[HN Gopher] Hackintosh Is Almost Dead
___________________________________________________________________
Hackintosh Is Almost Dead
Author : ingve
Score : 277 points
Date : 2024-03-16 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aplus.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (aplus.rs)
| Retr0id wrote:
| macOS supports running as a paravirtualised guest OS (officially,
| on an apple-hardware host also running macOS). If there is to be
| a "next gen" of hackintoshing, I think it'd be based on a cut-
| down linux host acting as a shim between the real hardware and
| the paravirt interface.
|
| See also:
| https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amaz...
| "This patch set introduces a new ARM and HVF specific machine
| type called "vmapple". It mimicks the device model that Apple's
| proprietary Virtualization.Framework exposes, but implements it
| in QEMU."
| Asooka wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how feasible it is to run that
| on an Arm workstation, e.g. an Ampere Altra. Or going the other
| way and trying to squeeze macOS on to the latest Raspberry Pi.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Would be cool and ironic to get the full Macos on Android
| hardware.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I would pay at least $100 to have MacOS running on an
| Android tablet.
| m463 wrote:
| I was about to say that VMs will always be wanted.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| One thing I've been on the hunt for is a good server hypervisor
| solution for Apple Silicon. I would like to put an Apple
| Silicon Mac Mini in my rack, and it would be really nice to
| have a minimally bootstrapped host OS running a handful of
| macOS VMs for various purposes.
|
| The best I'm aware of currently is UTM which has some scripting
| capabilities. But that is very far off from the experience with
| Proxmox.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8&themeRefresh=1
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I think you missed the "Apple Silicon" part of my comment.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Came here to write what the parent is saying: exploit the
| virtualization route to trick MacOS into running on the target
| hardware.
| bsdpufferfish wrote:
| Additional reasons:
|
| - there is less alternative hardware I want to use. I want Apple
| Silicon processors, materials, and there just isn't much high
| quality competition.
|
| - Because of inflation the Apple premium isn't as high as it used
| to be. You get a Mac mini or MacBook Air at very competitive
| prices (RAM is still painful).
|
| - Linux Desktop software is more competitive and fills some of
| the roles that needed macOS before.
| asdff wrote:
| Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was
| shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum
| acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an
| 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is
| close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there
| with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie,
| etc.
| esafak wrote:
| $500 for a Mac is great! $100 for an Intel is great too. PCs
| used to cost thousands of dollars!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_AT
| shagie wrote:
| > I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb
| model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand.
|
| That's because a M1 mini with 16gb still has a _lot_ of
| utility in it that hasn 't depreciated significantly in the 2
| years since it's been released. My M1 (8gb) is still happily
| sitting in a media consumption part of my day and is not
| showing any signs of age. I would be surprised if, for the
| role that it has, it becomes outdated in another 2 or 3
| years... and wouldn't be surprised if it lasts another 2 or 3
| beyond that.
|
| If you spent $700 on it in 2020 at release, it is still
| working as well as it did on the day you bought it.
|
| You may be seeing the premium from when it was bought being
| attached to the current used price - and there are less
| expensive ones available now - but the device, for what it
| was when I got it is still providing value and selling it
| used would mean I'd need to get a new one... at a similar
| price as what I'd sell it for.
|
| > sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add
| in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.
|
| I will note that for me, in the spot where it is, the
| "multiple drive bays, pcie, etc." represents a _worse_ device
| as it doesn 't sit nicely under a monitor on a small desk.
| Part of the choice of the Mac mini for me for that role was
| its form factor and quiet running.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| RAM and storage are both incredibly painful.
|
| $200 to add 8GB RAM to the base 8GB (16GB total).
|
| $400 to add 16GB RAM to the base (24GB total).
|
| $200 to add 256GB storage to the base 256GB (512GB total).
|
| $400 to add 768GB storage to the base 256GB (1TB total).
|
| $800 to add 1768GB storage to the base 256GB (2TB total).
|
| For comparison, a faster 2TB nvme PCIE4 SSD is a bit over $100.
| sp332 wrote:
| Right, but you can add storage without soldering.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Via USB/Thunderbolt or SD card you can. But you can't
| upgrade or replace your SSD in an Apple Silicon MacBook.
| jen729w wrote:
| You can, but as someone who is currently juggling external
| SSDs to try to get a video project finished, I can tell you
| that you don't want to.
|
| Hence me yesterday looking at the 4TB upgrade price on the
| M3 MBP. Hoooooooly cow. I mean I'll almost certainly get it
| on my next upgrade, but wow.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Why? Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies
| you can kiss goodbye to your data. Watching Louis
| Rossmann's repair videos disillusioned me from ever
| wanting to upgrade internal storage beyond 1TB.
|
| Externals are cheap, fast, and safe. It's win/win/win,
| the only downside is that they're inconvenient if you
| want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a
| lap), but I'm not sure I would pay the Apple tax just for
| that.
| VHRanger wrote:
| You can't add nvme that get the nvme level of performance.
|
| Especially not at the level we'd be used to in any other
| serious isecase (eg. Split PCIe lanes into x4 and have a
| bunch of fast storage)
| da768 wrote:
| It wasn't too bad a few years ago but right now you can buy two
| Ryzen 7840U 64G/1TB with OLED display for the price of one
| similar specced MacBook.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| A couple more for me:
|
| - The icloud webapps are now pretty good, and icloud file
| storage and password management works well on windows these
| days
|
| - Windows is also pretty good these days, and obviously if you
| want to run games, it's the easiest option.
|
| Although I enjoy my macbook and iphone, I don't have a
| compelling reason to have MacOS on my desktop instead of
| windows. I think the only thing that I would like to have are
| clipboard sharing and Universal Control (share mouse and
| keyboard with macs and ipads), but there are cross-platform
| software solutions that are good enough
| Muromec wrote:
| Next in the series: EU mandates Apple to sign 3rd party hobbyist
| drivers to enable Hackintosh enthusiasts.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Apple never licenced their OS to run on non Apple hardware,
| with exception of when it was on death bed shortly before the
| NeXT reverse acquisition, and Steve Jobs killing all agreements
| with clone makers.
|
| Hardly the same of the current DMA requirements.
| monetus wrote:
| Bad news for the indie music scene using these, where they just
| want to be able to run their VSTs and DAWs. Some will switch back
| to macs, so worth it for apple I guess.
| WWLink wrote:
| This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs
| actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows
| still seem pretty bad. I spent the last week shopping around
| for an audio interface and every single model had people
| complaining about driver issues and latency and "random loud
| static" or other crazy things when using Windows. Always
| Windows. Crazy stuff.
| bmitc wrote:
| Except that Apple breaks audio applications with every new
| release of macOS and has for years. And, it's just a matter
| of time before Apple kills basically every DAW and VST when
| they finally kill off OpenGL on macOS.
|
| Edit: What I have said is true here, so I'm unsure why the
| downvotes.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Curious, why would OpenGL break VSTs? (And yes, I get that
| AU is the preferred way over VST2 or even VST3, which is
| why most modern plugins are available in AU as well. I just
| don't see how OpenGL plays into this.)
| conradfr wrote:
| A lot of plugins use OpenGL, it's just that simple :)
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Huh, TIL, I assumed they used standard OS controls, but
| looking at some of them that makes sense.
| bmitc wrote:
| I would be very surprised if the vast majority, as in
| 80-100%, of DAWs and VSTs don't use OpenGL.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Some VST plugins use OpenGL to render their user
| interface.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Linux ships with a realtime kernel patchset these days, so
| the only issues there have to do with hardware- and
| proprietary VST support. With the newer Pipewire audio server
| you don't even need to set up JACK.
| NoxiousPluK wrote:
| As someone who does quite some audio stuff on Windows, using
| Focusrite Scarlett interfaces - I never encountered issues
| like that.
|
| On Linux however..
| monetus wrote:
| Huzzah for pipewire.
| marcodiego wrote:
| It was just posted today:
| https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2024/03/15/pipewire-camera-
| ha...
| MenhirMike wrote:
| One of things that really annoys me about Windows is that
| there doesn't seem to be a way to capture audio from a single
| application even though the audio mixer can clearly change
| the volume. But if you want to capture, it's only the final
| mix output for everything (so you better hope that there's no
| sudden notification sound from anything). Or you'd have to
| use a virtual sound card like VB's Cable/Voicemeteer, which
| requires the application to be able to select a specific
| soundcard.
|
| Arguably this isn't relevant for audio production, but it
| does make capturing applications a huge pain. (And if I did
| miss something and there is a way to e.g., have OBS capture
| the audio of a specific Window/Application, I'm all ears!)
| steve1977 wrote:
| > This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs
| actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows
| still seem pretty bad.
|
| I don't know where this is coming from. It certainly doesn't
| apply to the actual driver latency of higher end and
| professional interfaces. Most of these actually have a
| slightly smaller latency for the same buffer size with ASIO
| then they do with CoreAudio.
|
| The one thing that can cause latency issues are GPU drivers,
| but there's ways to fix that.
| actimia wrote:
| I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this
| way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer
| Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends
| with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right
| now.
|
| Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it
| is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the
| web and move files around.
|
| Now if we could have Windows running on an M3 chip with the nice
| touchpad and battery, that would be really nice.
| joemi wrote:
| I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically
| different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What
| software do you have issue with, and why?
| kybernetyk wrote:
| I think he's missing the forced advertisements in the macOS
| startmenu. Or the forced restarts/updates :)
| bmitc wrote:
| Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on
| macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the
| depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned
| macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics
| libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of
| OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows
| directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL.
|
| Go ahead and try to rename iTunes because there's no other
| way to keep it from opening when your non-Apple Bluetooth
| headphones connect. Good luck.
|
| There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in
| macOS. It's bizarre.
|
| Or the fact that macOS doesn't implement basic protocols for
| external monitors, making macOS work terribly with non-Apple
| monitors.
| Klonoar wrote:
| So what re: workarounds? It's not Linux, it will never be
| Linux. Systems are allowed to be different and do different
| things.
| bmitc wrote:
| Well that's fine, but Windows isn't Linux but everybody
| treats it like such, hating on it for not being Linux
| while people often praise macOS for being "Unix". For
| macOS, it doesn't have the installer system that Windows
| has, so solutions like Homebrew are created to try and
| graft Linux things on it. Usually, the trouble is that
| Apple has made some asinine decision with the default
| tooling installed or some other strange limitation.
