- You buy the right hardware. Intel CPU and AMD GPU. Choose Ryzen if you like those and like tinkering and hacking on your OS a lot. And no, it's very unlikely your Nvidia GPU will ever work with a recent macOS.
- You use the vanilla method of macOS install. The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need. Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "beast" in the name. Run screaming from them. Do not mess with the OS install, do not put any kexts into the OS install. Put everything into EFI.
- You set aside the occasional day for OS updates (and possibly updating OpenCore). You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.
I've been using a 8700K/RX580 hackintosh for years now, and in many ways, it's been more stable than my actual Macs -- and certainly more modular and expandable.
Dont use Ryzen, virtualization does not work, including Docker and some other apps like Adobe ones are buggy. Other than that I agree. I made a hackintosh a month ago for half the price of what I would need to pay Apple and it is rock solid. Everything works including all wireless features like sidecar, airdrop, etc. Sleep, thunderbold, rx5700xt, everything is working well.
I'd sort of do it the sort of reverse way... Run KVM with pass-through to a VM MacOS instance and then run all your docker shit on the Linux host. Best of both worlds right there:
1. You get MacOS with GPU acceleration (which is like the primary feature for making it usable).
2. You get a legit environment to run docker containers... That doesn't have to boot a VM and rob you of all your ram. If you haven't ever used containers on a metal Linux environment, you're missing out... it's much better experience than doing it on a Mac (as far as development goes).
The recommendation to use an AMD GPU still stands, since it's passed into the VM. I've been using an RX 560D on Catalina (the one that didn't advertise having 2 fewer CUs, grrrr) without any graphical trouble.
iCloud mostly works, the only two apps that I can't get working are iMessage and FaceTime. This is a common issue for all Hackintoshs, it's not a VM specific problem. It comes down to needing to provide a real Apple SN that matches the kind of Mac you set your Hackintosh to identify as. I'd half recommend picking up a broken / for-parts iMac off eBay to lift the serial number off of (and to say you do actually own a Mac =P ).
I did have some trouble doing passthrough of NVMe drives in the past. I don't know if this was the VM's fault or the fact that it would get hooked by Linux on the host boot and then be unbound before booting the VM. I haven't tried again in the last 18 months, so it's entirely possible any issue there got fixed. I've been booting from an iSCSI volume from my NAS (QEMU hides this fact from macOS).
I should add that I moved away from the Apple ecosystem awhile ago in terms of my personal data. I use a mix of Google services and NextCloud (hosted on my own hardware). My Apple ID getting banned isn't too much of a concern for me. I've never heard of someone actually getting their Apple ID blocked for using a Hackintosh, I figure there are so few people actually doing it it's not worth it to Apple to enforce.
That being said, I don't know how they'd respond to a wealthy company using a bunch of Hackintoshs. I still don't understand how they expect people to properly do CI/CD for iOS without macOS in a server / virtualization environment though. My employer uses rack mount sleds for Mac Minis, but without proper IPMI, managing them is a pain. I wish you could license macOS for a virtualization environment so you could deploy a few 1U dual socket 64 core EPYC servers (128 core / 256 thread total) rather than 4x 6 core boxes per 1U.
Either that, or they should let the toolchain run on more than just Macs. I think that is one of the major features of React Native - you can develop your apps on whatever machine you want. You only need a proper Mac when you're bundling for release.
I joke in jest, but even official apple hardware has serious virtualization issues these days. Crazy kernel panics and vmware indicated they're not sure they can fix it (all in the hands of Apple).
I do agree that Intel HW is better for the hackintoshes though, even more so if you need thunderbolt!
I've been tempted before but am super wary of the fact I may suddenly become stuck on a certain version of macOS because updating it breaks everything.
I imagine you're knowledgeable as you've built one - is that a genuine risk? Or do all versions become hackable eventually?
I'm not the person you replied to but I've used hackintoshes since the Snow Leopard days. Generally if you set it up properly as was described at the beginning of this thread minor updates will work fine without any user input. Some major updates will be the same, with others you might end up needing to change some kexts to fix audio or wifi but it'll generally boot. With major updates that change a lot you might be better off backing up your data and doing a fresh install.
So far all versions have become hackable (generally in a matter of days or weeks) but with Apple's transition to their own silicon I imagine the last version they put out that supports x86_64 will be the final hackintoshable build.
I anticipate that ARM macOS will not run at all on systems without Apple Silicon (as they are calling it) and never will. I assume these systems will have the proprietary secure enclave on-die, which would be missing from all other ARM systems.
I agree. No one has ever managed to get iOS on non-Apple hardware†, and I don't see why ARM macOS would be any different.
† Except maybe Correllium, which was a large commercial effort. Since they don't make any details public, I'm not clear if Correllium just built a sort of emulator or if they actually have the OS running "natively" on 3rd party hardware.
The Darwin on ARM Project[1] attempted just that. It depends on what you mean by "iOS" if you want to say they accomplished it - for example, they got XNU, the kernel, running on a Nokia N900, but they never got a UI up and running (only single-user mode).
This is only if you use a vanilla kernel, right? (Which of course has its own advantages, since with a custom kernel updating is guaranteed to be a pain.)
>The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need
>Avoid ..., insanelymac,
Where did the tools mentioned in those guides come from then? Hackintosh scene became what it is due to countless hours poured into development by developers from insanelymac, olarila & couple of other Russian sites; almost every other major hackintosh site started as guides using the information from the aforementioned sites.
In fact the development discussion of OpenCore, happens at insanelymac[1].
The tools largely come from a Russian guy who goes by vit9696, along with some of his developer friends.
He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion, but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice and to keep things short for the noobs I was speaking to, it's easier to steer people away from it.
Pretty much everything can be done just using the Dortania guide and /r/hackintosh and maybe the "official" Discord, if something goes wrong.
>He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion,
Checking the discussion shows it's not true.
>but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice
May be you had a bad experience with the site, or may be it really isn't 'noob' friendly anymore, but that doesn't mean you should discredit the actual developers of the tools in favour of the 'How To' guides written about the very same tools.
I'm just attaching the fundamental components of Hackintosh nowadays, but if we dig back in insanelymac the contributions goes back more than a decade when Apple used to sell their OS on discs. The content there are worthy of preservation at The Computer Museum.
The InsanelyMac site is riddled with bad advice from questionable sources. Eg. using the beast tools, binary patching kexts for dumb reasons, rando plist changes.
I did not have a "bad experience" per se, with the site. It's just full of unschooled people all too eager to offer bad advice.
I respectfully disagree, learning what's happening with your machine is helpful for troubleshooting and for security. Further, I feel the parent comment was disrespectful for the actual creators.
Can't agree more on Intel CPU and AMD GPU combination. Ideally it'll be cousins of what Apple has used in their actual products, e.g. 8th gen processors and RX 580 or Vega 56 GPUs.
I've done it a couple of times and only takes an hour, with plenty of guides available on YouTube too. Especially if you need a high performance system, putting one together yourself can save thousands than purchasing from Apple.
My 2015 MBP is showing its age and I would love to build a powerful desktop as I spend 85% of my time working at the same desk. But I'm very accustomed to the Mac workflow and tooling. Years ago when I tried the Hackintosh thing I could never get iMessage to work and that made it a no-go for me.
It required some tinkering for me and the upgrade to Catalina before I could get it to cooperate, but iMessage did eventually work and has continued to work since that initial upgrade.
Tonymacx86's useful information is smothered in a quagmire of utterly useless garbage, outdated, invalid information, and in general a user interface from 2001 where somewhere 65 pages of a single forum thread is the information you seek.
As a learning resource, it is a complete waste of time for trying to build a hackintosh.
> Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "beast" in the name.
Huh. When did avoiding tonymacx86 become a thing? I built my first Hackintosh in 2010 and relied on tonymacx86 but I haven't paid attention to the community since 2014-onwards.
There's a ton of great advice on Tonymacx86 and InsanelyMac if you keep your tongue straight in the mouth, but also a ton of mediocre and even bad advice (like using their "helpful software"). Not to mention the petty conflict between the two sites.
In general you're much better off following advice from the Github guides, /r/hackintosh and Discord channels.
I haven't run a Hackintosh in over 5 years but there was this transition, it used to be necessary to install custom kexts and do some pretty weird stuff. Then came these uefi bootloaders that did some magic that let you install just fully vanilla MacOS. Pretty great but it basically made all the old guides and advice obsolete. I bet avoiding the old names can keep you out of trouble, even if they're probably still pumping out good stuff.
