8 ms·

My Hackintosh Hardware Spec

319 points by morid1n 9y ago

askafriend 9y ago
I just broke down and finally got a 2015 5k iMac. At some point I just need to get work done instead of waiting for the latest and greatest and the 2015 iMac is powerful enough. I got a good deal on a refurbished one too, so I'm pretty happy with it. There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I just pray that external GPUs will become supported on MacOS. That's the final piece for many people, I think.
- micaksica 9y ago
  > There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is anything giving you that much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP? However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2 when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound, even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10 images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure. I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.
  - sedachv 9y ago
    > Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers. A couple of months ago I dusted off an Acer Aspire One netbook (released in 2010, Atom N450 processor, 2GiB RAM) to install OpenBSD 6.0, after a few years with Linux and Mac OS X on other systems. Surprisingly it is my primary machine now. Today I wanted to see if there were even smaller netbooks with usable keyboards around and came across this video comparison of the Sony Vaio P and Fujitsu UH900: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI The video was posted in February 2017 and the thing to notice are the complaints about the mini netbooks being unusable for web surfing and viewing videos in 2017. 99% of users are absolutely convinced that the reason web pages load slowly is not in fact horrible garbage JavaScript bloatware, but that their computers are too old and slow. HN users do things like uMatrix filtering and `youtube-dl -f`. I think that the 99% of users are much more demanding of their hardware than HN readers, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    if not constantly, then, really really frequently, i recompile Android projects. before buying a new machine recently, i wanted to know what benefit a fast processor would offer for my specific usage pattern. so i repeatedly recompiled a representative Android project at different CPU speeds on my existing (over-clockable) machine. the machine needed about 15% less time to recompile at 4.1 GHz than it did at 3.4 GHz.
- dovdovdov 9y ago
  Well, I replaced my 2010 MBP with a 2015 MBA, just because I got bored with it, and was also bored with waiting for a 'proper' MBP update. I also got it within a good deal, so I haven't had to touch my piggybank which has £1500 in it since 2013 waiting for Apple to hear the voice of developers who are busy with more advanced things than selecting the perfect emoji on the touch bar at a Starbucks.
- dvcrn 9y ago
  External thunderbolt GPUs are already supported (with a little bit of hacking). Check out https://egpu.io https://egpu.io
- nottorp 9y ago
  The home user problem is the GPUs in iMacs are shit for gaming. The work user problem is the iMac isn't designed for 100% CPU usage for extended amounts of time. I work from home as a consultant, so I have both problems :) Thus, hackintosh...
- zerohm 9y ago
  There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore My personal data point of Moore's Law slowing down: my 8 year old Core 2 Quad is still half as fast as a modern i5. For it to still be usable would have been impossible in previous decades. With an SSD and modern video card I still game on it.
- rconti 9y ago
  Yup. I gave up and replaced my 2006 Mac Pro with a 2016 5k iMac once I realized the prices were sub-$2k instead of the $3k I was expecting. I've always hated all-in-ones but lately have found displays and computers last roughly as long as each other so it's less of a concern. That GORGEOUS 5k display sure doesn't hurt, either.
codinghorror 9y ago
While I agree CPU perf improvements have been quite incremental, PCI express SSDs and 64gb ram make Hackintoshes worth it. I almost wish Apple would just quietly make this easier for folks, blessing it without explicitly blessing it.
- nedsma 9y ago
  Just use Hackintosh approved components[1] and you'll have an easy ride. [1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017 https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017
  - valarauca1 9y ago
    I can't overstate how common parts are for this. My motherboard wasn't officially on their list yet the only difficult I had was my USB keyboard windows/alt/ctrl key wouldn't properly work. I had to drop $50 on a Mac keyboard. Was about on part with the difficulty of installing Ubuntu now-a-days.
- wibbleywobbley 9y ago
  They basically have blessed it as much as you could reasonably expect them to. With careful hardware selection you will have no issues. My only recommendation, in general, is to use a USB audio device rather than integrated audio.
rubyn00bie 9y ago
It's sad to say but this is the only way to get a decently powerful desktop Mac right now (that's not using server grade Xenon chips, I don't need ECC). One thing that's unfortunate though (about a Hackintosh) I think about to change (maybe already has) is the use of a R9 280x due to driver issues in OS X (i.e. there are no drivers for newer GPUs). I think now you can use, or soon will be able to, Pascal based GPUs which would great for deep learning/CUDA. It's a shame Apple has been relentless in their quest to ship inferior GPUs in Macs. The biggest beef I have with this Touchbar MBP I've got is the GPU is pretty crap compared to NVidia's offerings-- and I think it's somewhere that Apple could dominate. Sure it'd take partnering with GPU manufacturers, innovation, and money in the space but that's exactly what the Mac needs right now and Apple is fully capable of... or someone's god forbid sacrificing a small bit of portability for the power. I really want to love the mac but outside of iOS development I don't have