|
| And because Apple is constantly breaking software, it
| creates a lot of churn on macOS. From PowerPC to Intel to
| Arm, from ObjectiveC to Swift, from Cocoa to Metal, etc.,
| they're constantly upheaving the ecosystem and OS.
| Meanwhile, it provides very little to the end user other
| than normally increasing the size of Apple's walled
| garden.
| jwells89 wrote:
| To nitpick a bit, IIRC Windows itself doesn't support
| Vulkan, that's left to GPU vendors.
| bmitc wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. That appears to be right, but
| Windows allows it.
| lm411 wrote:
| > There's not even a built-in way to uninstall programs in
| macOS. It's bizarre.
|
| You literally just drag the app to the trash can. Properly
| sandboxed Mac apps are a delight to uninstall.
|
| Yes, some apps are more difficult, but those are usually
| Windows apps that are crudely ported to MacOS and that's on
| the developers for not creating proper MacOS apps.
| bmitc wrote:
| Yes. Everyone knows that. But that doesn't uninstall the
| application. It just deletes the top files. It doesn't
| remove any caching or configurations or other files in
| other parts of the system like a Windows uninstaller
| does. To do that on macOS, there are third-party apps
| that provide this functionality.
| int_19h wrote:
| Windows uninstallers generally don't remove
| configurations and cached data, either.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Homebrew is one of my favorite pieces of software
| s0ss wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I find web browsing and moving files
| around to be practically an equivalent experience between mac
| os, windows, most linux distros.
| paradox460 wrote:
| I see sentiments very similar to this on Reddit and some
| other message boards. Generally the user posting them cut
| their teeth on Linux or Windows, and has an affinity toward
| the ux conventions you'd see there. Macs have different ux
| conventions, not bad ones, just different, and it's not what
| the poster is expecting.
|
| Some call it baby dick syndrome, The user has imprinted the
| conventions of their first operating system on themselves,
| and assumes that they are universally considered "best"
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Unfortunate typo.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the
| web and move files around
|
| Cannot relate at all. "Move files around" is essentially the
| same on Windows and Mac, except on the Mac I have a UNIX shell.
| Browsers also behave exactly the same on every platform, and
| Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is it
| about?
| jupp0r wrote:
| Have you ever needed to perform a reliable recursive
| directory copy between two drives on Windows? I have and it
| turned out to be a comically complicated task. Robocopy helps
| but als has its edge cases you need to handle. Also long path
| names become problematic (MAX_PATH etc).
| jwells89 wrote:
| I don't know how Windows users deal with file copying being
| as bad as it is and has been there for so long.
|
| Linux can have issues here too though, depending on the
| file manager being used. Some file managers there still
| have weirdly bad copy/move handling.
| leptons wrote:
| What are you even talking about? Copying folders on Winfows
| just works. Please explain.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| By default there is a path character limit of 260
| characters, although there is a method to increase it. So
| if you try to copy something with a long filename that is
| many nested folders deep, it will fail. In one office, I
| had a coworker who used very descriptive folder/subfolder
| names for everything, and he constantly had this issue.
| jupp0r wrote:
| The problem is that lots of older software allocates
| fixed size path buffers (mostly on the stack) that uses
| the MAX_PATH macro (which is set to 260). Fixing this
| requires recompilation.
| jupp0r wrote:
| No it doesn't. Try setting up Windows CI for a large code
| base, good luck. I couldn't believe this is an actual
| problem in 2024 either, but unfortunately it is,
| depending in what tools you use (Visual Studio and most
| Microsoft Dev tooling works great, anything cross
| platform is hit and miss).
|
| Just read the limitations section of this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
| hx8 wrote:
| I daily both macOS and Linux, and have for over a decade. I
| think Dolphin is significantly better than Finder.
| leptons wrote:
| Finder is the same crap software it's always been. Windows
| Explorer has always been better. Nobody except the nerdiest
| of nerds would want to use the terminal for "moving files
| around".
|
| >Safari is snappy and the least memory-hungry of all. What is
| it about?
|
| MacOS is a memory hog in itself. Safari is the laughingstock
| of browsers, so behind the times and purposely crippled by
| Apple.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as
| it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse
| the web and move files around.
|
| I used both Windows and Mac regularly for years, and I have no
| idea what you're talking about.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| Apple released the last major revision of the cheese grater Mac
| Pro in 2010. If you wanted a Mac with exotic features like a
| new CPU and more than one internal hard drive in 2013~ then
| Hackintosh was the way to do it
| lm411 wrote:
| I like MacOS.
|
| I spend most of my time in a shell, so MacOS being POSIX
| compliant is a huge draw for me.
|
| What difficulty do you have browsing the web? I just click
| Safari and it works. Though I usually have FireFox and un-
| Googled Chromium running as well... and they work just fine.
|
| I generally use shell commands to manage files, but, dragging
| works just fine for copying and moving them. Certainly as well
| as it does in Windows.
|
| Truly, I can't imagine what you experienced that was "unusably
| bad".
|
| MacOS has some quirks for sure, it's far from perfect. And I'm
| not a huge fan of a lot of the changes they've made over the
| years. But I am a big fan of some of them.
|
| On the other hand, despite massive improvements to Windows
| security and stability over the years, I do like using Windows.
| (And yes I realized things like WSL exist).
| huytersd wrote:
| What's wrong with the web. You just use chrome or safari and
| everything just works.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I used to love it when it was still a capable unix with a good
| UI. At the same time Linux was a horrible mess, none of the
| desktop environments were passable.
|
| I loved it until Tiger and Snow Leopard. After that it started
| going downhill. More and more features I really wanted were
| being deprecated (like the ability to have virtual desktops in
| a multi-dimensional grid). This was the first big thing that
| really broke my workflow and I have regretted it ever since.
| More and more UI things were pushed through I didn't like. The
| fullscreen mode became (and still is) horribly incompetent.
| Apps were becoming more iOS-like, dumbed down.
|
| I put up but instead of looking forward to every exciting new
| OS update, I started worrying about what feature I used would
| next be removed or mangled beyond recognition. Eventually the
| negatives added up so much I left the platform entirely. I went
| to KDE, because that had become a powerful and configurable
| desktop environment through the years. I finally have my
| virtual desktop grid back and things are so much better for it.
| I found that opionated software doesn't work for me (for this
| reason GNOME won't ever do either). The only reason I thought
| it worked for me was that OSX's designers had roughly the same
| opinions as me. But over time this changed.
|
| This was not a coincidence. At the same time Apple changed from
| a computer company to a lifestyle brand. It started appealing
| to the masses which started with the iPod but really kicked off
| in full gear with the iPhone. The Mac is really just an iPhone
| accessory now. Microsoft has been making attempts at becoming a
| lifestyle brand too, with hilarious incompetence :') Only their
| xbox division gets a tiny bit of the way but their main
| marketeers are such business suits that will never understand
| 'cool' even if it bites them in the ass.
|
| Oh well.. I still use it for work because it's slightly better
| than Windows. And our company's Windows desktops are locked
| down too much.
| mchannon wrote:
| A $9 USB to WiFi dongle addresses my networking needs.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Not the iServices though?
| verticalscaler wrote:
| In the olden times this used to be called the Jade plan:
| I don't really complain. I had a good run which helped me skip
| over the worst price/performance Mac lineup that I remember.
| There're now plenty good choices within the current crop of M1 /
| M2 / M3 machines and I'll be following eBay closely for a good
| used Mac mini / studio models. Or maybe even splurge on something
| new.
|
| I've been doing it for ages as Apple hardware holds its resale
| value exceptionally well. You can use the often exaggerated price
| premium to your advantage - buy brand new default config at an
| opportune moment in the upgrade cycle, sell just in time for a
| coveted new release.
|
| This works even better if you happen to be traveling somewhere
| where Apple devices are unusually expensive.
|
| I'm still on the M1 Air and will likely sell it just before a M4
| release 12-18 months from now. Cost of ownership averages out to
| <$0.25/day.
| haunter wrote:
| Well I can run Mac OS in Proxmox nowadays so that's killed the
| "bare matel" Hackintosh for me. Yes it takes time to set it up
| (once!) but I much prefer KVM now than fiddling with hardware
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68R2SdbFj-8
| m463 wrote:
| this. A lot of the ground hackintosh broke like opencore is
| directly in use with VMs
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Why are you using Proxmox instead of just kvm? Are you running
| more than just Mac?
| tripdout wrote:
| There's no GPU acceleration is there?
| jwells89 wrote:
| There can be if you've got a spare PCI-E slot to plug a
| supported AMD GPU into and pass through to the VM.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| This works very well, especially if the VM storage is on a
| fast SSD linux md raid array. Very very snappy Mac working
| environment.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind
| of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was
| using.
|
| Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I
| couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing.
| These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to
| convince it to work.
|
| Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years
| ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just
| want to turn the key and go somewhere.
|
| Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly
| remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will
| find some other thing yo capture the imagination.
| hparadiz wrote:
| It's really not much of a time commitment. You can just lookup
| hardware with full compatibility and build a desktop that "just
| works".
| derefr wrote:
| The primary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing
| are people who, like the GP in their youth, couldn't afford
| to just buy "hardware with full compatibility", let alone buy
| the equivalent-specced Mac.
|
| The secondary demographic of people interested in
| Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough
| extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how
| to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while
| spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as
| possible.
|
| People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to
| run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh
| community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of
| Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added
| tinkering -- they _can_ , if you do this, but ~nobody does
| this.)
| shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote:
| I have a need to be able to run macos binaries and xcode
| from time to time, and it used to be non-trivial to run
| macos in a unsanctioned vm so I had a mac laptop around.
|
| But these days you can spin up a qemu macos vm without too
| much effort and that's my virtual hackintosh.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I remember I needed Hackintosh to build an iPhone app on my
| PC. You must possess a Mac to make apps for iPhones, don't
| know why.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Cost of ownership of an M3 MacBook Pro is like $300-400 a
| year. Even if you have the time, it's just not worth it
| anymore like it used to be.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| It seems reasonable when you consider TCO, but you still
| have to pay 100% up front. Not everyone can drop $2k on a
| laptop, most people don't need to.