I've stopped playing with these around 10.5 - I had some unsolvable issues with my Radeon x1600 back then; OS updating was also somehow broken; the one of most popular "distributions" of 10.4 was most reliable on my hardware. I haven't touched Hackintosh world since then.
I know it's obviously impossible that Apple would ever enter PC market with MacOS but damn, that would be great.
It has gotten better in recent years. No one uses "distributions" anymore (or at least, if they do, its very misguided). Point-release updates almost always work fine if you set up the machine right—in fact, I've never had a problem from a point release update during a decade of Hackintosh use.
Damn, this is a buzzkill for me. I just built a new computer a month ago and was hoping to get a Hackintosh setup working but didn't do much research into it beforehand. Why will Nvidia GPUs never work? Because they won't publish open source drivers to work off of?
Because Apple computers don't use nVidia cards, and nVidia no longer makes their own Mac drivers (as they did until recently). Porting the Linux driver would be a massive amount of effort, even if nVidia was more open.
If you have a slightly older nVidia GPU (1000 series or older), it will work in High Sierra via nVidia's in-house drivers. But you will never be able to upgrade past High Sierra.
AFAICT the answer is that Nvidia and Apple are not the best of friends, and Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers.
This may have been at least partly because it restricts the numbers of people who try making hackintoshes out of existing machines.
I think this is probably a factor in the lack of support for intel Wifi too - it keeps a lot of laptops from neing able to 'just work' as hackintoshes too
> Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers.
People think this based on a vague statement from nVidia's PR. It doesn't make any sense to me. nVidia has continued to release (minor) updates for the High Sierra drivers, and Apple has been perfectly happy to sign those. Also, this is a technically-advanced audience that would probably have no trouble installing unsigned drivers.
I really think that nVidia realized they would have had to do a major driver rewrite for Mojave (because much more rendering goes through Metal) and decided it wasn't worth the effort. The Mac drivers were clearly a very low priority for nVidia; it took the better part of a year before the company added compatibility with their new Pascal graphics cards, and even then the drivers had all sorts of bugs with applications like Little Snitch[1]. It's even possible that nVidia had some knowledge of the upcoming ARM transition, and decided to cut their losses ahead of time.
Depends on your definition of "allow". By default they're blocked, yes, but you can change that by booting into recovery mode, opening a Terminal window, and typing:
csrutil disable && csrutil enable --without kext
Now unsigned kexts will be allowed to load (while leaving the rest of System Integrity Protection intact).
For most software this requirement would be a massive problem, but I'm not sure that applies to the type of person installing 3rd party graphics cards in Macs...
The nVidia Web Drivers never officially supported eGPUs anyway. In order to do it at all you had to use a hack which—surprise!—also required disabling System Integrity Protection!
There is a hack that allowed me to use the Nvidia web drivers on Mojave on my 2012 15" rMBP. Not sure if it works on Catalina. You have to reapply it every OS update. I don't think there is a hack to get CUDA working, which was last supported on High Sierra.
Not sure if the same hack could be used on a Hackintosh (with an old enough card). But for now I would just use High Sierra if you have an Nvidia card, unless you really needed something in a later OS and the hack made it possible. I downgraded that 2012 to High Sierra, and keep other older machines on it as well (didn't have a choice with my 2019 16"). It runs very smoothly and currently has enough software support (e.g. latest Office 365 still supports it).
Aww, I didn't realize that Nvidia stopped making the macOS driver. I was hoping they might stick with it because the new Mac Pro has proper PCIe slots.
> - You set aside the occasional day for OS updates (and possibly updating OpenCore). You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.
This is good general advice for updating even apple-built MacOS machines.
I use OpenCore, on my 2010 27" iMac of all things. Needed to enable target display mode and native brightness control on the new K610m GPU. So in essence, my actual Macintosh is now a Hackintosh in Apple's eyes.
I did something similar.. I had an original Mac Pro, which didn't support 64-bit MacOS because Apple's UEFI ran in 32-bit mode and Apple's boot loader / kernel never supported switching into 64-bit mode from 32-bit mode. So to use that machine for 64-bit driver development, I had to make it into a "hackintosh", where they had a UEFI that would run in 64-bit mode..
I bought an EGPU 1.5 years ago with the idea of replacing my gaming computer with my MacBook Pro running Windows. But due to the limitations of Thunderbolt 3 and the throughput from my enclosure, I cannot get consistent frame rates which is critical for playing fast-paced competitive games like Apex legends. It really sucks and this point, my $1000 EGPU is currently acting as a fancy adapter + charger + enabling smooth scrolling when surfing the webz.
But I have been exploring the idea of converting my gaming computer to a Hackintosh instead. This looks very promising since I require stability and security.
I just wished there was a combination of above solutions; no need to compromise between stability and performance.
Finally, some might say; just buy a Mac Pro! Well, I cannot motivate $6000 Just because I want to game every now and then.. :)
Why bother with Mac? I've just built a Xeon E5-2640 using a Chinese X79 motherboard. NMVe, proper Radeon RX580 GPU - in an open build test bench frame. All in all, something like $250 on eBay for everything. Runs the games I like well and looks great on the table, especially with two big red LED fans in front. :-)
Some people just greatly prefer using macOS over windows or linux and don't want their entire computer experience to be windows just because they play games now and then.
macOS isn't exactly perfect, but I don't know any other desktop operating system that comes even close to macOS in terms of polish and user experience.
I understand that Microsoft can't just redesign Windows over night, but I also fail to understand why Windows isn't better. Better as in more consistent and more responsive.
As much as I like to consider other operating systems, the reality is that I don't want the hassle and macOS just works.
Are you primarily a mac OS user? I am primarily a Windows user and when I occasionally have to use mac OS, I find myself regularly facing many seemingly inconsistent behaviors that really surprise me. I'm inclined to think it is a matter of familiarity more than anything.
I head up our IT department and I use both; Windows for business apps, MacOS for creative apps. 10 is mindbogglingly inconsistent from the way the UI changes between old and new control panels to the way graphic scaling is horribly broken. The cloud side is getting better and works great for users. We've slowly peeled away 3rd party (Dropbox, Slack, Webex) services.
Everything in Windows 10 feels like it's in beta. There is no polish, that final 1%, to any of it.
I'm primarily macOS but have a LOT of experience with Windows.
I still feel like I'm fighting against Windows to do anything. I just think different people are suited to different workflows & macOS and Windows are very very different to each other.
Having done dev on OSX you are going to be constantly fighting the machine. Apple is worse about walled gardens than MS is. With Apple, you need to do exactly what they want or you will have pain.
My experience is the exact opposite - but we're probably looking for different things.
That walled garden approach is why, in my opinion, the OS feels as good as it does. MacOS feels like a mature operating system that Apple have created with restraint and control - where to me Windows feels like a piece of legacy enterprise software with a shiny UI.
If I wanted out of a walled garden, there's no way it'd be to a non *nix based OS - especially not to one that uses it's start menu to pump ads at me.
> A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.
By this definition Mac OS isn't a walled garden, save for kernel modules, although it could become so in the future thus its cohesive design is to be pedantic a product of itself rather than a closed ecosystem. A product of actually having a mental picture of how the whole thing works and a cohesive set of applications to go with it.
Historically windows has without third party applications been a pretty garbage experience even its image and text editors were so bad that you could randomly generate urls until you hit an alternative and most likely get a better choice. Its not shockingly that a platform that doesn't even know what good look likes doesn't have an ecosystem full of anything that represents this.
> MacOS feels like a mature operating system that Apple have created with restraint and control - where to me Windows feels like a piece of legacy enterprise software with a shiny UI.
Quibble, I don't think this has to do with being a walled garden—or at least, I think you may be using the term in a different way than I generally think of it. Apple could have much better legacy support and an equally well designed OS.
Some older applications might look out of place, but that's preferable to not letting them run at all—you can still choose to stick with newer software and have the same experience. Alternately, Apple could stop overhauling the OS's visual design for no reason every seven years...
My entire C/C++ development cycle. I haven't touched it in years because of this. If what you want to do is bang out a GUI in Xcode you'll have a pretty good time, if instead you want to interact with your hardware or other software in ways Apple didn't predict then you're probably just not going to be able to do it.