much of a reason to run it these days. Windows + Linux subystem is pretty great, or just booting directly into Linux. To be honest developing in native Linux lately has been wonderful, it's incredibly fast, driver support is pretty damn good, and desktop is attractive enough. I even have Thunderbolt 3 ports on my desktop which have been good, I just wish VNC clients were faster so I could network-in my Macbook Pro's screen better. The latency even over thunderbolt three is pretty atrocious. Edit: Just so I don't SPAM another comment, as the nice folks below have pointed out... PASCAL is supported. Upvoted you all because I'm so happy. Gonna get my hackintosh back in action tomorrow. Edit 2: I'd also like to say NVMe is mind blowingly fast on the desktop I've got and something sorely lacking from Apple's offering adding another downside to the current Mac desktops. Edit 3: Cleared up note about thunderbolt 3 and VNC.
- godzillabrennus 9y ago
  Mac OS "as it's now called" is a compelling offering because of third party commercial software support including Microsoft and Adobe. Linux is great for some developers who work with stacks that live entirely in Linux. There are still some things though that it doesn't stack up well against like the software available for Windows or Mac. As someone who does front end graphic work to mockup apps before building them as part of my workflow I couldn't see myself switching off Mac OS unless Microsoft drops the registry, replaces NTFS, stops with the spyware being built in, disables the forced updates and finally goes with one UI/UX for everything.
dchuk 9y ago
If this Hackintosh was originally built in 2014 (with 2014 parts), I would assume the price is significantly lower to build this today. Also, seems like that monitor makes up more than half of the price of $3000 for parts. Can this be done now for under $1000? If so, this is a pretty attractive machine.
- eugenekolo2 9y ago
  Doubtful. Maybe around $1500. Computer parts really don't get that much cheaper year to year. In fact, they go up sometimes. CPU + Mobo + GPU + RAM + SSD is going to run you around $500 + $200 + $300 + $200 + $300 = $1500. Rest of the components probably run you another $500. So for those exact specs, it's at least $2000 in parts today. You can probably get slightly worse stuff and do this for ~$1500.
- morid1n 9y ago
  The display hasn't come down in price much. The problem today would be sourcing some these parts I guess. It would be cheaper though. Or so I believe, haven't checked SSD prices recently.
- islane 9y ago
  If some of the components are sourced used, then the price for this could easily be <$1000 for the core components, though you could make this cheaper with a different CPU and GPU, cheaper memory, see below: (prices estimated from eBay) ------------------------------ CPU, fans, cpu cooler, motheboard, RAM, PSU, GPU (comparable Radeon 280x) $865 +/-$50 (shipped) Note: a cheaper CPU (+overclock), a different PSU (500-600w would be fine for this system), cheaper ram (+overclock) would net a $100-200 savings for nearly identical performance Case (Silverstone fortress FT-03) $200 est Apple-compatible PCIe wifi card $130 shipped Storage, speakers, mouse/keyboard, and display vary by user needs the cost here could be $200 or less for cheap/used components or $10k for color-accurate panels, audiophile speakers, custom mechanical keyboard, multiple PCIe SSDs, etc, etc ------------------------------ TL,DR - let's assume you're will to source some used components and go the cheaper route on a few things. You already have access to a screen, input devices, and speakers. In this situation, you could build a comparable machine for under $1000 + the cost of whatever storage SSD/HDD you need. You could stay under $1000 for the whole build if you opt for a cheap case and a single SATA-based SSD.
xaduha 9y ago
Using VFIO is a better solution.
- radimm 9y ago
  what's the day to day experience compared to 'native' hackintosh?
  - xaduha 9y ago
    I've been using Hackintosh since Snow Leopard I think, but I never used a real Mac. To me running it in a VM feels as real as it ever was, apart from a bootloader and an installer there's nothing that needs to be done to the system post installation. Granted it wouldn't work this way for everyone, since I pass several pieces of real hardware, so it's still partially Hackintosh-y, you still need to pick and choose, but not nearly as much. I pass a USB3 hub that is built-in (USB soundcard, M/KB obviously) and AMD videocard. To not use any kexts you'd have to pass OOB supported networking card also. Some report performance issues, but I never noticed anything of the sort, I suspect they are doing something wrong like passing just one processor core.
ap46 9y ago
Tonymacx86 & the new Pascal drivers will let you use the greatest GPUs now for all creative work not fulfilled by linux & if you want to avoid the spyware plague of Windoze 10.
jankotek 9y ago
Hm; quad core, 32GB memory, Radeon R9 280X, single display... that is just basic workstation.
nottorp 9y ago
Hmm the bt/wifi module is interesting, though expensive. If you go for a random off the shelf bt it's going to be a lot of trouble, if this is the original it will save a lot of hassle. The striped sata ssds are overkill though. Same for the mirrored spinny disks, raid is not backup and you're better off with time machine to an external disk or one of the online backup services.
- jawngee 9y ago
  I use an orico BT-104 dongle and have working handoff, iMessage, etc. Wasn't a hassle at all, just plugged it in. iMessage was actually a bit more work because you need to generate a "serial" for your clover config, otherwise it'll generate a new one on every boot.
  - nottorp 9y ago
    Yeah but if i manage to find your dongle anywhere, are you sure it hasn't been updated to have a different chip inside? That's the common problem with usb dongles for bt or wifi.
- sleepychu 9y ago