| FredPret wrote:
| They have lots of monthly payment plan options here in
| Canada, and probably in the US too. It even used to be
| zero interest. Not sure about the rest of the world.
| matwood wrote:
| Apple Card offer this in the US, but you have to get the
| card. I buy all my Apple gear this way. 0% loans are
| great.
| kayg04 wrote:
| Also many no interest options in India but the prices are
| higher here, somewhat so for the Macs but significantly
| higher for the iPhone as it is such a social status thing
| here in the north.
| prmoustache wrote:
| But more people can certainly afford a second hand mac
| mini which doesn't cost more than the sum of the parts of
| a typical hackintosh.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Not everyone can drop $2k on a laptop
|
| That's what most laptops used to cost back in the 1990s
| or so (after adjusting for inflation). If you look
| further back in time, hardware was even more expensive -
| and it couldn't even do 10% of what a modern MacBook
| does. Modern hardware is ridiculously cheap.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| In the 90s most people didn't have a laptop for that very
| reason. They just owned desktops which were way cheaper.
|
| I studied computer science then and I knew 1 student out
| of 50 that had an actual laptop. Even at the uni we had
| to use their computer rooms full of desktops and X
| terminals.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Cheaper for sure but not "way cheaper", at least nowhere
| near as cheap as desktop hardware is today.
| ponector wrote:
| In the 90s no one I know had a computer at home.
| Nintendo/Sega maybe, rich guys had Play Station, but no
| one had PC.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh here people did. Internet was booming and I set up so
| many PCs. It was great business.
| greedo wrote:
| Not really sure they were much cheaper in the 90s. My
| first PC was a Dell P90 in 1994, IIRC it cost about
| $2500. There was kind of a mantra at the time that no
| matter the improvements, you'd always spend about $2500.
| And adjusted for inflation, that "way cheaper" desktop
| was over $5K in today's dollars.
| adamomada wrote:
| Inflation calculator says the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro I
| bought in 2007 is something like $4400 now. Bought a
| small intel ssd for the sata3 port in it too for probably
| another $500 now
| wkat4242 wrote:
| And you can drop it and lose the $2k in one single
| second. You can insure against that but it costs another
| small fortune.
|
| TCOs are great calculations for companies but don't work
| for individuals.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Build a Hackintosh out of a rugged laptop case, problem
| solved.
| nerdawson wrote:
| AppleCare+ on the $2k 14" MBP is $279 or +14% for 3 years
| of coverage. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
| izacus wrote:
| So now you made it a 2.3k$ MBP didn't you? Funny how the
| 999$ MacBooks tend to explode in price when you configure
| them to make them useful.
| nerdawson wrote:
| Correct. It's an insurance product.
|
| Whether you take it is all about your risk tolerance and
| in no way impacts the usefulness of the machine.
|
| I believe 14% is worth it.
| raydev wrote:
| I don't understand how this relates to paid warranty or
| insurance. Your TCO for a non-Apple laptop can also
| include a protection fee or cost to repair with no
| insurance.
| shagie wrote:
| Buying a new MacBook Air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-
| mac/macbook-air/13-inch-m2 $999.00
| or $83.25/mo.per month for 12 mo.
|
| With a footnote:
|
| > Monthly pricing is available when you select Apple Card
| Monthly Installments (ACMI) as payment type at checkout
| at Apple, and is subject to credit approval and credit
| limit. Financing terms vary by product. Taxes and
| shipping are not included in ACMI and are subject to your
| card's variable APR. See the Apple Card Customer
| Agreement for more information. ACMI is not available for
| purchases made online at special storefronts. The last
| month's payment for each product will be the product's
| purchase price, less all other payments at the monthly
| payment amount. ACMI financing is subject to change at
| any time for any reason, including but not limited to,
| installment term lengths and eligible products. See
| https://support.apple.com/kb/HT211204 for information
| about upcoming changes to ACMI financing.
|
| ----
|
| You do not have to drop $2000 on a new laptop up front.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Don't forget the $700 Walmart special:
| https://www.walmart.com/ip/609040889
| duskwuff wrote:
| Entry-level price for a new Mac, right now, is $700 (M1
| Macbook Air at Walmart). It doesn't get you the best or
| the fastest, but it's a perfectly usable laptop. Or, if
| you're okay with something lightly used, a refurbished M1
| Mac Mini is ~$500.
| bluescrn wrote:
| But Apple's entry-level Macbooks aren't intended to be
| bought. They have almost comically low amounts of storage
| and RAM for 2024 (8GB/256GB).
|
| It's all about the upsell on those non-upgradeable parts.
| hparadiz wrote:
| VSCode remote to my Linux desktop on LAN. The upsell is
| obvious but I'm not gonna drop $500 on 256 gb of disk
| space
| greedo wrote:
| The M1 MBA being sold by Best Buy and Walmart are
| perfectly fine for 99% of the computing world. Maybe not
| for gamers (most laptops suck for this), or for someone
| needing to crunch large datasets, but when this first
| came out, tons of developers were perfectly happy using
| it, even with small storage. Hell, my iMac I used up
| until buying a Mac Studio only had 256GB.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| I assume people would do this to get a powerful machine and
| not comparable with one of the cheaper Macbooks?
| bluescrn wrote:
| I wouldn't count on 10 years of real-world life from a non-
| upgradeable and 'repair-resistant' device with a glued in
| battery, even if the hardware specs are good enough to last
| that long.
| xcv123 wrote:
| That's 5 years of ownership. $2500 USD for a 16" then you
| get something back on the second hand market.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I'm happy with the M1 air pro for 700. Could use 256 more
| SSD but it's not worth $500 extra that apple wants to
| charge.
| umbra07 wrote:
| Did you factor in repair costs?
|
| A 14in MBP with an M3 Pro/36GB/1TB is $2800. Add 10% sales
| tax, and that's about 3k.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I've never needed to actually repair a Mac.
| shantara wrote:
| I started my developer career on Hackintoshes many years ago.
|
| No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop,
| it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems
| with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image
| the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which
| happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest
| Xcode.
|
| Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over the years,
| like crashes and graphical glitches with certain apps, like
| Photos or Preview, problems with monitor resolutions and
| refresh rates, and many, many others.
|
| Ultimately, they were a useful tool for a time, but they
| suffered from death by a thousand cuts in terms of practical
| usability. So, I bought a basic Mac Mini as soon as I was
| able to, and never looked back.
| taude wrote:
| I built a hackontosh in 2016, bought all the right mobo with
| the right driver sets, etc. Used the buyer's guides on
| tonymacx86.com and purchased the exact hardware, downloaded
| the drivers, flashed things, etc. It was far from "just
| working". I had a stable and solid system for about 18 months
| (after a weekend of tweaking), and then it needed to be
| reconfigured, and I didn't have the time to spend the weekend
| getting it to work again....so that machine went back to
| windows. Even with the proper supported Nvidia card, I had
| issues, and went through some pains with the wifi.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I don't understand. Do you imagine there isn't a young
| generation of time rich cash poor tinkerers now? Why would the
| idea of a hackintosh suddenly become obsolete because you can
| afford one now and don't have time? Nothing about your
| statement logically follows.
| peruvian wrote:
| He's just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and
| talking about themselves. I've seen the "I used to tinker but
| now I don't" line a hundred times as well as the "this
| doesn't apply to me so I don't care - let me tell you how".
| derefr wrote:
| In what sense is this an "HNism"?
|
| Ever since blogs have had comments sections, the set of
| people who are too lazy to make their own blogs, have been
| holding forth (writing, essentially, their own blog posts)
| in other people's blogs' comment sections.
|
| Heck, I'm sure people were doing it on Usenet and all-
| subscribers-can-post mailing lists, too -- using the
| "Reply" button on a message to mean "I want to create a new
| top-level discussion that quotes/references this existing
| discussion" rather than "I want to post something that the
| people already participating in this existing discussion
| will understand as contributing to that discussion."
|
| In all these cases, the person doing this thinks that a
| comment/reply is better than a new top-level post, because
| the statement they're making requires context, and that
| context is only provided by reading the posts the statement
| is replying to / commenting on.
|
| Of course, this being the internet, there is a thing called
| a _hyperlink_ that could be used to add context just as
| well... but what there is _not_ , is any kind of
| established etiquette that encourages people to do that.
| (Remember at some point in elementary school, learning the
| etiquette around writing a letter? Why don't schools teach
| the equivalent for writing a blog post/comment? It'd be far
| more relevant these days...)
|
| Also, for some reason, social networks all have "reply" /
| "quote" actions (intended for _engaging_ with the post
| /comment, and so showing up as "reactions" to the
| post/comment, or with your reply nested under the
| post/comment, etc); but no social network AFAIK has a "go
| off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message
| composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited
| quote of the post you were just looking at, but without
| your post being _linked_ to that post on the response-tree
| level.) Instead, you always have to manually dig out the
| URL of the thing you want to cite, and manually cite it in
| your new post. I wonder why...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| "...but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a
| tangent" action (which would give you a message composer
| for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote
| of the post you were just looking at, but without your
| post being linked to that post on the response-tree
| level.) ... "
|
| On Usenet, if you were altering the general SUBJECT of a
| post, you'd reply to a comment BY PREPENDING the NEW
| TITLE/SUMMARY of your post to the PREVIOUS TITLE of the
| post to indicate that you HAD changed the GENERAL SUBJECT
| of the post to something else AND end your NEW TITLE with
| "Was..." to prefix the previous title, e.g. "Hackintosh
| is Almost Dead" => "My Changing Hobby Habits Was:
| Hackintosh is Almost Dead"
| nullwarp wrote:
| Isn't that the truth. For a site with the word "hacker" in
| it there seem to be so few of them. I can't imagine letting
| all that curiosity die out of me like the parent comment
| implies.
|
| I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff
| either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had
| more time I'd still do it.
|
| If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.
| bruce511 wrote:
| The funny thing about growing older is that we change,
| and the things that were once "I'd rather be dead than
| not do this" just naturally fade away, and other new
| exciting things take their place.
|
| I say thus not to dampen your enthusiasm, but rather to
| encourage you to enjoy it to the maximum while it lasts.