I can accept that this works for most people. They don't want to mess with the UI and want to "solve problems." But for me the two were linked, and I had to ditch OSX. I had similar problems on Windows but Windows lets you work around the OS if you really need to.
Have you looked into Macports (or Homebrew) at all? At the command-line level macOS is really quite like other Unix systems, once you install a bit of standard tooling.
The semi-exception where I occasionally run into problems is TCC. It's usually not a bother on the command line, but starting with Mojave it can occasionally interfere. But, since Mojave came out in late 2018, if you haven't touched macOS in years you didn't run into that. :)
Yes, I used homebrew extensively. It helps but does not solve every problem. There's still things Apple does not want you to do and you will not do them.
Okay, I'm still quite curious what specific development tasks you're able to do in Linux but feel restricted from doing on macOS. If you turn off SIP (takes five minutes), you can rewrite kernel memory if you want to. Which is of course a different thing than ease-of-use, but I'm not sure what would be so different.
I've upgrading a Macbook early 2011 to Mojave using the dosdude1 patches and the uploaded app keeps crashing when the reviewer tries to open it. It worked fine with no issues locally and with the High Sierra XCode 10.1. I can't figure out a solution. I would not recommend a hackintosh for iOS development with regards to provisioning issues.
Tell me about it - I work a support desk for an MSP; all Windows. I can't tell you how many times I've struggled with file permissions or partitions that I know would be very easy to fix in a *sh shell... Imagine being told "access denied" when you're running the command prompt as "administrator"!
Can you give some examples? There are exactly two things that I wish macOS would copy from Windows: full paths visible and interactive in Finder, and the ability to create new files within Finder (how is that not a thing?!)
I'm in the same boat as you. I was primarily Windows for many years, but reluctantly made the switch to MacOS for my daily driver a few years ago and I'm glad I did.
Still have a Windows 10 machine, and although I do have some love for a few Windows-only applications, it just feels like an uphill battle whenever something isn't working.
I agree that UI between the two is largely just a personal preference thing. But the POSIX underpinnings of MacOS is objectively useful for a great many developers. I appreciate what MS is doing with WSL but it’ll always be a poor substitute.
I agree with it being familiarity. I grew up with Macs in school, and have been using them since OS 8 and 9, some experience with System 7 (uncommon for how young I am). There's lot and lots of little details that have carried on throughout all the years that just seem "normal" to me.
I find myself facing inconsistent and surprising behaviors with Windows despite it being my primary OS at work.
Growing up with Mac and Linux makes Windows seem quite strange :)
Familiarity is a huge part of it. Windows is getting better very slowly but consistently. Really the only major pain points where I say MacOS is objectively better are:
- Window flickering on resizing, both have it but MacOS has a lot less of it.
- Being able to customize any shortcut menu item in any app
- Finder, Document proxy icons and open/save dialogs are just leagues ahead of Explorer.
Another anecdote: I was a Linux user and had to use a Mac for apps development, and the transition was smooth. I imagine transitioning from windows to unix system would be pretty jarring because not only the ui is different, but the underlying system is different too.
Counter: I grew up with Windows, using Macs only occasionally in stores and such. Never really liked Windows. Tried Linux for a year when I was 12 or so, ended up coming back to Windows.
When I was 16 I decided to Hackintosh my Dell and absolutely fell in love with Snow Leopard. I've used OS X in some form ever since.
If hackintoshes becomes popular enough to threaten their bottom line the very next version of OS X and those thereafter will include countermeasures designed to make your life difficult. This doesn't seem to be a sustainable love affair with a counterparty that will never share your affection because you represent a potential loss not a customer.
I have bought real Macs since, it just so happened Hackintosh was my introduction, because I didn't have money when I was a teenager. It worked out very well for Apple, actually.
Apparently consistency isn't a part of the majority's vocabulary and they can ignore 5 different styles of typography and dialogs, among many other issues. It's a disaster and officially not a priority for MS.
Nothing comes close to macOS indeed.
I understand being thrown off by inconsistencies in typography and it’s exactly the kind of thing that bugs me too... but it’s also an objectively tiny thing to worry about in the broader context of which computing platform you’re going to use.
The bigger argument for macOS is the ergonomics of the hardware. Precious few Windows laptops hold a candle to a MacBook.
The majority is on Windows not because they don’t care about the inconsistencies but because Apple is too expensive and Windows too entrenched at lower price points.
Windows went down a six year long dead end with 8.x trying to be both a desktop and a phone/tablet OS at the same time, while also doing it twice as fast as was actually feasible and without taking the time to think it through, in an attempt to catch up with iOS.
Windows 10 actually doesn't seem too bad, except for the vestigial Metro crap. Power Shell looks interesting. They seem to have worked out what to do with .NET at last. WSL2 seems decent too so they finally seem to be back on a productive track.
Completely true, but there are way more hits than misses on macOS. Dashboard no longer ships with the OS. Launchpad is useless to me but I can completely forget it exists & never use it.
I think the issues windows has had over the years come down to the fact that the 'misses' they've had are core parts of the OS that you can't avoid using.
I do genuinely think Windows 10 is the best version of windows though, and with WSL they're definitely headed in the right direction.
I use Launchpad frequently. I rearranged my most common apps to be on one screen. I four finger swipe down on my MBP, and there's my apps. I still use Spotlight search too so I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard.
Cmd-tab allows to switch to an app, but the Dashboard view lets me get to a specific window within an app directly from whatever view I'm currently in. 4 finger swipe up, and clickity click, I'm in the document I'm wanting
> Cmd-tab allows to switch to an app, but the Dashboard view lets me get to a specific window within an app directly from whatever view I'm currently in. 4 finger swipe up, and clickity click, I'm in the document I'm wanting
You may be right. I don't really pay attention to BrandName(TM) of a simple feature. All I know is I never browse the /Applications folder to find an app. I also know that these features are NOT available on Windows. That with the missing spacebar press in Explorer for Quicklook access to a file in Windows makes not using macOS frustrating
The most annoying thing for me on MacOS is no 'New' menu on right-click to create a new file, only a folder. I'm just so used to doing that in Windows that it really annoys me in the Finder. There are ways to hack that in yourself though.
Sure they are: hit win+tab for a Mission Control/Expose-like view, and you can get a Spotlight-style search by just hitting Start and beginning to type.
Dashboard was the name for a widgets system in mac OS.
I'd quit my job if they forced me to use Mac OS over my Linux desktop, so it really depends on what you're looking for and how much you are willing/able to customize your interface.
I've never used mac os, but definitely get you on sane defaults. From what I could tell, the few linux desktops that were actually meant to be used with their defaults and not customized immediately were the ones on elementary OS and Gnome, and they've actually gotten pretty nice and consistent in their design, and pretty good about spacing.
I bought a gaming pc a few years back with the intention of using it for gaming only, and continuing to use my aging macbook for literally everything else.
The macbook hard drive died and so I decided to try to use the PC as the daily driver.
There are many reasons for it, but it boils down to the fact that I enjoy using macOS and I don't enjoy using Windows.
If I'm not enjoying using a piece of tech, it's not worth the investment - regardless of price.
Yes, Macs are expensive, but I don't mind paying more money to get an experience I actually enjoy. That to me is value, and why mac / pc benchmarks and price / performance comparisons are irrelevant to me as a person.
> I also fail to understand why Windows isn't better
It's simple: Microsoft doesn't prioritize making it better. They prioritize funneling people into more Microsoft products like One Drive. They are following the general trend of IT: Fuck users.
Having moved from Ubuntu/Unity to Mac, it feels like in my day to day use, the Mac and Unity have similar levels of polish and consistency (neither is perfect) but somehow Unity is way more usable, both out of the box (small things like the number of open App windows indicator) and with minor tweaks (5% less brightness for unfocused windows).
I do use Firefox/Thunderbird on both, so perhaps I’m missing some special apple sauce.
I would say the problem is exactly that they redesign Windows overnight, repeatedly. If they left the UI roughly where Win2k was I think there would be much fewer complaints. Instead you have successive generations of some team trying to make their mark. It's all additive, too, with vestiges of each wave left in place.
By the way there are other operating systems besides macOS and Windows. Seems to be lost in a lot of these discussions.
If you're blowing that kind of money on gaming I would hope you take it more seriously than "just now and then". Even so, with that kind of expenditure you can easily justify just having a dedicated gaming rig.