  You can do it for much cheaper if you buy the adapter and the board seperately ebay search for "BCM94360CD" turned up both bits. $80 total with the broadcom piece shipping from China.
hd4 9y ago
Not a troll attempt, but I want to know why people use Hackintosh over, say, Ubuntu or Fedora? What can you do with Hackintosh that you still can't with a Linux distro? Edit: Possibly a bit late to ask, but I should have asked if you had ever seriously tried Linux and if so what your experiences were like?
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  Compile software for iOS.
  - hd4 9y ago
    This is the only reason I have considered a Hackintosh in the past, actually got one but didn't get around to writing code for it because I got busy with other things. I wish it was less of a closed garden. I'm not sure how it helps their cause by setting the entry bar tied to hardware costs.
- wingerlang 9y ago
  Run macOS software..
  - hd4 9y ago
    Which software in particular?
    - rootlocus 9y ago
      Not Mac OS specific, but Photoshop or the Unity engine are good examples.
    - wingerlang 9y ago
      On top of my head of apps I use more or less daily. Xcode, Hazel, DragonDrop, 1Password, DayOne, Alfred, KeyboardMaestro, LINE, DaisyDisk, Sketch, Hopper, Fantastical 2, SnappyApp, BetterTouchTool and so on. Some may have equivalents (but I'm sure nothing as polished) or will run under Wine but I have bad experiences with both. There are also workflows that take advantage of macOS features (e.g. location service) that wouldn't work on Linux I guess.
grecy 9y ago
I ran a Hackintosh laptop for a couple of years - a Dell mini 9, probably the best supported laptop for Mac OS ever. It was great. Basically everything worked, and it never crashed. Well, almost. Sometimes sound would stop working until reboot. Sometime wifi would not work after wake from sleep. I couldn't upgrade Mac OS. The keyboard was garbage, as was the screen. Ironically, A friend tripped over the cord and smashed the screen - if it was a real mac MagSafe would have saved it. (I replaced the screen for $35, which was nice). All in all it was great, and after it I saved and saved and bought a real Mac Book Air 13 in 2012. I could not be happier. I have used it for tens of thousands of hours and it's still going strong taking a lot of abuse in West Africa. At the end of the day, a Hackintosh just approaches the Apple experience, but I don't think it will ever get there.
- 5_minutes 9y ago
  The sleep/awake problems you're describring here also happen quite often of "real" Macs.
  - e40 9y ago
    I have a fairly large sample size, and I've had zero issues with sleep/wake, except one: rarely, when I used to use a 2014 MBP for my desktop (external monitor, keyboard, mouse), about 1 in 30 times I would disconnect it to go to a meeting, it wouldn't wake from sleep and required a hard reboot. It seems to be related to losing the monitor/keyboard, as it never happened other situations.
    - swozey 9y ago
      I unfortunately buy a new MBP every year (except 2017 because I've got a 2016 and the upgrade didn't have the 32gb I expected). I have had problems with sleep/wake on probably every single machine. Did you leave it on to where it got to 0-5% battery and shut off? When I do that it takes me about 10 minutes to start actually using the thing again it's so throttled regardless of the fact that it's now plugged into an outlet. Even restarting it at that point doesn't help much. I have to just sit there waiting for it to hit 8% or 10% or whatever it hits to stop throttling everything. More often than not when I plug in my two monitors one won't come on until I do it again. Or maybe the third time. Then about 30% of the time when I close it and unplug everything and remove my headphones the thing is still running and my music blasts through the office. No manufacturer is infallible but this is the kind of stuff I would've quickly replaced my laptop and gone to another brand over if I wasn't so tied into OSX.
atVelocet 9y ago
Just as with any Hackintosh setup: The guy who builds the system seems to have "no" knowledge about hardware and thinks he could write about it. This guy says it's a eight core CPU which is just wrong. The power supply is WAY too oversized resulting in bad efficiency and thus a bigger power consumption. He also states he needs no special kexts. Well.. that's because you are using Clover! God damn.. there is so much wrong with >90% of those articles online on how to build a Hackintosh... it's amazing.
- morganwilde 9y ago
  Can you give a good resource that's not wrong? I'm really curious.
  - atVelocet 9y ago
    https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017 https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017 This is something to start with. But i don't know why they don't go with a NVMe SSD? Clover supports it and it's way faster. But overall these are relatively good guides. I still would make some minor adjustments but that doesn't matter.
- mtarnovan 9y ago
  He said he was going to buy the 8-core Mac Pro. What's wrong about that?
- nnq 9y ago
  > The power supply is WAY too oversized resulting in bad efficiency and thus a bigger power consumption ...but who gives a f? It's a desktop, no battery to drain. And of all the appliances in your home, the computers surely don't mean that much as a percentage of power usage. Yeah, other things are probably wrong too, but I think you picked the wrong detail to care about here :) Better to have a bigger power supply and be sure it'll handle whatever you might add to the machine in the future than to care about replacing it. And from my (and everyone else I talked to) experience, inefficient (power-wise) electronics tend to last way longer than efficient ones, so I prefer them (since my time wasted finding a replacement or a repair shop is worth more than the price of the extra power), even when it comes to fridges and washing machines. (Commenting mostly because all this insane obsession with energy efficiency is getting on my nerves.)
lucaspiller 9y ago