|
| Everything has a season and in that season it can seem
| terribly important. Perhaps an activity, or a favorite
| sports team, or a group of friends.
|
| Some of that remains forever, some of it gets deferred as
| other things happen. It's part of life, we grow, we
| change, the world around us changes.
|
| It's not that the drive is lost, it's just that it
| manifests in different ways, different activities,
| different challenges.
|
| When you see a post like yours in 30 years time, remember
| this moment, and raise a glass :)
| mturmon wrote:
| I'm going to gently pile on to the sibling comment here,
| and note that the "hacking" we find interesting should
| and does change over time. I used to spend time hacking
| PDP-11 assembly code to make games. That got old, and if
| I play a game now it's purchased. The stuff I hack on now
| is more like applied math.
|
| This is all good and natural, if it's organic and not
| growing it's probably not alive.
| raydev wrote:
| > If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.
|
| I wonder how many others had this exact same thought,
| before they lost their "hacker" drive while also
| preferring to continue living.
|
| This may shock you, but people's interests and desires
| can evolve over time, even when those people don't expect
| them to evolve.
| Solvency wrote:
| HN community selects for these kinds of posts, in the same
| way that subreddits like /r/amitheasshole love overwrought
| girlfriend-is-evil stories.
|
| Most often the highest rated posts on HN are from 40+ year
| olds who don't discuss the post at hand, they'll post a
| hyper-specific nostalgic story from their youth on
| something that is tangentially related to the post.
|
| In fact, the older the better. If your childhood anecdote
| is from the 70s or 80s you're a god.
| Klonoar wrote:
| They're not that far off topic - the site would be far less
| interesting if we didn't have tangential discussions in the
| comments.
|
| They are also, as you noted, expressing a very common
| opinion.
|
| Now I'm off to spend my Saturday not tinkering, because
| there's a bigger world out there and I've done my time.
| bruce511 wrote:
| On the contrary, I was relating the article to my own
| experience. The thrust of the article was explaining the
| end of an age.
|
| I was merely saying that we shouldn't see this as bad, it
| is the natural way of things. Everything that has a
| beginning has an end. Raise a glass to remember hackintosh,
| but don't mourn it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| People are asking how the fact that you make more money
| now is evidence of that. That's your natural ending, but
| it's not evidence of a natural ending.
| shagie wrote:
| There are _other_ things that are more interesting to build
| and make now than a hackintosh (with the added difficulty
| that trying to make a silicon compatible device may not be
| feasible).
|
| Combine this with that a Mac mini that might be at the target
| for a hackintosh device is $600 USD ... and has the advantage
| that it isn't hacked together and so has better support.
|
| The part of me that wanted to tinker with a hackintosh in my
| younger days is more satisfied by Raspberry Pi and Arduino
| projects. I've even got an Onion IO over there that could use
| some love.
|
| Its not that people don't want to tinker, but rather the
| utility that one gets for hacking together a Mac (again, note
| the silicon transition) is less than one gets for hacking on
| single board computers.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I guess the commercial success of the platform has increased
| the offering in the second hand market.
|
| Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is
| behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless
| integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to
| run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people
| using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the
| purchase of a mac.
| bruce511 wrote:
| As I said in my post, the next generation will find something
| new to tinker on.
|
| The idea of a hackintosh is obsolete because there are new
| worlds to conquer, the time of hackintoshes has come and
| gone. The new generation will find their own challenges, not
| re-hash challenges of the past.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends.
| Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
|
| See, that 35 years for me didn't make me stop working on my
| cars, it just allowed me to have enough money to have a
| reliable car as well as "toy" cars that I can still tinker
| with. I drive the Audi, but I still wrench on the Triumph. I
| used to tinker with Hackintosh stuff as well, and I haven't
| stopped tinkering, just moved on to other things, like this
| Rubidium frequency source I just bought to build a high
| accuracy NTP server from a Raspberry Pi. (Yes, of course, there
| are already cheap and easy solutions for this, but I want to
| tinker).
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Either OP doesn't consider tinkering an enjoyable past-time
| activity or they've no free time to do something they enjoy.
| Both quite sad to be honest.
| afavour wrote:
| I wouldn't go as far as "sad". Free time is always a finite
| resource you have to prioritise. I used to tinker, these
| days I'd much rather spend time with my kids. I'm
| definitely not sad about it. I'll have plenty of time for
| tinkering in the future.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Yes, time is limited, and these days I have new hobbies.
| For cars, and computers, it's a bit of been-there-done-
| that.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Can people simply have priorities?
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Of course. And people enjoy spending their free time on
| various things not necessarily due to some restriction.
| For those people time spend on those things isn't wasted.
| For example, can have fun fixing cars even if have money
| to have a mechanic do it.
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| I was also that kid. I remember an OSX upgrade breaking my
| mouse and I couldn't figure out how to get it working again. I
| was desperate for a Mac, but it was financially unattainable.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Macs are very expensive in some parts of the world, where other
| computer brands are affordable. A hackintosh could be a good
| option, and when somebody learns to do it well they could do it
| for others for money. Not only installing MacOS on PCs, but
| also installing newer versions of MacOS on Macs that are
| officially not supported anymore.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > A hackintosh could be a good option, and when somebody
| learns to do it well they could do it for others for money
|
| Apple thoroughly screwed over Mac developers that the only
| compelling software that's exclusive to MacOS is developed by
| Apple themselves[1], IMO. Even those packages have equivalent
| (or better) alternatives on Windows. Macs used to be _the_
| platform for DTP, audio and video production - now all the
| 3rd party developers have pivoted away to other operating
| systems. One of the reasons professionals resorted to
| Hackintoshes in the past was because Apple had periods of
| neglecting the Mac Pro hardware on and off. Why would anyone
| go through the paid of setting up a Hackintosh in 2024,
| outside of being a fan of MacOS aesthetics?
|
| 1. Logic Pro likely has the biggest pull; Final Cut isn't the
| halo app it once was.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I use many third-party apps on MacOS that are top of the
| line in their niche, regardless of OS. People have many
| different uses for computers and workflows that you are
| unfamiliar with.
|
| When you discover how programs on MacOS can connect and
| interact with each other and with the OS as a whole, it
| becomes a completely different experience.
| samatman wrote:
| Macs continue to absolutely dominate audio and video
| production, and desktop publishing. You're just making
| stuff up.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| I'd run a Linux desktop if it wasn't for audio
| production. Mac's Core Audio / Core Midi are the top of
| the heap.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Nice strawman! You completely demolished a market share
| argument I never made. My point is that audio and video
| professionals now have _viable_ alternatives to Apple
| software. Running MacOS is now optional, which wasn 't
| the case in the past, so there's less of an impetus for
| running MacOS on an non-Apple hardware.
|
| As for making stuff up - I don't know if you remember the
| years of neglecting Mac Pros, or the clusterfuck that was
| Final Cut Pro X. I do. I remember a lot of dyed-in-the-
| wool Apple users switching to Adobe on Windows. How many
| 3rd party DTP, audio or video production packages are
| still exclusively available on Apple?
| afavour wrote:
| I feel the same way with phones. I pre-ordered a Nexus One the
| day it opened, installed a dozen custom ROMs, etc etc. Upgraded
| to a Nexus 4, 5. These days I use an iPhone. Don't miss it,
| though I'm nostalgic for the excess free time!
| disiplus wrote:
| from around 2008 to 2012 I ran hackintosh, on desktop, it was
| great and fun in 2012 I bought a first MacBook. The good
| experience on the hackintosh made me get the MacBook. So I like
| to think hackintosh helped apple.
| smoyer wrote:
| I have one running in a virtual machine but on hardware that
| would natively support a Hackitosh which I use only for testing
| Mac distributions. It's too old to use now but when I built it
| you could buy Mac OS at Best Buy.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| went from hackingtosh to mac, never had enough to afford a car.
| (I think)
| stavros wrote:
| I don't know about you, but for me it was never about the
| money. I did this stuff (and still do) because I find it fun,
| not because I can't afford to buy it. I have my desktop, and I
| want that to just work, and I have a bunch of computers,
| hardware, 3D printers, etc etc that I constantly tinker with,
| because I like it.
|
| I suspect it's the same for you, and it may be the lack of
| time, but not so much the access to money.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| As a teen in the mid-oughties. I played heavily with the
| OSx86 project/Hackintosh. I learnt about writing kexts and
| kernel patche and I fondly remember getting a Linksys USB-to-
| ethernet adapter working on an HP workstation, running Tiger.
|
| My financial circumstances have improved somewhat in the
| intervening years. Today, I own quite a bit of Apple
| hardware, most recently Vision purchase overton-shifted my
| definition of "disposable" into very unfamiliar territory.
| Even still, about once a year I ensure I can still triple-
| boot" - just now I do it with ProxMox and Virtual
| Passthrough. The first iMessage sent from my virtualized
| "iMac pro" at 2AM and was almost as gratifying as the first
| Apple Bootscreen on a a Sony Vaio.
|
| May we never lose whatever that is.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Same story but with custom Android ROMs
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| those were the days. Nowadays it alls feels same-ish and
| boring. Can't wait for a new kind of device where not
| everything has been figured out yet.
| accrual wrote:
| The Steam Deck sort of occupies this space today. I'm not
| in the scene myself but I've read about users modding them,
| running unsupported OSs, liquid cooling them, etc. Seems
| like any sufficiently broad technology will garner a
| community of hackers and modders around it.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| This!
|
| I'm not into modding but I got SD because of it's
| openness and all sorts of things I can make with it (also
| to support gaming on Linux and kudos do Valve for the
| work on pushing it ;) )
| ktosobcy wrote:
| I played with jolla/sailfish for a while and the device was
| awesome but I couldn't get myself to like gesture/swipe
| navigation (I hate it on the current flock of iOS/Android
| with same passion)...
|
| For the device I'm pondering new OP which is more open than
| the rest but still, as you said - it's mostly the same OS
| and the changes are not that significant to spend all that
| time on flashing...
| accrual wrote:
| Agree. I used tweaked BlackBerry ROMs for a couple years
| before getting my first Android device, an HTC One M7 with
| Android 4.4 KitKat. Spent loads of time getting all the tools
| working to modify ROMs, bootloaders, recovery/TWRP, and
| squeeze every drop of performance out of that phone. Then
| went "backwards" to an iPhone 4S and have been rocking stock
| iPhones ever since.