For me, the reason for a hackintosh is just that I am tired of all the cables and having to swap between the two setups (like having one monitor for working, and one for gaming) while utilizing the performance when working.
I also want to utilize my iCloud Drive symlinking hacks to sync files / dotfiles between systems.
My gaming rig is currently running i4790k with a fairly decent motherboard (Asus Maximus VII) that I bought used for $200 a two years ago. It still performs like butter as long as you have a decent gpu connected to it. I seriously recommend this setup if you want to save some dough (or maybe the new Ryzen CPUs are better now tbh).
A sidenote regarding monitors: These are some exciting times to be working from home combined with having an interest for gaming due to the new monitors coming out, working for both.
I am currently thinking about the LG 38WN95C-W. Really expensive, but if you use it 8 hours a day for 5 years, I think I calculated it to be like 50 cent a day. :)
edit: Oh, and yes, as someone below mentioned, I love macOS and a lot of the things I work on require me to work on it.
I have a similar set up. I got some Thunderbolt dock for the mac and a USB input switcher that I connect all my peripherals to and can press a button to switch between the Macbook dock and my Windows PC. The only unoptimized part is I just use the DisplayPort input on my monitor for the PC and the HDMI input to the Macbook dock. So to swap all I have to do is press the button on the USB switcher and then change my monitor's input setting. Not quite one click switching, which could be done, but it's two clicks and cheaper than most KVM switches I've seen.
> I am currently thinking about the LG 38WN95C-W. Really expensive, but if you use it 8 hours a day for 5 years, I think I calculated it to be like 50 cent a day. :)
Exactly the same monitor I'm planning to get to my home office/games computer combo. In fact, despite the price, this seems to be the most awaited monitor of all year -- finally something that combines great performance, adult design without garish gaming elements, and office style needs (looking at TB3/USB-C with PD&DP).
I’m not sure if it’s true anymore. I experienced good performance when they switched to using xhyve/bhyve (basically use docker for mac). Can you shade more light on your experience? When was this? What circumstances? Which kind of apps?
Using Docker Desktop (which I believe runs Docker in a Linux VM - basically a friendly version of when when it was Docker Machine), with different containers - RabbitMQ, EMQ, Postgres, Minio, lots of our own images. I haven't used it for perhaps 6-9 months, but it was never fun - would grind the whole macbook to a painful pace.
If there's some kind of alternative for MacOS now, I'm keen to know more.
I've noticed sharing one monitor with multiple computers has always been a pain point... over most of my life.
By the way, I've always found having a dumb usb switch (for each device) and a dumb video switch to be the best way to eliminate incompatibilities. But everyone wants to get fancy and "smarten up" their kvm to use hotkeys and it screws with latency or keyboard state or just adds weirdness.
So I think the smartest place to put kvm functionality is probably at the keyboard, in the mouse and the monitor.
I was going to ask if that wasn't as loud as hell.
But it looks like the 2640 is a 65W part, so not excessive. Huh, not a bad buy for a few bucks, looks like you could get a 6C/12T board and cpu for about £60 from ebay.
(I don't need more computers, I don't need more computers...)
I was going to go that route for my 3D work, but at the time eGPU chassis and card was almost as much as an entire PC anyway. Decided to just go for the PC with the intention to hackintosh it but in the end Windows worked well enough for what I was planning to use it for, good thing I did too because now Nvidia doesn't work at all on modern MacOS so would have all been a waste of money if I'd gone the eGPU route.
I'm done investing workstation level costs into Apple platforms, I just can't risk them dropping support down the line anymore. Zero guarantee that another GPU will ever be released/supported for that Mac Pro.
Some might say "Surely they are not just going to develop that whole computer then discontinue it", why not? They did exactly that for the computer it was created to replace.
Similar thing here. I actually ended up finding that I downright preferred Windows, and I honestly find it a lot more stable and reliable in day to day use.
I ran the same route as you, and bought a eGPU enclosure and a GTX 1060 some years ago but then gave up after it frustrated me enough. Well it didn't work that bad but I had the feeling that OSX wasn't as stable as in the past and I was mostly using Windows 10 at work anyway (Visual Studio for SharePoint development) so I switched back after 6 years of using a Mac to a PC and haven't regretted it.
Windows 10 works great, there is WSL or I can run ubuntu on a Hyper-V or VBox.
The only thing I directly missed are Final Cut Pro X - but I now use DaVinci Resolve and Garage Band (I now use LMMS).
> Finally, some might say; just buy a Mac Pro! Well, I cannot motivate $6000 Just because I want to game every now and then.. :)
Depending on how much gaming computer you need for the games you want to play, it sounds like the better solution is to just build a gaming computer that runs Windows. That's my setup - a Linux desktop machine (small form factor, running on a machine from two generations ago, it's sufficient for the things that I need to do locally, and if I need to spin off a big compile I have cloud resources to do that) and a six month old gaming rig that runs Windows.
Why wouldn't you dual boot with the more powerful computer? Or alternatively just use Linux, with Proton the number of games available is already quite impressive.
Separate computers removes a single point of failure. If my gaming rig goes down it doesn't keep my work from progressing, and if my work computer goes down, I can swap out drives into the gaming rig to keep working.
«Stable» is such a problematic word. OpenCore is stable in the way that it never crashes, but it's unstable in the way that its configuration files always changes for every update.
I installed Catalina with OpenCore earlier this year and it was the smoothest Hackintosh experience yet, especially with their accurate, clear, and up-to-date documentation.
Which is why I am finally going to make a switch to PS5 as my first dedicated game console after 2 decades of Gaming PC's. 500$ for a high performance box that will game for atleast 5 years that I can connect to my existing 4k monitors or my 4k tv is an insane deal.
I'm looking at doing the same thing. I've been struggling with my PC all week. Second time this year, usually the only good avenue for a fix is to format and re-install Windows... I've had enough. My Macbook Pro 2015 has been doing just fine for 5 years and is currently doing great with a new battery. So I'm almost officially a console guy now QQ, guess I'm getting too old for this sh!t.
Hopefully they'll actually support motion aiming like on the switch this generation. It makes it a loooot more bearable. A lot of the waggle games on the wii have just burned people's expectations for motion controls, but if you try it with a ps4 or steam controller on pc you'll notice it's much more mouse-like than on just 2 sticks.
I've been very happy with GeForce Now on my MBP (I run Apex regularly). Wired connection, stable upstream connection, etc are a must, but other than that, there's not much downside.
The bootloader development in Hackintosh scene never cease to amaze me. I remember the lead developer of Clover bootloader[1] Slice, still developing it on his old Dell with 32 bit Snowleopard when it was being used for Mountain Lion and later.
But the interest in Hackintosh seems to be slowing down[2]? , it's not like Macs have become affordable, if anything Mac Pro is prohibitively expensive and hackintosh generally made more sense to those struck with underpowered Mac Pro.
Most of all, what will happen to the Hackintosh scene due to Apple Silicon? Will the community take up the challenge and make macOS work on Raspberry Pi 10(I understand that Apple Silicon is not vanilla ARM spec) or fizzle out?
I can't explain those Google Trends and I won't blame you for trusting them over the feelings of some guy on the internet, but it doesn't match my own experience at all. On the contrary, Hackintosh feels like it has become bigger and more mainstream, relatively speaking.
(Mind, I still think the scene's days are numbered due to Apple Silicon.)
I think the answer is simply that Ubuntu has become good enough.
The whole point of running MacOS was to get POSIX compliance with a polished GUI. No Windows, pretty terminals smooth fonts good UX.
Now MacOS has no edge over Ubuntu in any sense. Ubuntu runs Docker natively and Cuda. It has an insanely user friendly installer, it runs on a wide range of hardware with no issues and its default GUI is great.
Yeah, linux now actually works with wifi, sleep mode, decent fonts, native docker, a good package manager and a variety of games, all at the same time!
For my own personal reason: I lost interest due to countless problems, the hours of endless tinkering and simply that macOS is not that far ahead anymore. It has some nice things, but ubuntu is very stable now a days. Sleep works, wifi works, and even games are decent on a powerful linux box. Apple dropped the ball on macOS and the hardware remained very expensive.
I'll give a big vote of thanks to the OpenCore developers.
Clover had constant stability problems during boot on my hardware (Coffee Lake, Z390), but OC has been stable since day one (v0.5.6 IIRC). I've not had a single issue since switching.