Kind of hijacking the thread, but what's the best software for running graphical VMs on top of a Linux desktop? (i.e. a Parallels equivalent) I tried setting up MacOS through Qemu/KVM (using these instructions [0]) and it installed pretty much fine. I don't have a spare graphics card or monitor for VFIO, so I tried running it in a window, but the mouse and keyboard capturing was really finicky, so it was completely unusable. [0] https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
- xaduha 9y ago
  Do you have a spare M/KB or a KVM switch of some kind? Then what you should do is pass an USB hub (most MBs have more than one built-in anyway) to the VM and connect second pair of M/KB there.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    Yes, but I'd prefer not to do that. I have a 27" UHD screen, so it's big enough to display both the VM and my desktop. I'd like to display the VM in a window, like this: http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v7/update3/docs/en/Parallels%20Desktop%20User%27s%20Guide/pdwindowmode.png http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v7/update3/docs/en/Par...
dawnerd 9y ago
I built a hackintosh the other day using clover. Overall went very smoothly. The only thing that was tricky was audio. The bundled realtek drivers didn't work and had to find some github repo with a modified version (can't recall what it was now). Specs off hand: Asus Z170-A, Intel 6700K (Overclocked to 4.2), 32 gigs ram, 1tb ssd, nvidia 1060 powering dual 4k screens What amazed me was how easy it was compared to years ago the last time I tried.
- ikurei 9y ago
  Did you use those new drivers nVidia just released for 10xx GPUs? I'll be building my first hackintosh soon and that's got me worried.
  - intoverflow2 9y ago
    They will be, the 10XX series literally doesn't work on OS X otherwise.
    - bawana 9y ago
      what kind of power supply would you use w 1080Ti in the box?
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    Yep. You'll only get fairly low resolution until you install.
kuon 9y ago
I had a hackintosh build that was working really well for two years. At the time I would never had considered windows. But I did the switch to windows about 2 months ago (using a linux vm as dev backend). And I surprisingly had zero issue. The hackintosh can be a good way to taste the hardware diversity (even if the article don't go very far on the hardware side). Once you do, you realise how locked up you are by Apple.
- KSS42 9y ago
  Does Windows support of BASH help at all? I am curious if anyone finds that useful.
  - gervase 9y ago
    I use it daily. It's not quite as good as the Mac's terminal in many ways, but in a few ways it's even better (apt > homebrew, for example). If all you need to do is ssh into a VM or server, it's awesome. If you need to run a specific version of a legacy Fortran compiler, it might not work for you. I switch between all three systems over the course of a day, but in terms of (A) system consistency, and (B) well-designed (third-party) applications, Mac still wins.
    - kuon 9y ago
      Yes, the Mac has good consistency. But I am very pleased with Windows window management and multimonitor support. Being able to resize multiple adjacent windows with a single drag is really nice. The window+tab and alt+tab shortcuts are complimentary and better than the mac counterpart.
  - kuon 9y ago
    It is getting more and more useful. Microsoft is really working on it. I am using a VM for now to be sure to get 100% linux environment working. But I hope to be able to do all my dev work in Windows in a few months. There is one thing missing still, it is something like iTerm 2. I am currently running terminator on linux via X11. Having a nice native Windows terminal emulator would be a big plus. There is ConEmu, but after a lot of tinkering I was unable to make proper color and mouse support working. MacOS is a very nice system for developers, and I am very sad to move away from it. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-motivations-b10accc10889 https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-moti...
SmellTheGlove 9y ago
Nice build, but I'm a little surprised to see it get this much traction at HN. The hackintosh subreddit has builds like these for days. Mine is a dual boot setup on an i7-6700k on Z170, 64GB RAM, and a very old and well-supported Radeon 5770 GPU. I will admit mine sits mostly in Windows with a number of Linux VMs running for development, which is why I maxed out the RAM. Previous build was an LGA775 build. More specifically, an LGA771 hack. Again, ancient Gigabyte P35DS3L motherboard, 6GB RAM, and a modified Xeon X5470. It was extremely stable. I may bring it back, but I used the SSDs and PSU in my new build.
robotjosh 9y ago
What I really need is windows 10. Can a hackintosh run parallels with windows 10 ok?
- knd775 9y ago
  Generally, yes. But I'd just dual boot unless you need them at the same time.
quantum_state 9y ago
Very nice write up n thx for sharing ... I had done similar but at the end ... Linux took over ...
MJR 9y ago
If anyone is considering building their own, this is a good reference. Dan Benjamin's site detailing his recommendations: http://hackintoshmethod.com/ http://hackintoshmethod.com/
leonroy 9y ago
Hackintoshes are a fun hobby and in my youth I burnt a lot of time messing around with editing kexts, boot loaders, and fixing it after every other update. Soon as I got my first paying job I plowed my first two pay cheques into a Mac Pro and never looked back. The headache of relying on a Hackintosh which could break between updates was just not worth it at all when I had work to do on it. Are Hackintoshes much more reliable today than they used to be?
- taude 9y ago
  The answer is yes, I ran one for two years buy purchasing well-known compatible hardware. But you're still at the mercy of OS X upgrades, which require fiddling and downloading of newer NVidia drivers, etc... So, still not worth it, IMHO.
redsummer 9y ago
Phil Schiller would make a good replacement for Tim Cook.

