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Hackintosh Build Went Great


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2015 Jun 22, 1:35pm   6,103 views  16 comments

by Bellingham Bill   ➕follow (2)   💰tip   ignore  

So I waited for WWDC to see if Apple was going to release anything interesting, but . . . nope!

So I kicked off the order I had in my cart at Newegg . . . just ~$600 of parts necessary to make a pretty decent x86 box:

http://i.imgur.com/cmPKcEI.jpg

i5-4690K ($240) , $130 Z97 motherboard, $80 550W power supply, $90 for 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, low-noise HSF and case fans

Reused my Lian Li case, 500GB SSD, and old 5770 card -- another $500+ in parts that I'd have to toss if I bought a new Mac.

Been running 10.11 for a week now, installing was easy-peasy (via "Clover") and it's been great. Only issue is Wifi drops out after sleep, but this happens only in 10.11 not 10.10, so should be fixed in a later 10.11 drop.

Coulda spent $500 more for a non-upgradeable Mac Mini, or $2000 more for a decent iMac, but fuck that noise.

I got burned twice with Apple, first they didn't support the $3000 Mac Pro I got for shit -- not offering any GPU upgrades, dropping OS support after 10.7.5.

Also the 2006 iMac I got needed a new $50 hard drive in 2011, and that cost $200 from Apple (breaking apart an iMac is not for the faint of heart).

Hoping Apple will make a decent Mac again once Thunderbolt 3 and Skylake comes out -- the laptops with that should be pretty good.

Until then, I'll be on my Frankenmac!

Comments 1 - 16 of 16        Search these comments

1   Heraclitusstudent   2015 Jun 22, 2:42pm  

Everything is working? Sound? iMessage? Peripherals?

2   Bellingham Bill   2015 Jun 22, 5:02pm  

There's some shell script thing to get the ALC 1150 sound working, but I just use USB speakers instead.

There's a kernel extension available (from Intel's Linux drivers) to get the onboard ethernet port working, and I'm using that (necessary for access to the AppStore, en0 has to be an active 802.3 port)

Don't care about iMessage (that's the one thing Apple cracks down on with hackintoshes), but iCloud is working.

SATA Pioneer DVD-R is apparently working, all my USB peripherals are working, for Bluetooth I got this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-iMac-Desktop-PCI-1X-BCM94360CD-802-11ac-1-3Gbps-BT4-0-Wifi-Card-WF-AC360-/201222487334

but this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833139027

also works for people.

5770 will crash after an hour or so of use in 10.11, works fine in 10.10 so maybe it will be fixed with a later release. Going to get an nVidia card anyway, if the onboard Intel graphics aren't good enough for my needs.

3   Tenpoundbass   2015 Jun 22, 5:30pm  

That's very Woz of you.

4   marcus   2015 Jun 22, 6:00pm  

Why not just run windows on it ? What so great about OSX that you go through this trouble ? Is it just that you're used to it ? Also, is it just a partition you run the Mac OS on or is that the only OS you'll have on it.

5   bob2356   2015 Jun 22, 9:14pm  

marcus says

Why not just run windows on it ? What so great about OSX that you go through this trouble ? Is it just that you're used to it ? Also, is it just a partition you run the Mac OS on or is that the only OS you'll have on it.

Why not run linux and ignore both dinosaur operating systems?

6   marcus   2015 Jun 22, 9:31pm  

marcus says

Why not run linux and ignore both dinosaur operating systems?

Because a lot of applications are built to run on windows and Mac, or just Windows.

7   Bellingham Bill   2015 Jun 22, 9:39pm  

marcus says

What so great about OSX that you go through this trouble ?

why did I spend $2000+ more buying a IIcx in 1989 when I could have gotten a 386 box that ran DOS and later Windows 3.0?

Microsoft has been chasing Apple's taillights for 30 years now . . . in the NT4 ~ Win2k period they briefly reached parity if not overall superiority on the usability and reliability axes, but from XP on it's been a pretty sad story from Redmond while the OS X of today is tremendously better than that of 10 years ago when Apple began the move to x86.

Just the simple things, like how the OS X system command key is "Alt" (on my Microsoft keyboard) but Ctrl on Windows (because DOS took the Alt key first).

OS X's terminal is pretty great while Microsoft is still stuck in "Galapagos Syndrome" still in denial about how useful a full POSIX environment is to developers.

I don't think there's any particular area where Windows 10 is superior to OS X 10.10. API-wise there's no comparison, when my Mac died I tried to find a good C#-based hobbyist game API (that wasn't Unity3D) and came up with nothing. Microsoft has essentially abandoned C# for some reason.

While since 10.9 Apple has been going gangbusters on hobby development with SceneKit and SpriteKit, and now Swift.

Well, I have to give Microsoft credit for C#, C# 6 is still 5+ years ahead of Swift, in Swift 2.0 they just implemented C#'s extension methods, from 3.0 back in 2007.