As someone who used to do this myself, I don't quite understand why people still go through all the effort to run macOS. In the past I've built Hackintoshes on desktops and laptops, and it was fun to accomplish (audio through HDMI was especially tricky!), but in the end it was slower, less stable, and not nearly as useful as running Linux on the same hardware. I run Linux on everything these days.
What's the draw? Better off buying a mac if you want the "Apple Experience" anyway. If you don't, I don't imagine why you'd want anything to do with this.
I switched away from a hackintosh tower to a real Mac recently because things lined up for that to make sense, but previously I hackintoshed because nothing came as close to checking all of my boxes for a desktop environment as even just out of the box macOS.
No amount of effort spent on customizing Windows does the trick because of things about it that are unchangeable (like its terrible text rendering), and while a Linux setup can get close (especially if eschewing a monolithic DE), it requires pouring countless hours into it to get it there, and even then many details are wrong and random things are flaky.
It's largely (if not entirely) due to the cost-to-performance ratio.
Apple's cheapest Mac configuration, the Mac Mini, starts at $799 for a measly i3 4-core processor and 8GB of RAM with no dedicated GPU. For the same price, I can put together something of at least 2X the performance: i5 6-core, 16GB RAM, and an RX 570/580 GPU.
Granted for Hackintoshes you're on your own for debugging but as others below have said and on r/hackintosh, the end product is oftentimes very stable. So tradeoff can be worth it, especially as you go up the product stack.
Price, flexibility, control are some of the top things that come to mind. Yes there can definitely be stability issues but if you are in some country where you want to develop iOS apps but can't really afford a high end Mac this makes sense. Also as a stepping stone into their ecosystem.
Also it is hard to underestimate the amount of polish that Apple puts into their UI. Overall it is a pretty good experience especially compared to some of the windowing systems on various flavors of linux. Polish is something that does not come easily in the open source world.
It's probably 2030 before Intel Mac are no longer usable, which is forever in tech time. ARM seems to be spreading its wings when it comes to high end CPUs at the moment (for example, the 96 core 4 thread ThunderX3) and it's not a big stretch to think that they will become commodity parts for desktops and servers in the near future, especially if Microsoft follow Apple's lead. Given brisk competition and open ARM licencing is quite likely to give x86 a run for its money and takes substantial market share.
Some people suggest that Apple will do some special custom hardware in the CPU that will mean Hackintoshes are impossible, but any hardware can be emulated in software, so it then becomes a performance issue. Maybe your ML workloads will suck compared to Apple hardware, for instance.
I think the biggest danger is that Apple ARM hardware doesn't support non-Apple GPUs, but even then some enterprising hacker will probably accept the challenge and enable a Linux driver bridge or the like.
macOS arm64 can run on non-Apple hardware using a relatively lightly changed KVM (and the Qemu-side changes are even less intensive than the iOS on Qemu project). However, it doesn't come without compromises on most hardware.
What I can enumerate as risk factors for running macOS arm64 in a VM:
- ARMv8.1 atomics are mandatory. This excludes Cortex-A72 devices, like the RPi4, and earlier generations.
- 16KB page support are mandatory, excludes the RPi4 and other devices too.
- Rosetta uses an MSR to switch the memory model, this makes x86 threads have to all run only at one core at once on Arm CPUs where there isn't a stronger memory model.
Notably, some Arm server CPUs provide TSO, making this a non-issue, and Nvidia's Tegra Xavier CPUs provide sequential consistency, making it a non-issue.
- PAC, not a big risk factor, trap once and then patch to the non-PAC variant at worst for instructions that aren't in the NOP space.
- FP16/dotproduct: provided in HW from quite some other manufacturers, and even when it isn't, you could feasibly emulate those fast enough.
On GPUs, Metal paravirtualization exists in macOS 11, maybe would be better to target that for reverse-engineering purposes.
Even if you give up on Rosetta, there’s all the other MSRs you’ll need to patch–there’s not a huge number of these, but since EL0 has direct access to at least one of these you can’t just patch the kernel.
> PAC, not a big risk factor, trap once and then patch to the non-PAC variant at worst for instructions that aren't in the NOP space.
You know, I don’t think Apple really uses the backwards-compatible encodings at all. Probably since they don’t need to?
> Even if you give up on Rosetta, there’s all the other MSRs you’ll need to patch–there’s not a huge number of these, but since EL0 has direct access to at least one of these you can’t just patch the kernel.
APRR can only remove permissions, not add them. As such, it can be stubbed out. The other MSRs are tunables for CPU errata workarounds, which can just be stubbed too.
> You know, I don’t think Apple really uses the backwards-compatible encodings at all. Probably since they don’t need to?
You just need to trap once for each time you see them and then patch it there.
How long before Apple has even 1 proprietary extension to arm64 without which macOS won't run? As soon as hw without that extension is EoL, no more hackintoshes.
I imagine it will continue to work as it does now while the macOS versions still support intel macs - what happens once we're past that is a huge unknown
I think it'll be a while (if ever) before the Mac Pro moves to an ARM CPU. It's not that I think Apple can't build a CPU to compete in that space, it's that I don't know that there's a large enough market to justify building that CPU. ECC memory, lots and lots of PCIe lanes, dual CPU capable, etc. etc.
You can take the iPhone CPU and make it into an ARM CPU for a laptop that can compete with Intel and AMD (somewhat) easily. That same architecture is in no way reflective of what people expect out of a workstation. Unless Apple is going to start running all of their own internal workloads ("Apple Cloud") on their own CPUs, I don't see it happening. And in order to do that, they're going to have to get mainline OS support for it, which again is a very different path to market than doing everything in-house with OSX.
Same architecture but this is all about the silicon and what extra hardware accelerated features can apple build into the OS by adding modules to their SoC. That will have little to do with the fact that it's using the ARM architecture in relation to getting those features to work on non Apple Silicon devices.
It was incredibly worth it for me to turn my gaming PC into a hackintosh, if only for the experience of running macOS on strong hardware without needing to spend thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, I can't upgrade higher than High Sierra, since I'm using an Nvidia GPU. So I'll have to switch to AMD GPUs at some point down the road. I suppose that's what I get for using proprietary software.
Is there a current "most compatible"/"recommended" hardware list somewhere so if you wanted to buy parts for a new Mac Pro-like Hackintosh you'd have the best chance of "everything working"?
I build iOS apps using Visual Studio 2019 + Xamarin on Windows, then running macOS in a VMWare VM that basically just functions as a build server (Windows communicates with it via SSH). You can find lots of YouTube videos describing how to do it.
It's technically against the macOS terms of service, but the macOS terms of service are likely illegal anyways (monopoly bundling of hardware + software, etc).
I never understood the appeal of Hackintosh. Linux has a hard enough time getting touchpad, display, suspend/resume, etc working on regular PC laptops. Does any of that stuff have hope for working well on reasonably modern MacBooks? Maybe this is more for reviving a 10+ year old Apple computer with Ubuntu? I understand that it's kind of fun and interesting but I feel like you're just punishing yourself if your goal is to actually try to use it day-to-day. Just get a Dell.
edit: I now realize this is for running macOS on PC hardware. I remember that I had a coworker back in like 2008 that booted his Dell Mini 10v Netbook with Mac OS X and it was fun to look at but comically non-functional. But he forced himself to use it..
I had an eeepc 901 years ago, with an atom chip, and I turned it into a hackintosh running snow leopard. It worked great! Way better than with the original software on it.
Hackintoshes can be really good. Not all are, and you have to be careful about updates sometimes, but it can be very worthwhile. I would probably have it bootable as an option on my current Ryzen workstation, but I went with an nvidia graphics card so it's a no-go. Good thing I also love debian.
I'm amazed by this. I started using an EeePC 901 a few months ago, and it barely runs Firefox. I don't know if that says more about the computer than it does about Firefox, but I had no idea such a thing was even possible.
It's quite some time ago now! I don't think I even have mine any more...
I guess Snow-Leopard was pretty lightweight compared to what we have now. IIRC I also modded the machine a bit with a 64GB aftermarket storage card. Maybe doubled the RAM too.
Eventually I think the aftermarket storage card died, and I went back to debian/XFCE, then to debian/LXDE, in an effort to try to keep it both current and usable, with chromium for a browser as FF was too heavy.