319 points by morid1n 9y ago

I just broke down and finally got a 2015 5k iMac. At some point I just need to get work done instead of waiting for the latest and greatest and the 2015 iMac is powerful enough. I got a good deal on a refurbished one too, so I'm pretty happy with it. There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I just pray that external GPUs will become supported on MacOS. That's the final piece for many people, I think.

micaksica 9y ago
> There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is anything giving you that much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP? However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2 when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound, even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10 images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure. I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.
- sedachv 9y ago
  > Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers. A couple of months ago I dusted off an Acer Aspire One netbook (released in 2010, Atom N450 processor, 2GiB RAM) to install OpenBSD 6.0, after a few years with Linux and Mac OS X on other systems. Surprisingly it is my primary machine now. Today I wanted to see if there were even smaller netbooks with usable keyboards around and came across this video comparison of the Sony Vaio P and Fujitsu UH900: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI The video was posted in February 2017 and the thing to notice are the complaints about the mini netbooks being unusable for web surfing and viewing videos in 2017. 99% of users are absolutely convinced that the reason web pages load slowly is not in fact horrible garbage JavaScript bloatware, but that their computers are too old and slow. HN users do things like uMatrix filtering and `youtube-dl -f`. I think that the 99% of users are much more demanding of their hardware than HN readers, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  if not constantly, then, really really frequently, i recompile Android projects. before buying a new machine recently, i wanted to know what benefit a fast processor would offer for my specific usage pattern. so i repeatedly recompiled a representative Android project at different CPU speeds on my existing (over-clockable) machine. the machine needed about 15% less time to recompile at 4.1 GHz than it did at 3.4 GHz.
dovdovdov 9y ago
Well, I replaced my 2010 MBP with a 2015 MBA, just because I got bored with it, and was also bored with waiting for a 'proper' MBP update. I also got it within a good deal, so I haven't had to touch my piggybank which has £1500 in it since 2013 waiting for Apple to hear the voice of developers who are busy with more advanced things than selecting the perfect emoji on the touch bar at a Starbucks.
dvcrn 9y ago
External thunderbolt GPUs are already supported (with a little bit of hacking). Check out https://egpu.io https://egpu.io
nottorp 9y ago
The home user problem is the GPUs in iMacs are shit for gaming. The work user problem is the iMac isn't designed for 100% CPU usage for extended amounts of time. I work from home as a consultant, so I have both problems :) Thus, hackintosh...
zerohm 9y ago
There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore My personal data point of Moore's Law slowing down: my 8 year old Core 2 Quad is still half as fast as a modern i5. For it to still be usable would have been impossible in previous decades. With an SSD and modern video card I still game on it.
rconti 9y ago
Yup. I gave up and replaced my 2006 Mac Pro with a 2016 5k iMac once I realized the prices were sub-$2k instead of the $3k I was expecting. I've always hated all-in-ones but lately have found displays and computers last roughly as long as each other so it's less of a concern. That GORGEOUS 5k display sure doesn't hurt, either.

codinghorror 9y ago

While I agree CPU perf improvements have been quite incremental, PCI express SSDs and 64gb ram make Hackintoshes worth it. I almost wish Apple would just quietly make this easier for folks, blessing it without explicitly blessing it.

nedsma 9y ago
Just use Hackintosh approved components[1] and you'll have an easy ride. [1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017 https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017
- valarauca1 9y ago
  I can't overstate how common parts are for this. My motherboard wasn't officially on their list yet the only difficult I had was my USB keyboard windows/alt/ctrl key wouldn't properly work. I had to drop $50 on a Mac keyboard. Was about on part with the difficulty of installing Ubuntu now-a-days.
wibbleywobbley 9y ago
They basically have blessed it as much as you could reasonably expect them to. With careful hardware selection you will have no issues. My only recommendation, in general, is to use a USB audio device rather than integrated audio.

rubyn00bie 9y ago

It's sad to say but this is the only way to get a decently powerful desktop Mac right now (that's not using server grade Xenon chips, I don't need ECC). One thing that's unfortunate though (about a Hackintosh) I think about to change (maybe already has) is the use of a R9 280x due to driver issues in OS X (i.e. there are no drivers for newer GPUs). I think now you can use, or soon will be able to, Pascal based GPUs which would great for deep learning/CUDA. It's a shame Apple has been relentless in their quest to ship inferior GPUs in Macs. The biggest beef I have with this Touchbar MBP I've got is the GPU is pretty crap compared to NVidia's offerings-- and I think it's somewhere that Apple could dominate. Sure it'd take partnering with GPU manufacturers, innovation, and money in the space but that's exactly what the Mac needs right now and Apple is fully capable of... or someone's god forbid sacrificing a small bit of portability for the power. I really want to love the mac but outside of iOS development I don't have much of a reason to run it these days. Windows + Linux subystem is pretty great, or just booting directly into Linux. To be honest developing in native Linux lately has been wonderful, it's incredibly fast, driver support is pretty damn good, and desktop is attractive enough. I even have Thunderbolt 3 ports on my desktop which have been good, I just wish VNC clients were faster so I could network-in my Macbook Pro's screen better. The latency even over thunderbolt three is pretty atrocious. Edit: Just so I don't SPAM another comment, as the nice folks below have pointed out... PASCAL is supported. Upvoted you all because I'm so happy. Gonna get my hackintosh back in action tomorrow. Edit 2: I'd also like to say NVMe is mind blowingly fast on the desktop I've got and something sorely lacking from Apple's offering adding another downside to the current Mac desktops. Edit 3: Cleared up note about thunderbolt 3 and VNC.

