Hackintosh

[Bob Zelin]

what a FANTASTIC video this was.

is it too late for a donut ?
is it too early for whiskey ?
should I have chosen a different career ? (as I slap myself in the face).

Words I say almost EVERY day !

As he mentioned in the video, I was amazed that he spent all that money, and chose the NVidia GTX-1070 instead of the AMD Vega 64, knowing that he was going to suffer thru the build, and then not get the results that are setup in the macOS for the Vega 64.

Boy – this is more effort than I would have been willing to go through ! Many people never get that when it comes to the “little things” (like where are the damn screws to screw in the motherboard to the case) – those are the things that can drive you crazy.

Great video –
Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Bernard Newnham]

He did make quite an epic of building what is, after all, a standard PC. He did go for the expensive stuff too. I’ve built two Hackintoshes, though not lately – I don’t have a use for a Mac any more – and they went as straightforwardly as any other PC build.

I used the files from https://www.tonymacx86.com/ and a copy of whatever the current operating system was from an Apple shop. They both ran fine, just as his did – because under all the pretty stuff that you buy at great expensive, and wait with baited breath for a long awaited new release, your Mac is just another PC.

Bernie

[Tom Sefton]

I’d really love to see how someone’s hackintosh performs with a vega gpu and an 18 core processor…

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Bernard Newnham]

And SSDs and lots of RAM – just like any other PC of that spec.

It’s something I can never understand. There are huge amounts of variations in PC parts – motherboards, processors, GPUs etc etc. They are updated pretty much every week, and anyone who puts in a little effort to understand what’s in there can spec their own, build and change as necessary. Stick with Apple gear, and you wait …. and wait …. and wait. Then they give you a tube thing that needs endless stuff hung on the outside. But inside it’s still a PC, one that is very difficult to adapt. Why bother with the stuff?

Bernie

[Shane Ross]

OH GOD that was a fun video. When he was stymied about why his GPU driver wasn’t working, nor the Ethernet…all those questions…that was the issue I HAD when I built mine, and all those questions I asked.. And just like him, I had a corrupt EFI folder.

Fun building mine…I’ll do it again if Apple doesn’t come out with a reasonable MacPro. Meaning, expandable.

Shane
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[Mark Smith]

Seems like a lot of work for middling results, no?

[Shane Ross]

[Mark Smith] “Seems like a lot of work for middling results, no?”

9 hours of work, and $2600. Up against a $13,000 iMac Pro and then a $5,000-$6,000 MacPro…for results that were off by seconds. So, are all those few seconds worth $10,000 to you? I only include the iMac Pro in this as it’s new, and the MacPro is 3 years old and not really worth investing in right now.

But that’s the thing… $2600 vs $13,000 for results that were very close.

Shane
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[Mark Smith]

I loved my Cheese Grater mac pro until it was finally time for it to go. It was by far one of the most robust computers I have ever owned and I think Apple would do everyone a favor by makig the 2018 version of that machine.

That said, I am profoundly dyslexic and sitting in front of a computer and parsing through files and piles of drivers is worse for me than a trip to the dentist who eschews novocaine.

And then there are the system updates that might break the hackintosh. If you look at it strictly by $ sure there is a case, but I have to consider the psychic pain of sitting more hours in front of a screen figuring out what went off the rails with the latest update which is not a desired activity. I’ve got enough screen time in my life, and now I’m on a screen time diet. There is also something frustrating to me about fixing the tools that I need to do the work I own the tools for in the first place.

Maybe its a high convenience fee, but I’m ok. My Macs give me long years of surprisingly trouble free service: my 2012 macbook pro still runs perfectly well, needs a battery, but hey. THe Macbook not my edit machine except only in a pinch and only for HD, but it still works great.

I know there is satifaction in building things, I’ve built a wide variety of stuff, racing motorcycles, camera rigs, gardens, houses to name a few. I know I’m not going to get much satisfactio from building a hackintosh, so I’ll skip. My hat’s off to people who go down that route.

[Shane Ross]

[Mark Smith] “And then there are the system updates that might break the hackintosh.”

Simple..don’t run them. Turn off AUTOUPDATE, just like I do on ANY computer I use, especially professionally. You can update some components, and yes, you can even use the Apple APP STORE updater to update the OS from say 10.13.0 to 10.13.6. It’s going from 10.13 to 10.14 that would be the one to worry about. I just went from 10.11.3 to 10.12.4…and I basically redid the CLOVER installer. It was far smoother and more effortless than my first OS install with 10.11!

[Mark Smith] “If you look at it strictly by $ sure there is a case, but I have to consider the psychic pain of sitting more hours in front of a screen figuring out what went off the rails with the latest update which is not a desired activity.”

Again…don’t update. I NEVER update unless I have to. Like an app needs it, or new hardware only uses a driver that only works on that OS. There is no case to just update because the update is there…even on a non-hack.

[Mark Smith] “Maybe its a high convenience fee, but I’m ok. My Macs give me long years of surprisingly trouble free service: my 2012 macbook pro still runs perfectly well, needs a battery, but hey. THe Macbook not my edit machine except only in a pinch and only for HD, but it still works great. “

Yeah, this is more of a thing for us geeky hardware types to actually enjoy this to some extent…The torture too. 🙂

Shane
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[Michael Gissing]

The other thing to consider is this was an underpowered machine from the GPU side. It would still not be expensive to get a machine that outperformed. Say you went crazy and spent half as much as an iMac Pro you would get a screamer, particulalry if you are using Adobe or Blackmagic software as well as FCPX. If you were not using FCPX, I wouldn’t bother with Mac OS and just run a win box. Even easier to install and setup.

And with a Win box, as Shane says, don’t let it update. Mine stay off the internet until I need to do some updates or register software, then they are disconnect from the internet but not ethernet. Rest of the time a Linux laptop is my front end to the internet. Apart from the cost savings of build your own, I also keep power supplies and all monitors, keyboard, mouse etc. The iMacs are a very wasteful design that requires junking perfectly good components just to do incremental upgrading. My monitors are now nine years old. Mouse and keyboard older. Power supply is six. All perfectly working. Cut down on ewaste.