Pleased to hear someone has one still up and running :)
seems like you don’t understand what a hackintosh is which might be why you don’t get it. it’s not other os on apple hardware as you put it, it’s osx on generic hardware
One valid use case for the Hackintosh is to have it in the VM to provide some support of your software for users of OSX. Setting couple of virtual machines with different operating systems for testing makes sense, however Apple made it really hard to support their platform.
sat here working on a recently built Ryzen 7 32gb, which runs perfectly. The complete build cost was < £700, thats with a decent graphics card, 1tb nvme.... the equivalent mac would've cost a lot more.
> I honestly would have been fine with a $2500 Mac Pro
The cheapest mac pro you can get with modern hardware is $6000. My hackintosh is $1500 because I do like a fast machine that I can play games on every now and then.
- You buy the right hardware. Intel CPU and AMD GPU. Choose Ryzen if you like those and like tinkering and hacking on your OS a lot. And no, it's very unlikely your Nvidia GPU will ever work with a recent macOS.
- You use the vanilla method of macOS install. The dortania guides along with /r/hackintosh are all you need. Avoid tonymacx86, insanelymac, and any software with the word "beast" in the name. Run screaming from them. Do not mess with the OS install, do not put any kexts into the OS install. Put everything into EFI.
- You set aside the occasional day for OS updates (and possibly updating OpenCore). You do not want to update willy-nilly and you definitely want to wait a day or few for the more brave to guinea pig any issues.
I've been using a 8700K/RX580 hackintosh for years now, and in many ways, it's been more stable than my actual Macs -- and certainly more modular and expandable.
1. You get MacOS with GPU acceleration (which is like the primary feature for making it usable).
2. You get a legit environment to run docker containers... That doesn't have to boot a VM and rob you of all your ram. If you haven't ever used containers on a metal Linux environment, you're missing out... it's much better experience than doing it on a Mac (as far as development goes).
Any recommendations?
iCloud mostly works, the only two apps that I can't get working are iMessage and FaceTime. This is a common issue for all Hackintoshs, it's not a VM specific problem. It comes down to needing to provide a real Apple SN that matches the kind of Mac you set your Hackintosh to identify as. I'd half recommend picking up a broken / for-parts iMac off eBay to lift the serial number off of (and to say you do actually own a Mac =P ).
I did have some trouble doing passthrough of NVMe drives in the past. I don't know if this was the VM's fault or the fact that it would get hooked by Linux on the host boot and then be unbound before booting the VM. I haven't tried again in the last 18 months, so it's entirely possible any issue there got fixed. I've been booting from an iSCSI volume from my NAS (QEMU hides this fact from macOS).
I should add that I moved away from the Apple ecosystem awhile ago in terms of my personal data. I use a mix of Google services and NextCloud (hosted on my own hardware). My Apple ID getting banned isn't too much of a concern for me. I've never heard of someone actually getting their Apple ID blocked for using a Hackintosh, I figure there are so few people actually doing it it's not worth it to Apple to enforce.
That being said, I don't know how they'd respond to a wealthy company using a bunch of Hackintoshs. I still don't understand how they expect people to properly do CI/CD for iOS without macOS in a server / virtualization environment though. My employer uses rack mount sleds for Mac Minis, but without proper IPMI, managing them is a pain. I wish you could license macOS for a virtualization environment so you could deploy a few 1U dual socket 64 core EPYC servers (128 core / 256 thread total) rather than 4x 6 core boxes per 1U.
Either that, or they should let the toolchain run on more than just Macs. I think that is one of the major features of React Native - you can develop your apps on whatever machine you want. You only need a proper Mac when you're bundling for release.
I do agree that Intel HW is better for the hackintoshes though, even more so if you need thunderbolt!
I was a bit light on my "try not to use Ryzen" fearing the hoards of responses from the "My Ryzen works fine, it's easy!" camp.
I imagine you're knowledgeable as you've built one - is that a genuine risk? Or do all versions become hackable eventually?
So far all versions have become hackable (generally in a matter of days or weeks) but with Apple's transition to their own silicon I imagine the last version they put out that supports x86_64 will be the final hackintoshable build.
Hopefully I am wrong.
† Except maybe Correllium, which was a large commercial effort. Since they don't make any details public, I'm not clear if Correllium just built a sort of emulator or if they actually have the OS running "natively" on 3rd party hardware.
[1] https://github.com/darwin-on-arm
>Avoid ..., insanelymac,
Where did the tools mentioned in those guides come from then? Hackintosh scene became what it is due to countless hours poured into development by developers from insanelymac, olarila & couple of other Russian sites; almost every other major hackintosh site started as guides using the information from the aforementioned sites.
In fact the development discussion of OpenCore, happens at insanelymac[1].
[1]https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/338516-opencore-disc...
He may (loosely) use InsanelyMac for OpenCore discussion, but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice and to keep things short for the noobs I was speaking to, it's easier to steer people away from it.
Pretty much everything can be done just using the Dortania guide and /r/hackintosh and maybe the "official" Discord, if something goes wrong.
Checking the discussion shows it's not true.
>but the rest of the site is generally full of questionable and often outright wrong advice
May be you had a bad experience with the site, or may be it really isn't 'noob' friendly anymore, but that doesn't mean you should discredit the actual developers of the tools in favour of the 'How To' guides written about the very same tools.
[1] Bootloaders before OpenCore - https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/319-bootloaders/
[2] Arbitary Kext and process patching - https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/647-lilu-and-plugins/
[3] Virtual SMC - https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/335292-virtualsmc-%E...
I'm just attaching the fundamental components of Hackintosh nowadays, but if we dig back in insanelymac the contributions goes back more than a decade when Apple used to sell their OS on discs. The content there are worthy of preservation at The Computer Museum.
The InsanelyMac site is riddled with bad advice from questionable sources. Eg. using the beast tools, binary patching kexts for dumb reasons, rando plist changes.
I did not have a "bad experience" per se, with the site. It's just full of unschooled people all too eager to offer bad advice.
Any mention of the "beast tools" is quite literally banned on Insanelymac, so I think you're getting the two confused. https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/275941-very-importan...
I've done it a couple of times and only takes an hour, with plenty of guides available on YouTube too. Especially if you need a high performance system, putting one together yourself can save thousands than purchasing from Apple.
My 2015 MBP is showing its age and I would love to build a powerful desktop as I spend 85% of my time working at the same desk. But I'm very accustomed to the Mac workflow and tooling. Years ago when I tried the Hackintosh thing I could never get iMessage to work and that made it a no-go for me.
If yes, it's a good indicator you're going the right path.
If no, there be dragons.
(Tonymacx86 also has a lot of useful information, for better or worse, but you shouldn't start there.)
As a learning resource, it is a complete waste of time for trying to build a hackintosh.
Have you ever had to upgrade/change something hardware-wise to keep up to date with the latest MacOS versions?
Question is, can I buy some "optimal" Hackintosh hardware and expect it to work for upcoming MacOS versions for years to come (at least 3 years)?
Huh. When did avoiding tonymacx86 become a thing? I built my first Hackintosh in 2010 and relied on tonymacx86 but I haven't paid attention to the community since 2014-onwards.
In general you're much better off following advice from the Github guides, /r/hackintosh and Discord channels.
To a lesser extent good advice for non-hackintoshes
I know it's obviously impossible that Apple would ever enter PC market with MacOS but damn, that would be great.
If you have a slightly older nVidia GPU (1000 series or older), it will work in High Sierra via nVidia's in-house drivers. But you will never be able to upgrade past High Sierra.
Edit: honestly I have no clue why I am downvoted: I really would appreciate an answer here.
AFAICT the answer is that Nvidia and Apple are not the best of friends, and Apple decided that they would not sign any newer drivers.
This may have been at least partly because it restricts the numbers of people who try making hackintoshes out of existing machines.
I think this is probably a factor in the lack of support for intel Wifi too - it keeps a lot of laptops from neing able to 'just work' as hackintoshes too
People think this based on a vague statement from nVidia's PR. It doesn't make any sense to me. nVidia has continued to release (minor) updates for the High Sierra drivers, and Apple has been perfectly happy to sign those. Also, this is a technically-advanced audience that would probably have no trouble installing unsigned drivers.