godzillabrennus 9y ago
Mac OS "as it's now called" is a compelling offering because of third party commercial software support including Microsoft and Adobe. Linux is great for some developers who work with stacks that live entirely in Linux. There are still some things though that it doesn't stack up well against like the software available for Windows or Mac. As someone who does front end graphic work to mockup apps before building them as part of my workflow I couldn't see myself switching off Mac OS unless Microsoft drops the registry, replaces NTFS, stops with the spyware being built in, disables the forced updates and finally goes with one UI/UX for everything.

dchuk 9y ago

If this Hackintosh was originally built in 2014 (with 2014 parts), I would assume the price is significantly lower to build this today. Also, seems like that monitor makes up more than half of the price of $3000 for parts. Can this be done now for under $1000? If so, this is a pretty attractive machine.

eugenekolo2 9y ago
Doubtful. Maybe around $1500. Computer parts really don't get that much cheaper year to year. In fact, they go up sometimes. CPU + Mobo + GPU + RAM + SSD is going to run you around $500 + $200 + $300 + $200 + $300 = $1500. Rest of the components probably run you another $500. So for those exact specs, it's at least $2000 in parts today. You can probably get slightly worse stuff and do this for ~$1500.
morid1n 9y ago
The display hasn't come down in price much. The problem today would be sourcing some these parts I guess. It would be cheaper though. Or so I believe, haven't checked SSD prices recently.
islane 9y ago
If some of the components are sourced used, then the price for this could easily be <$1000 for the core components, though you could make this cheaper with a different CPU and GPU, cheaper memory, see below: (prices estimated from eBay) ------------------------------ CPU, fans, cpu cooler, motheboard, RAM, PSU, GPU (comparable Radeon 280x) $865 +/-$50 (shipped) Note: a cheaper CPU (+overclock), a different PSU (500-600w would be fine for this system), cheaper ram (+overclock) would net a $100-200 savings for nearly identical performance Case (Silverstone fortress FT-03) $200 est Apple-compatible PCIe wifi card $130 shipped Storage, speakers, mouse/keyboard, and display vary by user needs the cost here could be $200 or less for cheap/used components or $10k for color-accurate panels, audiophile speakers, custom mechanical keyboard, multiple PCIe SSDs, etc, etc ------------------------------ TL,DR - let's assume you're will to source some used components and go the cheaper route on a few things. You already have access to a screen, input devices, and speakers. In this situation, you could build a comparable machine for under $1000 + the cost of whatever storage SSD/HDD you need. You could stay under $1000 for the whole build if you opt for a cheap case and a single SATA-based SSD.

xaduha 9y ago

Using VFIO is a better solution.

radimm 9y ago
what's the day to day experience compared to 'native' hackintosh?
- xaduha 9y ago
  I've been using Hackintosh since Snow Leopard I think, but I never used a real Mac. To me running it in a VM feels as real as it ever was, apart from a bootloader and an installer there's nothing that needs to be done to the system post installation. Granted it wouldn't work this way for everyone, since I pass several pieces of real hardware, so it's still partially Hackintosh-y, you still need to pick and choose, but not nearly as much. I pass a USB3 hub that is built-in (USB soundcard, M/KB obviously) and AMD videocard. To not use any kexts you'd have to pass OOB supported networking card also. Some report performance issues, but I never noticed anything of the sort, I suspect they are doing something wrong like passing just one processor core.

ap46 9y ago

Tonymacx86 & the new Pascal drivers will let you use the greatest GPUs now for all creative work not fulfilled by linux & if you want to avoid the spyware plague of Windoze 10.

jankotek 9y ago

Hm; quad core, 32GB memory, Radeon R9 280X, single display... that is just basic workstation.

nottorp 9y ago

Hmm the bt/wifi module is interesting, though expensive. If you go for a random off the shelf bt it's going to be a lot of trouble, if this is the original it will save a lot of hassle. The striped sata ssds are overkill though. Same for the mirrored spinny disks, raid is not backup and you're better off with time machine to an external disk or one of the online backup services.

jawngee 9y ago
I use an orico BT-104 dongle and have working handoff, iMessage, etc. Wasn't a hassle at all, just plugged it in. iMessage was actually a bit more work because you need to generate a "serial" for your clover config, otherwise it'll generate a new one on every boot.
- nottorp 9y ago
  Yeah but if i manage to find your dongle anywhere, are you sure it hasn't been updated to have a different chip inside? That's the common problem with usb dongles for bt or wifi.
sleepychu 9y ago
You can do it for much cheaper if you buy the adapter and the board seperately ebay search for "BCM94360CD" turned up both bits. $80 total with the broadcom piece shipping from China.