| mysteria wrote:
| This is the classic "money is time, time is money" conundrum. A
| teenager doesn't have the money to buy a fancy car or computer
| but they have the time to tweak and experiment to get the most
| out of it. Meanwhile an adult has the money but not the time,
| assuming they have a full time job, kids, etc. So they're
| willing to spend the money to get products that work and would
| rather spend their limited time with their family instead.
|
| In my teens I had a group of friends who loved to tinker, from
| hackintoshes to custom ROMs to homelabbing to electronics
| repair. Now I'm like the only one left who does this stuff :(
| _puk wrote:
| When you're young you have all the time, all the energy, but
| none of the money.
|
| When you're an adult you have all the energy, all the money,
| but none of the time.
|
| When you're a retiree you have all of the money, all of the
| time, but none of the energy.
|
| A generalisation of course, but quite apt!
| mysteria wrote:
| The only way out of this is an early retirement in a LCOL
| area or a job with a very good WLB (which is likely pretty
| rare for most HNers in the tech industry). Even ignoring
| overtime I'm typically _tired_ when I get home from work
| and have other commitments alongside my hobbies and
| tinkering.
| zerr wrote:
| There are new generations of cash poor tinkerers though,
| including the 3rd world.
| accrual wrote:
| > Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35
| years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I
| just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
|
| This resonates with me as well. As a teenager with my first car
| I spent a lot of time tweaking its appearance, sound,
| performance, etc., buying what little I could from local auto
| parts stores. I couldn't wait to get older to have more money
| so I could do more mods and really make the vehicle how I
| wanted it.
|
| In the back of my head I wondered why older folks didn't do
| this though. They have these nice vehicles but they're bone
| stock! Why not new wheels, tint, a tasteful lower, etc.?
|
| Then I myself got older and found it just isn't as important as
| it used to be. I still have a slightly modified car, but I'm
| not rooting around inside the dash with a soldering iron like I
| once did, haha.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Haha that is a very similar mindset I had when I bought my
| first house. I was excited about all of the nice improvements
| I could make and wondered why so many people I knew who were
| well off never really put much work into their home.
|
| Then I quickly realized that its such a big hassle and also
| you almost instantly get used to things how they are.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Same for me. I spent countless hours recompiling my kernel in
| slackware, configuring enlightenment window manager. These days
| I don't even change the desktop wallpaper.
| pram wrote:
| Yeah I spent literally dozens of hours of my life compiling
| different kernels with OSS and ALSA variations to get my
| sound card working lol. Really a 'you had to be there' thing.
| rpdillon wrote:
| People have been making this argument to me about Linux for
| more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across
| was:
|
| > Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
|
| Something never quite sat right with me about this argument,
| and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the
| understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's
| exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around
| you: it turns you into an expert.
|
| So yes, I may just want to turn the key and have my car work.
| But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had
| tinkered with my car, so I can better understand what was
| wrong, and whether I can fix it myself or if I needed a
| professional.
|
| I run Linux on all my machines, and my family generally uses
| Mac (both sides), but all those years tinkering with Linux,
| they still come to me for help with their Mac machines that
| they insisted would Just Work.
|
| All that out of the way, I agree with your fundamental premise:
| hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next
| generation of tinkerers.
| teh_infallible wrote:
| Your comment makes me think of my 3d printing journey. A lot
| of printers require maintenance and tinkering just to keep
| them functional. To an extent, since they are targeted
| towards "makers" who like to play with these things, that's
| fine.
|
| But sometimes the thing you're trying to build is of central
| importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your
| way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be
| exploring your ideas with a machine that's already fully
| functional.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Sometimes the holiday is the destination. Sometimes the fun
| is in the getting there, not being there.
|
| Tinkering can be fun. But these days I mostly want results,
| achievements etc. I want to tinker to a successful goal,
| not just tinker for tinkers sake.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I agree that tinkering is a side effect of curiosity, and
| that curiosity leads to expertise, which has value.
|
| I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My
| car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was
| fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's
| just not interesting.
|
| I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that
| too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building
| your 10th is less so.
|
| The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit
| hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the
| economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting
| one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all
| along.
|
| In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on
| to the next challenge.
| secstate wrote:
| I think the awkward part of your first post is that you
| appear to start with a value judgement that tinkering is
| for poor people who's time is worthless. That's not
| remotely fair to either poor people, or rich people who
| like to tinker. No one's time is worthless. Not your time.
| Not mine. It's all just time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Linux is only free if your time is worthless!
|
| This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot
| more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend
| managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable"
| meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent,
| natively supported hardware.)
| audunw wrote:
| That argument doesn't sound very convincing to me. How
| would I know an avoiding Ubuntu is reasonable? That still
| seems to be the go-to distro for many people I know that
| like to use Linux but aren't Linux experts. How do I know
| which hardware is natively supported?
|
| With Windows 10/11 I've never had any problems, either with
| pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running
| Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smooth as well.
|
| My experience with Linux as an OS has been fairly good for
| many years, regardless of the distro. It's the applications
| that could be an issue. Feels like it's only very recently
| (post Steam deck in particular) that gaming seems to be
| viable at all. And it's hard to beat the MS Office package
| for work. I recently got the idea to have two user accounts
| on my home computer where I have an account dedicated to
| working from home, logged into my office 365 account from
| work.. and it was honestly amazing how suddenly everything
| was just perfectly synced between my work and home
| computer.
| fsflover wrote:
| > How do I know which hardware is natively supported?
|
| You buy preinstalled. Works for me.
| lanstin wrote:
| Yeah preinstalled. And I never had issues with Ubuntu
| breaking in ways like arch or gentoo. Breaking includes
| trying to install some new thing or uograde and having
| random other stuff have to be googled.
| TylerE wrote:
| That would be a firing offense at my company. Company
| files stay on company hardware. Personal files stay on
| personal hardware, and never should the two meet.
| chasil wrote:
| If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch
| Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during
| this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s,"
| i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime.
|
| If you have recently performed the analog activity on a
| Linux distribution, which is likely either apt
| update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a
| reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot
| alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare
| offer either free or low-cost options to address that.
|
| Windows update is _enormously painful_ compared to Linux.
| There can be no argument of this fact.
| mmcnl wrote:
| This is absolutely false. I run dual-boot Windows and Linux
| on hardware that has 100% Linux support. Windows just
| works, the same cannot be said for Linux unless all you do
| is use a browser and listen to Spotify.
| fsflover wrote:
| > unless all you do is use a browser and listen to
| Spotify
|
| So what exactly isn't working?
| WJW wrote:
| Not OP, but the fact that I have an easily accessible
| text file on my desktop with the exact commands to run in
| my terminal to recompile the graphics driver when
| upgrading packages breaks graphics again should speak
| volumes. I don't really mind, because running 3 commands
| in the terminal a few times per year is not particularly
| difficult for me. I could see it being difficult for non-
| devs though.
|
| What does get annoying is when such an OS upgrade breaks
| the wifi drivers and I have to setup a bluetooth hotspot
| on my phone to access the github repo and fetch the
| latest driver version for the wifi dongle.
| t-3 wrote:
| There are pain points on both. Audio on Linux is still
| annoying if your system isn't very vanilla, while Windows
| sucks at bluetooth, configurability, and has a lot of
| annoying anti-user "features".
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is a great linux post because while taking the time to
| type out distros to avoid is worth it, saying what distros
| to try is not.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu
|
| which one you would recommend?
| theshackleford wrote:
| > You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11
| updates
|
| Utter fantasy.
|
| They complete whilst I sleep, taking zero of my time at
| all.
| Gracana wrote:
| I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's
| something you own and control and can dive into and see every
| part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies,
| because I know I can be stopped or locked out. With open
| source software, simple electronics, old cars, fabrication
| and woodworking, the time I spend learning feels worthwhile.
| rpdillon wrote:
| This is a great point. I sort of detest becoming an expert
| at proprietary stuff, because I know they'll just change it
| before long. I've lamented about this elsewhere as modern
| software creating "permanent amateurs". Even those that
| want to invest in expertise often find their knowledge
| outdated in a handful of years, and those that don't want
| to invest can easily justify it by pointing out this
| effect.
| xattt wrote:
| Proprietary or not, tinkering help you develop an intuition
| of what _might_ be wrong.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Yeah I mean, whoever made the original statement is just
| not an OS engineer.
| umbra07 wrote:
| I fully empathize - and yet, there are benefits from
| tinkerers/hackers messing around on proprietary
| hardware/software. Hackintosh - and similar communties -
| led to projects like Asahi Linux, Nouveau, Panfrost, etc.
| dataflow wrote:
| > I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's
| something you own and control and can dive into and see
| every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary
| technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked
| out.
|
| The problem with this approach is then you get a generation
| of engineers with tunnel vision thinking the One True Way
| to achieve your goal is the same way your GNU (or whatever)
| software did it.
|
| Invest time in learning your technologies, whatever they
| are. There's valuable knowledge in proprietary stuff just
| as there is in OSS.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I agree with your point in principle, and yet I installed
| Ubuntu on my work laptop this January after using Windows
| professionally for my entire (5 year) career. I've found
| myself moving in the opposite direction from the person
| in the root comment, because I find that it's getting
| harder and harder to find tolerable proprietary software.
| It feels like everything is glacially slow, laden with
| ads and tracking, reliant on an internet connection for
| basic functionality, or some combination of the above.
| dataflow wrote:
| "There is valuable knowledge worth learning in the
| technology" != "this is strictly better software on every
| axis and you should switch to it for your daily work"
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Frankly there is no value in learning user-hostile
| proprietary technologies in a way that the owner of said
| technologies actively wants to discourage and prevent.
|
| Like learn the proprietary tech in the environments it's
| intended to be used in but if you can't use it in that
| environment I personally wouldn't waste my time with it.
| With FOSS tech at least you can make the argument that
| you can learn stuff by maintaining it properly but with a
| proprietary stack in an unsupported and actively user
| hostile environment the best you are going to do is learn
| how to maintain a fragile truce with the software gods.
| exe34 wrote:
| Yeah I'll learn as much as I absolutely have to in order
| to get my paycheck. Any more and you need to give me a
| raise.
| golergka wrote:
| For you, me, other people on HN who generally make a living
| by understanding computers, definitely.
|
| For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some
| documents and print them without having to update a kernel?
| No.
| Nab443 wrote:
| Even as a dev with 3 environment I've not had to tinker my
| kernel since I left gentoo something like 15 years ago,
| Ubuntu takes care of it..