Problem is with C# is that Microsoft is no longer pushing it, having reverted back to C++ apparently.

Note the main apps I need are Chrome, Maya, Photoshop CS4, Unity3D, Xamarin or Visual Studio or Xcode . . .

Windows doesn't really bring anything to the table app-wise, and API-wise they've lost the plot. Tool-wise, Unity3D on Windows is a bit better than OS X, thanks to integration with Visual Studio.

And the surprising viability of hackintoshes totally eliminates the hardware differences between Windows and OS X, too.

All totaled, this is a ~$1000 Mac:

Lian Li PC-C32 case , purchased in 2008 for $170.
550W SeaSonic P/S, $80
Gigabyte Z97-UD3H-BK motherboard, $130
i5-4690K, $240
be quiet! Shadow Rock LP HSF, $35
2 x 8GB DDR3-1600, $90
512GB Crucial SSD (purchased late last year for my Mac Pro), $200

plus the $60 BT4/802.11ac PCIe card

For $100 more i coulda gotten the Mac Mini, but I want better graphics than that.

The $2500+ iMacs have better graphics (and are very similar to this build), but I don't want my LCD bundled like that. Something breaks, you're fucked. Plus they're totally non-upgradeable. Fuck you, Apple!

(Apple does this same BS with the iPad, offering a 16GB or 64GB but no 32GB. I chose the 16GB just to spite them, LOL)

is it just a partition you run the Mac OS on or is that the only OS you'll have on it

Now that Microsoft supports GPT drives and UEFI boot loaders (took 'em long enough to shitcan MBR) it's much easier doing multi booting. I've reserved 1/3 of my SSD for Windows 10 but haven't gotten around to installing it. I still have Windows 10 on my old PC (which I was using after my Mac Pro bricked itself in April) and that's actually good enough.

Funny thing Windows 10 is even free now, but now that I'm on 10.11 I don't have any need for it.

8   bob2356   2015 Jun 22, 9:50pm  

marcus says

marcus says

Why not run linux and ignore both dinosaur operating systems?

Because a lot of applications are built to run on windows and Mac, or just Windows.

Which ones would be a problem for you? I haven't really found any that don't have a linux equivalent that works just fine. I installed virtualbox and wine but have almost never used them. If you were a serious gamer the story would be different I guess.

9   Bellingham Bill   2015 Jun 22, 9:54pm  

For me the desktop environment is equally important as the APIs.

Until Linux gets Wayland or whatever I'm not interested.

Plus I also need good Japanese support.

Typography is simply beautiful on OS X, on Windows 10 it was still horrid.

10   Bellingham Bill   2015 Jun 22, 9:56pm  

OS X is no way a "dinosaur".

They've expanded R&D tenfold since I was there, and while most of that is going to iOS, OS X is also getting love.

In Linux, the hard stuff never gets done. Simple things like an accelerated window server. Apple first shipped that in 2002.

11   HEY YOU   2015 Jun 22, 10:00pm  

I was going to troll all the tech lovers but what's the use & I'm tired.

12   marcus   2015 Jun 22, 10:57pm  

Bellingham Bill says

the NT4 ~ Win2k period they briefly reached parity

I must agree that when Windows actually got worse, that was surprising. How could they possibly do that ? How could they have a business model that allowed that,?

Only by having a monopoly have they gotten away with such an underwhelming product for the last 12 years of so. Still, I use Windows on my home machine and my laptop because it's what I'm most accustomed to, and I guess because of their monopoly. .

13   Ceffer   2015 Jun 22, 11:16pm  

Why do they hate planned obsolescence? The new disposable appliances of the computer age. Accept your fate, do not resist.

14   bob2356   2015 Jun 23, 11:18am  

Bellingham Bill says

For me the desktop environment is equally important as the APIs.

Until Linux gets Wayland or whatever I'm not interested.

Plus I also need good Japanese support.

Typography is simply beautiful on OS X, on Windows 10 it was still horrid.

Whatever floats your boat. For the 99.99% of the people that don't need that level of graphics apple is a pretty expensive option. I personally find os X clunky and in the way a lot even if the graphics are allegedly better. I don't use a touch screen with unity on the desk top, classic gnome is fast, simple, and reliable for what I do.

What does the API matter? If you are writing to the os X API then you are writing os X specific code anyway.

15   Bellingham Bill   2015 Jun 23, 1:07pm  

bob2356 says

What does the API matter?

my dreams, man, my dreams . . .

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884/

16   Bellingham Bill   2015 Jun 23, 1:11pm  

In between my comment/graph on rents vs wages and the above comment I allowed OS X 10.11 to update itself to the 2nd beta that came out today.

Took about 10 minutes including the 2GB DL, and all my stuff still works.

Windows 10 has gotten a lot better, I installed all the previews up to 10070 and they went smoothly too, but OS X is still slicker (Windows 10 loses some regedit settings for some reason).

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