I really think that nVidia realized they would have had to do a major driver rewrite for Mojave (because much more rendering goes through Metal) and decided it wasn't worth the effort. The Mac drivers were clearly a very low priority for nVidia; it took the better part of a year before the company added compatibility with their new Pascal graphics cards, and even then the drivers had all sorts of bugs with applications like Little Snitch[1]. It's even possible that nVidia had some knowledge of the upcoming ARM transition, and decided to cut their losses ahead of time.
1: https://www.obdev.at/support/littlesnitch/483957225401957
For most software this requirement would be a massive problem, but I'm not sure that applies to the type of person installing 3rd party graphics cards in Macs...
Oh well, it is what it is...
https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/05/nvidia-egpu-thunderbolt-macos...
Not sure if the same hack could be used on a Hackintosh (with an old enough card). But for now I would just use High Sierra if you have an Nvidia card, unless you really needed something in a later OS and the hack made it possible. I downgraded that 2012 to High Sierra, and keep other older machines on it as well (didn't have a choice with my 2019 16"). It runs very smoothly and currently has enough software support (e.g. latest Office 365 still supports it).
https://youtu.be/krRXGPUUjvU
For now, there are no Nvidia web drivers posted for anything after macOS 10.13.
This is good general advice for updating even apple-built MacOS machines.
So basically you short change yourself on both fronts. ;-)
If you have a 2010 or 2011 iMac with a dead GPU btw, check out this thread on the MacRumors forum: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2011-imac-graphics-card...
Kept the stock power supply and put my own PWM module in to control brightness, since some reviews said it wasn't as bright as it was originally.
But I have been exploring the idea of converting my gaming computer to a Hackintosh instead. This looks very promising since I require stability and security.
I just wished there was a combination of above solutions; no need to compromise between stability and performance.
Finally, some might say; just buy a Mac Pro! Well, I cannot motivate $6000 Just because I want to game every now and then.. :)
I understand that Microsoft can't just redesign Windows over night, but I also fail to understand why Windows isn't better. Better as in more consistent and more responsive.
As much as I like to consider other operating systems, the reality is that I don't want the hassle and macOS just works.
Everything in Windows 10 feels like it's in beta. There is no polish, that final 1%, to any of it.
I'm primarily macOS but have a LOT of experience with Windows.
I still feel like I'm fighting against Windows to do anything. I just think different people are suited to different workflows & macOS and Windows are very very different to each other.
That walled garden approach is why, in my opinion, the OS feels as good as it does. MacOS feels like a mature operating system that Apple have created with restraint and control - where to me Windows feels like a piece of legacy enterprise software with a shiny UI.
If I wanted out of a walled garden, there's no way it'd be to a non *nix based OS - especially not to one that uses it's start menu to pump ads at me.
> A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.
By this definition Mac OS isn't a walled garden, save for kernel modules, although it could become so in the future thus its cohesive design is to be pedantic a product of itself rather than a closed ecosystem. A product of actually having a mental picture of how the whole thing works and a cohesive set of applications to go with it.
Historically windows has without third party applications been a pretty garbage experience even its image and text editors were so bad that you could randomly generate urls until you hit an alternative and most likely get a better choice. Its not shockingly that a platform that doesn't even know what good look likes doesn't have an ecosystem full of anything that represents this.
Quibble, I don't think this has to do with being a walled garden—or at least, I think you may be using the term in a different way than I generally think of it. Apple could have much better legacy support and an equally well designed OS.
Some older applications might look out of place, but that's preferable to not letting them run at all—you can still choose to stick with newer software and have the same experience. Alternately, Apple could stop overhauling the OS's visual design for no reason every seven years...
I can accept that this works for most people. They don't want to mess with the UI and want to "solve problems." But for me the two were linked, and I had to ditch OSX. I had similar problems on Windows but Windows lets you work around the OS if you really need to.
The semi-exception where I occasionally run into problems is TCC. It's usually not a bother on the command line, but starting with Mojave it can occasionally interfere. But, since Mojave came out in late 2018, if you haven't touched macOS in years you didn't run into that. :)
(I really really really hate modern TCC...)
Coincidentally, I run into this on macOS due to System Integrity Protection.
But what I like about SIP is it's easy to turn off and never be bothered by it again...
To enable it, make Finder the active application, then click View → Show Path Bar (or use the keyboard shortcut ⌥⌘P).
Still have a Windows 10 machine, and although I do have some love for a few Windows-only applications, it just feels like an uphill battle whenever something isn't working.
I find myself facing inconsistent and surprising behaviors with Windows despite it being my primary OS at work.
Growing up with Mac and Linux makes Windows seem quite strange :)
- Window flickering on resizing, both have it but MacOS has a lot less of it.
- Being able to customize any shortcut menu item in any app
- Finder, Document proxy icons and open/save dialogs are just leagues ahead of Explorer.
When I was 16 I decided to Hackintosh my Dell and absolutely fell in love with Snow Leopard. I've used OS X in some form ever since.
The bigger argument for macOS is the ergonomics of the hardware. Precious few Windows laptops hold a candle to a MacBook.
Windows 10 actually doesn't seem too bad, except for the vestigial Metro crap. Power Shell looks interesting. They seem to have worked out what to do with .NET at last. WSL2 seems decent too so they finally seem to be back on a productive track.
I think the issues windows has had over the years come down to the fact that the 'misses' they've had are core parts of the OS that you can't avoid using.
I do genuinely think Windows 10 is the best version of windows though, and with WSL they're definitely headed in the right direction.
Cmd-tab allows to switch to an app, but the Dashboard view lets me get to a specific window within an app directly from whatever view I'm currently in. 4 finger swipe up, and clickity click, I'm in the document I'm wanting
That sounds like Mission Control.
Dashboard was the name for a widgets system in mac OS.
Microsoft trashed the core UX twice (Vista and 8)
I have, and do use Linux semi regulary, but I customize NOTHING. I don’t want to manage my computer. The defaults in macOS is sane enough.
The macbook hard drive died and so I decided to try to use the PC as the daily driver.
There are many reasons for it, but it boils down to the fact that I enjoy using macOS and I don't enjoy using Windows.
If I'm not enjoying using a piece of tech, it's not worth the investment - regardless of price.
Yes, Macs are expensive, but I don't mind paying more money to get an experience I actually enjoy. That to me is value, and why mac / pc benchmarks and price / performance comparisons are irrelevant to me as a person.
It's simple: Microsoft doesn't prioritize making it better. They prioritize funneling people into more Microsoft products like One Drive. They are following the general trend of IT: Fuck users.
I do use Firefox/Thunderbird on both, so perhaps I’m missing some special apple sauce.
By the way there are other operating systems besides macOS and Windows. Seems to be lost in a lot of these discussions.
What models would you consider "reasonably priced" ?
For me, the reason for a hackintosh is just that I am tired of all the cables and having to swap between the two setups (like having one monitor for working, and one for gaming) while utilizing the performance when working.
I also want to utilize my iCloud Drive symlinking hacks to sync files / dotfiles between systems.
My gaming rig is currently running i4790k with a fairly decent motherboard (Asus Maximus VII) that I bought used for $200 a two years ago. It still performs like butter as long as you have a decent gpu connected to it. I seriously recommend this setup if you want to save some dough (or maybe the new Ryzen CPUs are better now tbh).
A sidenote regarding monitors: These are some exciting times to be working from home combined with having an interest for gaming due to the new monitors coming out, working for both.
I am currently thinking about the LG 38WN95C-W. Really expensive, but if you use it 8 hours a day for 5 years, I think I calculated it to be like 50 cent a day. :)
edit: Oh, and yes, as someone below mentioned, I love macOS and a lot of the things I work on require me to work on it.
(I had no idea such a thing existed in the first place!)
I can't vouch that it's not a keylogger given it sounds like some brand you'd find on AliExpress, but it does what it's supposed to do.
Since it's plugged into my desktop and I leave that running it's powered by that, but it also has a micro USB input for external power.
Exactly the same monitor I'm planning to get to my home office/games computer combo. In fact, despite the price, this seems to be the most awaited monitor of all year -- finally something that combines great performance, adult design without garish gaming elements, and office style needs (looking at TB3/USB-C with PD&DP).
What do you on macOS that isn't available on Windows? Really curious.
If there's some kind of alternative for MacOS now, I'm keen to know more.
I don't want my fundamental tool to be windows because I don't enjoy using it for hundreds of reasons - there's really not much more to it for me.