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some
| documents and print them without having to update a kernel?
| No.
|
| when it was needed to do it last time, in way more
| troublesome than Windows system updates?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Something never quite sat right with me about this
| argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it
| is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless,
| and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone
| around you: it turns you into an expert.
|
| I have plenty of other things I'd rather tinker with and
| become an expert on, though. My computer is a tool to let me
| work with those things. It's not fun when I have to debug and
| fix the tool for hours or days before I can even start
| working on the things I want to work on.
| TylerE wrote:
| Exactly. Why do I want to be neck deep in some XML config
| hell when I could be playing music?
| matwood wrote:
| This is me. The range of things I want to tinker with has
| grown. Various house projects, jiu-jitsu, cooking, etc...
| are all things I tinker with and learn from. Building
| computers, I've done and don't feel the need to do again. I
| even built a Gentoo install long ago when I was learning
| the nuts and bolts of linux.
| blfr wrote:
| I also use Linux on all my machines but that's because
| (perhaps after years of tinkering) it is currently the most
| turn-key laptop/desktop OS. Things just work, they don't
| break without a good reason, and weird limitations don't
| randomly pop up.
|
| Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional
| helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of
| use _designed by Apple in California_ , are not like that.
|
| Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https
| on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same
| network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and
| Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely
| pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.
| willdr wrote:
| If you sincerely believe this, you've tinkered enough that
| the massive knowledge barrier that is Linux seems like
| nothing to you.
|
| I would never sit my 70 year old mother down in front of a
| Linux machine. We're not at "caring that video files
| download too slowly" - we're at "how do I put a file on a
| USB".
| WJW wrote:
| Put USB stick into computer, click on "Files" in the
| program chooser, select the USB drive (helpfully listed
| as "USB drive" even), drag your files there?
|
| Same as on Windows and MacOS really. I don't dispute that
| Linux has rough edges, but putting files on a USB stick
| is not one of them tbh.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless
|
| You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or
| lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be
| way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will
| always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must
| still be able to spend it without care, because what would
| life be otherwise).
|
| > But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had
| tinkered with my car
|
| Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make
| more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to
| solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail
| you. It's too complicated.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Disclaimer: This became more of a rant than I intended.
| I've become pretty unhappy with the general quality of the
| "professionals" I've interacted with lately.
|
| I just can't agree with this take. It sounds that simple,
| but it's not.
|
| I happen to enjoy learning and fixing.
|
| It would take me a long time to build that trust. Nobody
| cares about my things and my family's safety like I do.
|
| Most people are a long way from making as much money as an
| expert would charge them.
|
| In the last couple of years, I have had some terrible times
| when I call for help.
|
| When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug
| in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look
| myself.
|
| Plus one time they left my fuel pump loose and I had to pay
| (in time and money) for an extra round trip with Uber, and
| the fuel it sprayed onto the road. They didn't fix the
| original problem, which cost me another round trip.
|
| Another time, I had technicians (experts) out to look at my
| leaking hot water tank 4 times before they decided it was
| time to replace it. I wasted the time calling, babysitting,
| coordinating, figuring out how to shower without hot water,
| etc.
|
| If this is the average "expert" count me out. I'll do it
| myself. Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as
| fun.
| eastbound wrote:
| Your argument is excellent and made me evolve my point of
| view about Mac. I use Mac for efficiency, and yet, I was
| wrong about what kind of efficiency I've been developing.
| Tinkering is so important, even if just for the fun of it.
| enra wrote:
| To me it was having just one powerful upgradable desktop
| computer with Windows and MacOS. So I don't have to have
| devices on my desk.
|
| Now I have solved with PC desktop, MacBook Air, and Apple
| Display. PC also has usb-c display output so I can just switch
| which cable connects to the display.
|
| Downside is still that M1 is not as fast, especially something
| that is GPU intensive as the PC I have.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Yea but thats how you learn.
|
| These ipad kids dont know anything because it all works now for
| games and netflix. No need for drivers, windows installs etc
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| With a little preparation setting up a Hackintosh is not much
| more difficult than setting up an actual Mac. What you're
| describing is a myth or just out of date.
| david38 wrote:
| I agree your first three paragraphs, but why won't they want to
| continue to hack?
|
| It was my obsession with worthless endeavors that got me the
| kind of job that made my time valuable in the first place
| hk1337 wrote:
| > These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time
| trying to convince it to work.
|
| I have said this same thing about Android vs iPhone. Also, if I
| cannot tinker with Android then I might as well have an iPhone.
| grishka wrote:
| There was a time when hackintosh was practical for everyone who
| needs macOS and/or can't stand other desktop OSes. It was the
| tail end of Apple's Intel hardware. It was pathetic in terms of
| performance (underpowered CPUs and buggy GPU drivers), quality
| (butterfly keyboards) and thermal design (things would overheat
| all the time), yet expensive.
|
| I myself was contemplating building a ridiculously overpowered
| hackintosh machine around 2019. Then the ARM transition was
| announced. And then the M1 came out with overwhelmingly good
| reviews from literally everyone. So I decided to wait for the
| beefed up "professional" version, which did come later, so here
| I am, typing this on an M1 Max MBP, the best computer I've
| owned so far.
|
| Also, for me personally, hackintosh was an introduction to
| macOS. I was a poor student at the time and couldn't afford a
| real Mac. Of course I bought one about as soon as I could.
| TylerE wrote:
| I had a similar revelation a few years ago. My giant PC gaming
| rig blew up again (specifically my 3080 shit itself), a year
| after having to replace the power supply and requiring the
| whole thing.
|
| I was just done with faffing around with that kind of thing.
|
| So I bought a (then fairly recently released) Mac Studio, just
| the plain jane base 32GB model, and couldn't be happier. So
| nice to have something virtually silent and energy efficient,
| instead of jet turbine that drew about 300w at idle.
|
| I 100% do not want a laptop for my primary personal machine,
| but the big workstation towers are too much.
|
| The Studio is that wonderful Goldilocks zone - performant,
| bring-your-own input devices, but merely "a bit pricey" and not
| extravagantly so.
| roxil wrote:
| I find these days the Steak Deck has become a great device for
| tinkering. I've seen people do some nice unexpected stuff with
| it, for example making an opening in the back to connect an
| dedicated GPU or using it to pilot drones in Ukraine.
| geon wrote:
| I had the same experience with windows 98/2k and my franken pc
| of randomly upgraded parts. I used to have to reinstall win98
| every other month or so because it was so unstable. I had the
| installer on a separate partition, so I could just wipe the
| system disk and have a clean install up in 12 minutes.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Spot on for me, but there's a different argument at play: At
| the beginning of the OSX on x86 times, Apple had an OS with a
| stellar user experience, but the hardware was just completely
| overpriced, so Hackintosh made complete sense.
|
| Fast forward to today and I think Apple managed to pivot this
| almost to the complete opposite end. I think the hardware is
| incredible value (that's debatable for sure, but my M1 aluminum
| machined Macbook with Apple Silicon is blazing fast, completely
| silent, super sturdy and runs forever -- I wouldn't trade it
| for any other laptop I could buy with money), while the
| Operating System has really taken a backseat, with hugely
| annoying bugs unfixed since 10 years:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460
|
| To me, in a world like that, Hackintosh simply doesn't make
| much sense anymore. Asahi Linux is really the star on the
| horizon, by doing exactly the opposite: Letting a free and
| better maintained operating systems run on strictly awesome
| hardware.
| jwells89 wrote:
| It can still be useful for those looking to run older versions of
| macOS for some reason or another. If there's PPC applications
| that one wants to run for example, you can piece together a Snow
| Leopard hackintosh from used parts that will run PPC apps through
| Rosetta faster than any real PPC mac ever could while be also
| being easier and more cheap to maintain.
|
| From time to time I'll consider building such a box as a time-
| frozen "zen machine" that runs OS X 10.6 or 10.9, is disconnected
| from modern distractions, and will never be subject to the
| disruptions that software updates can bring.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I'd give Windows some credit - it is actually quite good and
| stable these days.
| nirav72 wrote:
| No denying that windows these days isn't stable. Indeed it is.
| My biggest issue is all the third party crap I never asked for
| gets installed with it. Not to mention all the Microsoft
| services that I don't want to use, but still manage to be
| there. Like OneDrive. Sure one can uninstall it. But then see
| the mess it leaves with the way files are saved in the
| documents directory.
|
| Even when setting up a Windows 11 VM , I usually have to spend
| an hour just removing stuff, disabling things and multiple
| reboots just to trim things down.
| xcv123 wrote:
| > I usually have to spend an hour just removing stuff,
| disabling things and multiple reboots just to trim things
| down.
|
| All of that is automated now. https://atlasos.net
| nirav72 wrote:
| yeah, I've used plenty of community made tools to de-bloat
| windows. But that's not the point. We shouldn't have to do
| that. Especially when its a paid windows license, I
| shouldn't have to spend time dealing with Microsoft's
| effort at further squeezing out more revenue from their OS
| platform.
| xcv123 wrote:
| It was even worse in the Win95/98 era. I remember
| reinstalling the entire network stack multiple times in
| one day just to get TCP/IP working. The operating system
| was an extremely broken piece of shit and wasted days of
| my life.
|
| Shoulda this. Shoulda that. This is just the reality of
| Microsoft that we have to accept, and it will never
| change. There are tools to deal with it. So I use the
| tools and move on with my life.
| threeseed wrote:
| WSL still doesn't have the proper UNIX like experience of
| macOS.
|
| And there is no decent equivalent to homebrew.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean with Hyper-V why even WSL and just run VMs of whatever
| other OS'es you want? Tinkering with the OS these days is
| just so much different than it was in the past. Trying to
| dual boot Win/Linux back in the day was a interesting
| challenge that might leave your disk corrupt, now it's a
| question of why do that at all? Hacking smaller platforms
| like the pi that are cheap seems to get more attention than
| PCs these days.