hd4 9y ago

Not a troll attempt, but I want to know why people use Hackintosh over, say, Ubuntu or Fedora? What can you do with Hackintosh that you still can't with a Linux distro? Edit: Possibly a bit late to ask, but I should have asked if you had ever seriously tried Linux and if so what your experiences were like?

amiga-workbench 9y ago
Compile software for iOS.
- hd4 9y ago
  This is the only reason I have considered a Hackintosh in the past, actually got one but didn't get around to writing code for it because I got busy with other things. I wish it was less of a closed garden. I'm not sure how it helps their cause by setting the entry bar tied to hardware costs.
wingerlang 9y ago
Run macOS software..
- hd4 9y ago
  Which software in particular?
  - rootlocus 9y ago
    Not Mac OS specific, but Photoshop or the Unity engine are good examples.
  - wingerlang 9y ago
    On top of my head of apps I use more or less daily. Xcode, Hazel, DragonDrop, 1Password, DayOne, Alfred, KeyboardMaestro, LINE, DaisyDisk, Sketch, Hopper, Fantastical 2, SnappyApp, BetterTouchTool and so on. Some may have equivalents (but I'm sure nothing as polished) or will run under Wine but I have bad experiences with both. There are also workflows that take advantage of macOS features (e.g. location service) that wouldn't work on Linux I guess.

grecy 9y ago

I ran a Hackintosh laptop for a couple of years - a Dell mini 9, probably the best supported laptop for Mac OS ever. It was great. Basically everything worked, and it never crashed. Well, almost. Sometimes sound would stop working until reboot. Sometime wifi would not work after wake from sleep. I couldn't upgrade Mac OS. The keyboard was garbage, as was the screen. Ironically, A friend tripped over the cord and smashed the screen - if it was a real mac MagSafe would have saved it. (I replaced the screen for $35, which was nice). All in all it was great, and after it I saved and saved and bought a real Mac Book Air 13 in 2012. I could not be happier. I have used it for tens of thousands of hours and it's still going strong taking a lot of abuse in West Africa. At the end of the day, a Hackintosh just approaches the Apple experience, but I don't think it will ever get there.

5_minutes 9y ago
The sleep/awake problems you're describring here also happen quite often of "real" Macs.
- e40 9y ago
  I have a fairly large sample size, and I've had zero issues with sleep/wake, except one: rarely, when I used to use a 2014 MBP for my desktop (external monitor, keyboard, mouse), about 1 in 30 times I would disconnect it to go to a meeting, it wouldn't wake from sleep and required a hard reboot. It seems to be related to losing the monitor/keyboard, as it never happened other situations.
  - swozey 9y ago
    I unfortunately buy a new MBP every year (except 2017 because I've got a 2016 and the upgrade didn't have the 32gb I expected). I have had problems with sleep/wake on probably every single machine. Did you leave it on to where it got to 0-5% battery and shut off? When I do that it takes me about 10 minutes to start actually using the thing again it's so throttled regardless of the fact that it's now plugged into an outlet. Even restarting it at that point doesn't help much. I have to just sit there waiting for it to hit 8% or 10% or whatever it hits to stop throttling everything. More often than not when I plug in my two monitors one won't come on until I do it again. Or maybe the third time. Then about 30% of the time when I close it and unplug everything and remove my headphones the thing is still running and my music blasts through the office. No manufacturer is infallible but this is the kind of stuff I would've quickly replaced my laptop and gone to another brand over if I wasn't so tied into OSX.

atVelocet 9y ago

Just as with any Hackintosh setup: The guy who builds the system seems to have "no" knowledge about hardware and thinks he could write about it. This guy says it's a eight core CPU which is just wrong. The power supply is WAY too oversized resulting in bad efficiency and thus a bigger power consumption. He also states he needs no special kexts. Well.. that's because you are using Clover! God damn.. there is so much wrong with >90% of those articles online on how to build a Hackintosh... it's amazing.

morganwilde 9y ago
Can you give a good resource that's not wrong? I'm really curious.
- atVelocet 9y ago
  https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017 https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017 This is something to start with. But i don't know why they don't go with a NVMe SSD? Clover supports it and it's way faster. But overall these are relatively good guides. I still would make some minor adjustments but that doesn't matter.
mtarnovan 9y ago
He said he was going to buy the 8-core Mac Pro. What's wrong about that?
nnq 9y ago
> The power supply is WAY too oversized resulting in bad efficiency and thus a bigger power consumption ...but who gives a f? It's a desktop, no battery to drain. And of all the appliances in your home, the computers surely don't mean that much as a percentage of power usage. Yeah, other things are probably wrong too, but I think you picked the wrong detail to care about here :) Better to have a bigger power supply and be sure it'll handle whatever you might add to the machine in the future than to care about replacing it. And from my (and everyone else I talked to) experience, inefficient (power-wise) electronics tend to last way longer than efficient ones, so I prefer them (since my time wasted finding a replacement or a repair shop is worth more than the price of the extra power), even when it comes to fridges and washing machines. (Commenting mostly because all this insane obsession with energy efficiency is getting on my nerves.)