This is the first year that kind of monitor exists. :)
By the way, I've always found having a dumb usb switch (for each device) and a dumb video switch to be the best way to eliminate incompatibilities. But everyone wants to get fancy and "smarten up" their kvm to use hotkeys and it screws with latency or keyboard state or just adds weirdness.
So I think the smartest place to put kvm functionality is probably at the keyboard, in the mouse and the monitor.
Or we should have an open kvm solution
But it looks like the 2640 is a 65W part, so not excessive. Huh, not a bad buy for a few bucks, looks like you could get a 6C/12T board and cpu for about £60 from ebay.
(I don't need more computers, I don't need more computers...)
I'm done investing workstation level costs into Apple platforms, I just can't risk them dropping support down the line anymore. Zero guarantee that another GPU will ever be released/supported for that Mac Pro.
Some might say "Surely they are not just going to develop that whole computer then discontinue it", why not? They did exactly that for the computer it was created to replace.
Depending on how much gaming computer you need for the games you want to play, it sounds like the better solution is to just build a gaming computer that runs Windows. That's my setup - a Linux desktop machine (small form factor, running on a machine from two generations ago, it's sufficient for the things that I need to do locally, and if I need to spin off a big compile I have cloud resources to do that) and a six month old gaming rig that runs Windows.
Source: I installed Catalina via OpenCore on a new machine last weekend. It's very similar to installing Arch Linux for the first time.
This doesn't sound right at all for modern Windows. You sure it isn't a hardware issue?
I've had enough of macos & its crappy software quality.
Windows 10 has been fine so far (though the control panel is a complete mess, they really need to start from scratch!).
But the interest in Hackintosh seems to be slowing down[2]? , it's not like Macs have become affordable, if anything Mac Pro is prohibitively expensive and hackintosh generally made more sense to those struck with underpowered Mac Pro.
Most of all, what will happen to the Hackintosh scene due to Apple Silicon? Will the community take up the challenge and make macOS work on Raspberry Pi 10(I understand that Apple Silicon is not vanilla ARM spec) or fizzle out?
[1]https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/
[2]https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Hackinto...
(Mind, I still think the scene's days are numbered due to Apple Silicon.)
The whole point of running MacOS was to get POSIX compliance with a polished GUI. No Windows, pretty terminals smooth fonts good UX.
Now MacOS has no edge over Ubuntu in any sense. Ubuntu runs Docker natively and Cuda. It has an insanely user friendly installer, it runs on a wide range of hardware with no issues and its default GUI is great.
Clover had constant stability problems during boot on my hardware (Coffee Lake, Z390), but OC has been stable since day one (v0.5.6 IIRC). I've not had a single issue since switching.
Also the documentation is second to none.
What's the draw? Better off buying a mac if you want the "Apple Experience" anyway. If you don't, I don't imagine why you'd want anything to do with this.
No amount of effort spent on customizing Windows does the trick because of things about it that are unchangeable (like its terrible text rendering), and while a Linux setup can get close (especially if eschewing a monolithic DE), it requires pouring countless hours into it to get it there, and even then many details are wrong and random things are flaky.
Apple's cheapest Mac configuration, the Mac Mini, starts at $799 for a measly i3 4-core processor and 8GB of RAM with no dedicated GPU. For the same price, I can put together something of at least 2X the performance: i5 6-core, 16GB RAM, and an RX 570/580 GPU.
Granted for Hackintoshes you're on your own for debugging but as others below have said and on r/hackintosh, the end product is oftentimes very stable. So tradeoff can be worth it, especially as you go up the product stack.
Also it is hard to underestimate the amount of polish that Apple puts into their UI. Overall it is a pretty good experience especially compared to some of the windowing systems on various flavors of linux. Polish is something that does not come easily in the open source world.
Some people suggest that Apple will do some special custom hardware in the CPU that will mean Hackintoshes are impossible, but any hardware can be emulated in software, so it then becomes a performance issue. Maybe your ML workloads will suck compared to Apple hardware, for instance.
I think the biggest danger is that Apple ARM hardware doesn't support non-Apple GPUs, but even then some enterprising hacker will probably accept the challenge and enable a Linux driver bridge or the like.
What I can enumerate as risk factors for running macOS arm64 in a VM:
- ARMv8.1 atomics are mandatory. This excludes Cortex-A72 devices, like the RPi4, and earlier generations.
- 16KB page support are mandatory, excludes the RPi4 and other devices too.
- Rosetta uses an MSR to switch the memory model, this makes x86 threads have to all run only at one core at once on Arm CPUs where there isn't a stronger memory model. Notably, some Arm server CPUs provide TSO, making this a non-issue, and Nvidia's Tegra Xavier CPUs provide sequential consistency, making it a non-issue.
- PAC, not a big risk factor, trap once and then patch to the non-PAC variant at worst for instructions that aren't in the NOP space.
- FP16/dotproduct: provided in HW from quite some other manufacturers, and even when it isn't, you could feasibly emulate those fast enough.
On GPUs, Metal paravirtualization exists in macOS 11, maybe would be better to target that for reverse-engineering purposes.
Even if you give up on Rosetta, there’s all the other MSRs you’ll need to patch–there’s not a huge number of these, but since EL0 has direct access to at least one of these you can’t just patch the kernel.
> PAC, not a big risk factor, trap once and then patch to the non-PAC variant at worst for instructions that aren't in the NOP space.
You know, I don’t think Apple really uses the backwards-compatible encodings at all. Probably since they don’t need to?
> Even if you give up on Rosetta, there’s all the other MSRs you’ll need to patch–there’s not a huge number of these, but since EL0 has direct access to at least one of these you can’t just patch the kernel.
APRR can only remove permissions, not add them. As such, it can be stubbed out. The other MSRs are tunables for CPU errata workarounds, which can just be stubbed too.
> You know, I don’t think Apple really uses the backwards-compatible encodings at all. Probably since they don’t need to?
You just need to trap once for each time you see them and then patch it there.
You can take the iPhone CPU and make it into an ARM CPU for a laptop that can compete with Intel and AMD (somewhat) easily. That same architecture is in no way reflective of what people expect out of a workstation. Unless Apple is going to start running all of their own internal workloads ("Apple Cloud") on their own CPUs, I don't see it happening. And in order to do that, they're going to have to get mainline OS support for it, which again is a very different path to market than doing everything in-house with OSX.
Same architecture but this is all about the silicon and what extra hardware accelerated features can apple build into the OS by adding modules to their SoC. That will have little to do with the fact that it's using the ARM architecture in relation to getting those features to work on non Apple Silicon devices.
Yet it cost less to build than the Apple charges for Mac Pro wheels.
Another useful guide from r/hackintosh lists hardware to avoid: https://dortania.github.io/Anti-Hackintosh-Buyers-Guide/
Throughout initial set up and upgrading through different releases, I have been very impressed by the quality of the documentation.
I'm working on some games and apps but only publishing it for Android, cause I don't own a mac.
It's technically against the macOS terms of service, but the macOS terms of service are likely illegal anyways (monopoly bundling of hardware + software, etc).
edit: I now realize this is for running macOS on PC hardware. I remember that I had a coworker back in like 2008 that booted his Dell Mini 10v Netbook with Mac OS X and it was fun to look at but comically non-functional. But he forced himself to use it..
I had an eeepc 901 years ago, with an atom chip, and I turned it into a hackintosh running snow leopard. It worked great! Way better than with the original software on it.
Hackintoshes can be really good. Not all are, and you have to be careful about updates sometimes, but it can be very worthwhile. I would probably have it bootable as an option on my current Ryzen workstation, but I went with an nvidia graphics card so it's a no-go. Good thing I also love debian.
I guess Snow-Leopard was pretty lightweight compared to what we have now. IIRC I also modded the machine a bit with a 64GB aftermarket storage card. Maybe doubled the RAM too.
Eventually I think the aftermarket storage card died, and I went back to debian/XFCE, then to debian/LXDE, in an effort to try to keep it both current and usable, with chromium for a browser as FF was too heavy.
Pleased to hear someone has one still up and running :)
The Mini 10, otoh, was totally different and a royal pain to get working.
It was actually a pretty decent netbook running OS X once we got it running.
I run Ubuntu on my 2013 MacBook retina. Everything works!
I'm not looking for a cheap machine, I'm just looking for good value performance and expandability for what I'm paying.
The cheapest mac pro you can get with modern hardware is $6000. My hackintosh is $1500 because I do like a fast machine that I can play games on every now and then.