| int_19h wrote:
| WSL gives you much better integration with the rest of the
| OS. These days it even covers GUI Linux apps.
| switch007 wrote:
| Hyper-V lol. Use VMware Player/Workstation if you want to
| get any real work done
| k12sosse wrote:
| Good is relative. Windows 2000 never reset your preferences on
| an update of the OS.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Windows. Rock solid, and
| that was before they broke the search function (when it
| actually still actually searched in files rather than an
| incomplete index - thankfully, grepWin can be installed) or
| when they dumbed down the Control Panel.
| meepmorp wrote:
| You're the only person I've ever seen who agrees with me on
| that. W2K was the perfect windows - more polished than NT4,
| less bullshit than XP.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| I really don't understand where the nostalgia for XP
| comes from. Well, actually I think I do because a lot of
| home users probably didn't use NT4 and 2k and went
| straight from 98/ME to XP. But I remember all the
| ridicule that XP got for being such a terrible bubblegum
| OS X imitation, with required activation, and a bunch of
| stability and driver issues that were eventually ironed
| out. XP after Service Pack 2 was also rock solid, and
| probably still the best choice for a retro gaming PC
| because it's got decent hardware and software support and
| the activation has been worked around.
|
| But yeah, I used every Windows version since 3.11 full-
| time, and 2k was perfection - literally can't think of
| any downside to it.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I used both 2k and XP.
|
| 2k is pretty great, but fully patched XP is too. It's
| totally subjective but as much as I loved 2k I'd give an
| edge to end-state XP mainly for its ability to be
| customized with third party .msstyle themes, of which
| there were many that were well made and good looking.
|
| Fully patched 7 is a bit better yet for me though,
| because its theming engine added support for full depth
| alpha which really opened up possibilities for theme
| designers. It was a massive disappointment when Windows 8
| came along and gutted the engine, regressing it to being
| barely more capable than Windows 1.x with all the flat
| squares.
| linguae wrote:
| I also wholeheartedly agree: Windows 2000 was the
| pinnacle of the Windows NT line before Microsoft merged
| the consumer line (3.1/95/98/Me) with the professional
| line (NT) beginning with Windows XP, which unfortunately
| added all sorts of annoyances to Windows. The
| underpinnings of Windows are fine and are quite a
| formidable alternative to Unix. WSL has also been a major
| game changer, allowing me to have a Unix workflow without
| loading up a separate VM. It's just a shame the upper
| layers get in the way, though the Pro and Education
| versions of Windows are less in-your-face with these
| annoyances than the home versions. I'd love to have a
| Windows 2000 UI (with a search bar, introduced in Vista)
| on top of Windows 11.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > when it actually still actually searched in files rather
| than an incomplete index
|
| I don't even care about _in_ files. I just want a file
| named foo.txt to appear when I search for "foo" on the
| directory containing it.
|
| Windows 10 is completely unable to run that search.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Yes! and even if you search for foo.txt, it will also
| display foo_something.txt even though you didn't search
| for a wildcard (foo*.txt).
|
| And then you have that "fantastic" UI that helpfully
| tells you that the file is in
| "C:\Users\something\Documents\\..." regardless how large
| you make the window. Who's brilliant decision was it to
| truncate the locating folder without any way to resize
| the column and actually see the full path?
|
| Anyway, just giving a shoutout to grepWin again, it's one
| of the first thing I install on any Windows box while
| hoping that everyone involved in the Windows Search
| "experience" steps on a lego brick every day of their
| lives.
| huytersd wrote:
| Yep, I don't think I've had windows crash in atleast 2-3 years
| and I do a lot of strange, processor heavy things.
| mundays wrote:
| Now that their MacBooks come with 120hz screens with acceptable
| response time (unlike their early 120hz screens), the value
| proposition for hackintosh isn't as alluring for me. Previously,
| I've been worried about the T2 chip and the trend of Apple
| locking down MacOS, which also turned out to be less of an issue
| that I thought. The only area that saw significant retreat in
| macos is gaming.
| acmj wrote:
| > _The only area that saw significant retreat in macos is
| gaming._
|
| Mac gaming is probably getting better thanks to wine,
| crossover, GPTK and Whisky [1]. I am not a gamer but I have
| seen others playing serious Windows games like FF7 remake (not
| sure if that counts) on mac.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
| mundays wrote:
| The problem is, significant portion of "real games" used to
| run on macOS, and all PC games used to run on BootCamp. Now
| native mac games are all but extinct and cross-platform
| toolkits seem to be very hit and miss depending on the games
| (for now).
| acmj wrote:
| Sure, nothing beats bootcamp but that is not strictly
| macos. Apple's GPTK released last year seems to have
| greatly advanced gaming compatibility. Probably lots of
| games still don't work but it looks promising and is
| getting better. Hope Apple can continue to put resources
| into that.
| mundays wrote:
| I do hope that they would steer some of their resources
| from Apple Arcade into cross platform porting toolkits.
|
| I think the fundamental problem still remains that games
| unlike softwares are media and cannot be substituted with
| equivalents. By pushing their proprietary tech and
| neglecting native macOS ecosystem over the years, Apple
| has willingly pushed themselves in to the same corner as
| with console makers where they cannot compete with the
| value proposition of PC because of the overwhelming
| majority of exclusive titles that only run on PC. It's
| either all or nothing in terms of game coverage, because
| that's what ultimately allows consumers to "buy one
| device for (mostly) everything" for a hobby that takes
| significant upfront investment unlike netflix and hulu
| for example.
| KingOfLechia wrote:
| Other than trying out the MacOS for the first time to learn how
| bad it is, why would anyone make a hackintosh? Windows and Linux
| are infinitely better operating systems, more open, with better
| backwards compatibility, more hardware support, independence from
| vendor servers and more available software.
|
| A reminder that with MacOS you need internet connection in order
| to re-install the OS as it requires activation just like iPads
| and iPhones. Imagine one day Apple stops supporting your Macbook
| model, shuts down its activation server and your computer turns
| into brick after something goes wrong and it requires a factory
| reset.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| When was the last time you used Windows?
| KingOfLechia wrote:
| now
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Or Mac...
| mundays wrote:
| Yes, Tim Cook could flip a switch and my mac would become
| activation locked. Considering that Windows 11 has been working
| really hard to sneak remote attestation below our noses (and
| other stuff), I think it's safe to cross out Windows as well.
| KingOfLechia wrote:
| As long as Microsoft wants to keep Windows compatible with
| user-controllable hardware (like computers that let you
| disable secure boot and TPM or enroll custom keys), there
| should always be a way to debloat Windows.
| treyd wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't care _that_ much about user-controllable
| hardware, not as much as they used to. Their partnerships
| with OEMs have grown very deep and they managed to push
| Pluton for any device that wants to be certified for W11.
| They could go a few steps past this in a few short years.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes but this is why it's so important to push back
| against that with Apple. To show the market doesn't shrug
| and accept it.
|
| Microsoft has been trying to push their attestation crap
| for years. But we wouldn't have any of this so they toned
| it down.
| mundays wrote:
| True, Windows will never be as locked down as macOS that
| only runs on Apple designed custom ARM hardware. I guess my
| skepticism comes from my expectation that my Windows
| computer should be able to run games (unlike my macbook
| which holds personal data and work), and remote attestation
| is going to be used first in anticheats.
| jupp0r wrote:
| I see your points, but I don't want to make compromises for my
| daily work based on a scenario that's unlikely to ever occur.
| If the apocalypse comes, I'll gladly use Ubuntu, but in the
| meantime I'm ok with not reinstalling my OS when I'm somewhere
| without internet.
| jwells89 wrote:
| One thing to consider is that a lot of what some consider "bad"
| about macOS is purely subjective and varies depending on the
| user's background and mental models. It's not uncommon for
| people who grew up on Macs to find operating systems with
| Windows-esque desktop environments as "bad" as some find macOS.
|
| macOS installs don't require an internet connection or
| activation, I'm not sure where that came from. Macs registered
| with iCloud can be remotely bricked with Find My but that's
| completely separate and fully optional.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I'd recommend spending a few years on macOS. It doesn't sound
| like you have much experience with it.
| threeseed wrote:
| You can always install macOS using a Flash drive.
|
| That way it doesn't require an internet connection.
| KingOfLechia wrote:
| Even if you try to install it using a flash drive, it still
| asks you to connect to the internet to "verify" the
| installation. https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-
| macintosh-hardware... explains how it's ensured on the
| firmware level that you really connect with Apple servers.
| threeseed wrote:
| That is if you have a completely new machine or have zerod
| out the disk.
|
| If you are simply re-installing the OS then you can do it
| without internet.
| dutchCourage wrote:
| Hardware support, sure. Backwards compatibility is a double
| edged sword though. While it's awesome to have it's also the
| reason why parts of Windows feel so dated and inconsistent.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > While it's awesome to have it's also the reason why parts
| of Windows feel so dated and inconsistent.
|
| I'm not convinced.
|
| What Windows could do is make the old components available
| for old software, while directing all new software to use new
| components. Old software will feel dated and inconsistent,
| but the alternative is that this software would not work at
| all. If you don't install old software, you'll still have a
| perfectly seamless experience.
|
| I understand that backwards compatibility is the reason
| Windows still has two control panels. However, if it was up
| to me, the legacy control panel would be completely hidden
| from the UI until the user installs some software that uses a
| custom control pane (or something).
|
| I mostly don't understand why this hasn't happened.
| linguae wrote:
| I used to love macOS in the 2000s and 2010s. I never made a
| Hackintosh but I was always intrigued by them. Before WSL was
| introduced, the Mac was the best platform for people who needed
| to use proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office
| and the Adobe Creative Suite while running Unix. There was (and
| still is) a lot of native software on the Mac that is well-
| polished, such as OmniGraffle and Keynote.
|
| Times have changed, though. While macOS still provides a more
| consistent user experience, IMO, than Windows or Linux, Windows
| with WSL means I can run Microsoft Office and other proprietary
| apps alongside a seamlessly integrated Linux environment
| without needing to SSH into a VM. The popularity of Electron
| apps undercuts the Mac's consistency while also making Linux a
| more viable option since Linux can run the same Electron apps
| macOS and Windows do. Microsoft Office is now available as a
| Web app via Microsoft 365; while I prefer the macOS and Windows
| versions to the in-browser version, the in-browser version
| gives Linux users access to Office. I also believe macOS's Unix
| environment has not kept up with advances made in the BSD and
| Linux world. Windows can be quite annoying with its
| notifications, but unfortunately the Mac in recent years also
| has annoying notifications; I know this because I use a work-
| issued MacBook Pro regularly.
