HackinTosh

[Bob Zelin]

No –
you do this for a living. Go out and buy a Mac Pro. PC Connection has a Mac Pro for $2300. And if this is too expensive, there are other discount sites, and there is always ebay – plenty of good MAC Pro’s on the market for cheap. Why WHY do you want a piece of crap clone that runs on a PC ? There are lots of them on ebay for under $1000. Why screw around.

Bob Zelin

[Mike Cumberworth]

I have a Dell Netbook Hackintosh I “built” just to experiment w/XCode, and because I thought it might be cheaper than getting a legit Mac.

It works ok, but the screen was horrendous, multi-touch didn’t work, some drivers didn’t work, it can barely run programs, it’s hit-or-miss if you’ll ruin it completely by applying updates, and after the additional expense/hassle to upgrade the RAM (disassembling the ENTIRE thing to install the whopping max of 2GB!), I’d saved about $100 over the cost of a brand-new Mac mini w/HDMI-out, up to 4x the RAM & a legit Intel processor. For another $200 or so I could’ve had a brand new MacBook Air that would run circles around the crappy plastic Netbook & look cooler doing it.

It was a fun experiment though & much like jailbreaking my iPhone I kinda enjoyed playing “hacker” for a bit … but I’m MUCH happier & more impressed w/the actual Macbook Pro I just got.

I’d say, if you want to build it for the experience/challenge of building it, then go for it & enjoy experimenting. But, if you just want it to save $$ & run OS X, it’s ultimately not worth it.

Besides, who knows how much longer the Mac Pros will be around, based on their latest shenanigans. Could be a good time to grab one before they’re gone like Final Cut! Buy RAM after-market though because in that regard for some reason Apple still seems to believe it’s 1998…

[Lance Bachelder]

Yeah good luck – I recently attempted to build a Hackintosh since I was upgrading one of my Win7 workstations anyway – what a disaster – I’ve built dozena of workstations over the years so am pretty comfy with hardward, installs etc. and followed all the knowns steps to the T with only Hackintosh “approved” parts and still couldn’t get it working properly – finally gave up and tried to enjoy what was left of the 3 day 4th weekend. 🙁

What I don’t get about all your switchers and new Apple haters is why you don’t put your money where your mouth is? If you’re really gonna switch to PPro why not SWITCH! Win7 64bit is clean, stabile and FAST and runs the Adobe stuff way faster than Mac! Plus you can pick up a CUDA qualified video card for half what you’d pay on the Apple store. I just bought a GTX570 and can run PPro 5.5 at full res on 1080p footage with multiple effects applied.

I guess I’m different than most out there – I just see everything as tools to use and not a Mac vs. PC thing. I’ve used FCP since version 1, yet cut my last feature film on Sony Vegas 10 because it was the 1st 64bit NLE that worked and the only NLE that allowed a pro 5.1 mix while I was editing!! Now planning on cutting my next trailer on FCPX just to try it out and hoping to do it on a new 27″ iMac.

Fun times….

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California