn't so bad if I buy local in Germany anyway. And I can build the machine that exactly fits my requirements (see sig).
Now I just hope this machine holds me over long enough until I can afford 8/12 core, LGA 2011, in 2012.