lucaspiller 9y ago

Kind of hijacking the thread, but what's the best software for running graphical VMs on top of a Linux desktop? (i.e. a Parallels equivalent) I tried setting up MacOS through Qemu/KVM (using these instructions [0]) and it installed pretty much fine. I don't have a spare graphics card or monitor for VFIO, so I tried running it in a window, but the mouse and keyboard capturing was really finicky, so it was completely unusable. [0] https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

xaduha 9y ago
Do you have a spare M/KB or a KVM switch of some kind? Then what you should do is pass an USB hub (most MBs have more than one built-in anyway) to the VM and connect second pair of M/KB there.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  Yes, but I'd prefer not to do that. I have a 27" UHD screen, so it's big enough to display both the VM and my desktop. I'd like to display the VM in a window, like this: http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v7/update3/docs/en/Parallels%20Desktop%20User%27s%20Guide/pdwindowmode.png http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v7/update3/docs/en/Par...

dawnerd 9y ago

I built a hackintosh the other day using clover. Overall went very smoothly. The only thing that was tricky was audio. The bundled realtek drivers didn't work and had to find some github repo with a modified version (can't recall what it was now). Specs off hand: Asus Z170-A, Intel 6700K (Overclocked to 4.2), 32 gigs ram, 1tb ssd, nvidia 1060 powering dual 4k screens What amazed me was how easy it was compared to years ago the last time I tried.

ikurei 9y ago
Did you use those new drivers nVidia just released for 10xx GPUs? I'll be building my first hackintosh soon and that's got me worried.
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  They will be, the 10XX series literally doesn't work on OS X otherwise.
  - bawana 9y ago
    what kind of power supply would you use w 1080Ti in the box?
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Yep. You'll only get fairly low resolution until you install.

kuon 9y ago

I had a hackintosh build that was working really well for two years. At the time I would never had considered windows. But I did the switch to windows about 2 months ago (using a linux vm as dev backend). And I surprisingly had zero issue. The hackintosh can be a good way to taste the hardware diversity (even if the article don't go very far on the hardware side). Once you do, you realise how locked up you are by Apple.

KSS42 9y ago
Does Windows support of BASH help at all? I am curious if anyone finds that useful.
- gervase 9y ago
  I use it daily. It's not quite as good as the Mac's terminal in many ways, but in a few ways it's even better (apt > homebrew, for example). If all you need to do is ssh into a VM or server, it's awesome. If you need to run a specific version of a legacy Fortran compiler, it might not work for you. I switch between all three systems over the course of a day, but in terms of (A) system consistency, and (B) well-designed (third-party) applications, Mac still wins.
  - kuon 9y ago
    Yes, the Mac has good consistency. But I am very pleased with Windows window management and multimonitor support. Being able to resize multiple adjacent windows with a single drag is really nice. The window+tab and alt+tab shortcuts are complimentary and better than the mac counterpart.
- kuon 9y ago
  It is getting more and more useful. Microsoft is really working on it. I am using a VM for now to be sure to get 100% linux environment working. But I hope to be able to do all my dev work in Windows in a few months. There is one thing missing still, it is something like iTerm 2. I am currently running terminator on linux via X11. Having a nice native Windows terminal emulator would be a big plus. There is ConEmu, but after a lot of tinkering I was unable to make proper color and mouse support working. MacOS is a very nice system for developers, and I am very sad to move away from it. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-motivations-b10accc10889 https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-part-1-moti...

SmellTheGlove 9y ago

Nice build, but I'm a little surprised to see it get this much traction at HN. The hackintosh subreddit has builds like these for days. Mine is a dual boot setup on an i7-6700k on Z170, 64GB RAM, and a very old and well-supported Radeon 5770 GPU. I will admit mine sits mostly in Windows with a number of Linux VMs running for development, which is why I maxed out the RAM. Previous build was an LGA775 build. More specifically, an LGA771 hack. Again, ancient Gigabyte P35DS3L motherboard, 6GB RAM, and a modified Xeon X5470. It was extremely stable. I may bring it back, but I used the SSDs and PSU in my new build.

robotjosh 9y ago

What I really need is windows 10. Can a hackintosh run parallels with windows 10 ok?

knd775 9y ago
Generally, yes. But I'd just dual boot unless you need them at the same time.

quantum_state 9y ago

Very nice write up n thx for sharing ... I had done similar but at the end ... Linux took over ...

MJR 9y ago

If anyone is considering building their own, this is a good reference. Dan Benjamin's site detailing his recommendations: http://hackintoshmethod.com/ http://hackintoshmethod.com/

leonroy 9y ago

Hackintoshes are a fun hobby and in my youth I burnt a lot of time messing around with editing kexts, boot loaders, and fixing it after every other update. Soon as I got my first paying job I plowed my first two pay cheques into a Mac Pro and never looked back. The headache of relying on a Hackintosh which could break between updates was just not worth it at all when I had work to do on it. Are Hackintoshes much more reliable today than they used to be?

taude 9y ago
The answer is yes, I ran one for two years buy purchasing well-known compatible hardware. But you're still at the mercy of OS X upgrades, which require fiddling and downloading of newer NVidia drivers, etc... So, still not worth it, IMHO.

redsummer 9y ago

Phil Schiller would make a good replacement for Tim Cook.