|
| In my opinion, the most compelling reason for a Hackintosh in
| 2024 is for Intel Mac users reliant on Mac software tools to
| still use them without being restricted to Apple's hardware.
| The 2019 Mac Pro is still very expensive, and Apple's ARM
| lineup requires paying substantial sums of money for RAM
| upgrades with no workaround since there are no DIMMs.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Some people just prefer MacOS over Windows.
|
| By the time they shut down activation servers the hardware will
| be so worn out and obsolete no one will care. Also you can run
| Linux on Mac.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so
| tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for
| communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm
| still surprised this requires special interaction with the
| hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the
| backend if driver features are unavailable.
| mid-kid wrote:
| Custom drivers trip some security features and "taint" the
| kernel.
| jupp0r wrote:
| How does that impact iMessage? Are parts of it implemented in
| the kernel?
| lwkl wrote:
| > doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend
| if driver features are unavailable.
|
| Why should it? Apple only supports their own hardware so the
| software should never run into this problem.
| hd4 wrote:
| I'm yet to be convinced there is a single use-case other than iOS
| development/publishing for someone to want Hackintosh rather than
| simply installing a well-supported distro like Ubuntu or Fedora.
|
| I tried it a few times and it was always a painful and
| substandard experience.
| twoodfin wrote:
| No speculation in the article or thread yet what Apple is doing
| with the WiFi stack that creates such a fragile coupling with its
| services.
|
| Per iFixit, they're using an obscure WiFi / Bluetooth module from
| USI in the new MacBook Pros:
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+14-Inch+Late+2023+M...
|
| Possible they've gotten some "out of spec" capabilities wired in?
| Trying to imagine what for... Securely bridging local adhoc
| networks with the internet?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Apple's always done some unique things with WiFi/Bluetooth.
| Macs have long been able to keep Apple-branded bluetooth
| keyboards and mice usable even before the OS initializes for
| example, and if you use one of a few Broadcom chipset BT/Wifi
| cards that were used in real Macs in a hackintosh, that
| capability extends to those too. It feels weird being able to
| navigate BIOS/UEFI with a Bluetooth keyboard.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| It was pretty smart of Apple to switch to a proprietary
| architecture. I can't imagine MacOS running on standard Arm.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| I think the machine code would run (maybe not Rosetta2, since
| it uses weird extensions) but the issue is the weird boot
| sequence. You'd basically have to do the inverse of what Asahi
| Linux is doing to get it to boot on a machine with ACPI or
| another bespoke boot system (ala. Raspi).
| huytersd wrote:
| I used hackintoshes for a long time. I'm done with dealing with
| kexts and other such nonsense. Life is short I don't want to
| spend all of it dealing with some silly technical administration.
| Windows is good enough for every piece of software I want to run
| and I have an old MacBook for the odd thing that windows doesn't
| support. My windows machine dual boots into Linux for the extra
| exceptional thing that I can't do with windows.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth
| the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple
| hardware for me.
|
| Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying
| Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I
| don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple
| hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is a bit funny, the hacker energy once was there for running
| OSX on anything, now it is there for running anything else on
| M1, haha.
| kirykl wrote:
| Apple's whole strategy
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266
| sf_rob wrote:
| I'm fairly unaware of the current state of Linux on Apple M
| hardware, but I'd want a Linux partition on Apple hardware more
| than a Mac partition on x86. These days I have two devices
| though.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Its pretty good!
| flkiwi wrote:
| Writing to you from NixOS on an M2 Air. Aside from a handful
| of missing packages that aren't available for the
| architecture, it's shockingly good. My battery is reporting
| 19 hours remaining, and "setup" took about 20 minutes (not
| counting the brief time writing a new machine definition in
| my NixOS config). I don't have any fundamental issues with
| macos, but it's nice to have a consistent environment across
| machines, and this hardware is glorious.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| For me it's always been about repairability and expandability
| and Apple has gotten worse in that respect over time.
|
| It's essentially impossible to repair Apple hardware yourself,
| but Hackintosh is very easy to maintain in that regard.
|
| I have endless expansion options compared to Apple hardware.
| Hackintoshes are just a better choice.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Macs do keep their resale value more though. Personally I run
| Linux on my own machines but I do enjoy the build quality of
| the MBP I get from work. It's a whole another universe from
| my pretty good laptop that creaks and is made of plastic and
| the screen bends when I move it.. and the screen quality is
| not even comparable
| gscott wrote:
| Apple profitability by lock-in is all that matters in the Apple
| C-Suite now. Juice that stock price, get free stock options,
| buy new yacht to show off to your friends.
| golergka wrote:
| It's about the only viable option for professionally working
| with audio, in either studio or live setting. That's the
| biggest group of hakintosh users I'm personally familiar with
| anyway.
| steve1977 wrote:
| You can work professionally with audio in Windows, you'll
| probably even get better performance out of the same hardware
| you'd be using for a Hackintosh.
| golergka wrote:
| You can, theoretically. In practice, a lot of tools like
| Logic and specific VSTs are macos-only, and CoreAudio
| actually "just works" out of the box without having to
| manually install and setup all kinds of alternative low-
| latency drivers.
| irusensei wrote:
| Im pretty sure it was fun for everyone involved but the idea of
| using a patchwork of custom hacks never looked attractive to me.
| umvi wrote:
| I feel like hackintosh virtualization is a better investment of
| time. Currently it's onerous to run Apple OSes on anything but
| Apple hardware. Being able to spin up a hackintosh VM in any
| cloud provider would be pretty sweet. Of course that probably
| violates Apple OS terms of use so not sure if AWS would shut you
| down if they discovered people were doing that.
|
| But actually, as others have pointed out, I'm _much_ more
| interested in Linux running on M chips than Mac OS running on non
| Apple hardware. There 's nothing particularly compelling about
| Apple's OSes (except maybe their new VR sorry I mean "spacial
| computing" OS)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| For me it's just that macOS isn't a desirable OS anymore. Over
| the years Apple kept changing things that I preferred the way
| they were. So I'm done with it. I use KDE now.
| zavertnik wrote:
| I daily drove a hackintosh for years until I recently pivoted to
| apple silicon. I was a very enjoyable experience for me. The
| success and reliability of a hackintosh is really dependent on
| your hardware configuration. I had lucked out that my desktop
| tower that I had built years prior just so happened to coincide
| almost 1:1 with hardware requirements for a golden build. (6700k,
| 64gb ram, Vega 64, compatible wifi/bluetooth pcie, compatible m.2
| controllers, z170 mb which is well known in the hackintosh
| community, etc.)
|
| Being able to have a modular Mac was really something and I
| exploited that to tailor my machine to my use case
| (television/video production). I never had issues with bluetooth
| or WiFi, nor did I have ever have an issue with Apple's services
| like iMessage/Facetime.
|
| What sucked about the process was staying current with system
| updates. Updates within the macOS release went without a hitch,
| but my hardware was aged out in newer macOS versions which made
| upgrading a bit too much like surgery, and since this hackintosh
| was my production device, that wasn't something I wanted to roll
| the dice on.
|
| Having switched to apple silicon, I do kind of miss that freedom,
| but I've found that same freedom just by doing things a little
| less hacky. Instead of a board I can add drives to, I just setup
| a NAS, instead of using an old PCIE HDMI capture card, I got a
| more modern USB one, etc.
|
| For a long time, Hackintosh was an opportunity to do things _my
| way_ , and that experience led me to learning experiences that
| have improved my day to day that I otherwise may not have
| learned. It was a freeing experience. Today I still do things my
| way, but these days my way is more focused on convenience for the
| things that should "just work" so I put my attention on things
| that matter, rather than things that shouldn't, such as modifying
| my EFI before a macOS update to trick macOS into thinking I have
| the iGPU of a newer chipset because Apple dropped support for
| Skylake on a new release.
|
| Good times, the headaches were worth it in hindsight.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I've got a machine pretty similar to what you're describing in
| my closet (6700k, mobo reasonably well known in the community,
| 5700XT GPU) which used to be a hackintosh. Might be worth
| reviving and trying to find a use for.
| reactordev wrote:
| I used to tinker with building nforce4.kexts for OSX Leopard. I
| got everything working including the Realtek HD Audio thanks to a
| pcid injection. Snow Leopard was the last time I was able to
| build for nforce4 boards and we moved onto Intel gen 6 LGA1151.
|
| This was back when NVidia and Apple got along. GeForce 900 days.
| SLI was a thing. And it worked on my drivers. Sadly, I had kids
| and grew out of it, got old(er), and now only use Linux because
| aarm64 killed hackintosh.
| throwawayyy9237 wrote:
| _Many_ moons ago, before I had a job, I remember that Hackintosh
| seemed like the only way I could enjoy a Mac OS.
|
| These days I have literally piles of old Macs that I have fun
| trying different Linux distros on.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| Well, surprisingly Macbooks are competitively priced now and not
| that much more than Windows laptops.
| andrewdb wrote:
| If only this Dockerfile were real. It would greatly help app
| developers and publishers:
|
| FROM apple/mac-os-slim:latest ...
|
| Please, Apple, please let your developers use more virtualization
| or containerization.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| As a long time lover of hackintoshes (couldn't afford a real Mac
| as a youth but tried to make the netbook macOS dream come true),
| I'm quite sad to read this. The author has a very valid point
| that drivers are going to become increasingly complicated and
| difficult.
|
| I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn't
| explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes.
|
| As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a
| unique source of frustration. I'll spend hours digging through
| crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7
| MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory
| than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that
| shouldn't be possible. The firmware is a version that we never
| released. Etc etc.
|
| I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make
| it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being
| confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I've fixed
| it.
|
| Now I've spent hours chasing something and I can't help.
|
| (Opinions are my own, etc etc).
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I've been using a Hackintosh as my daily driver for nearly 15
| years and they have always been rock solid, with months of
| uptime consistently. It's just a matter of starting with the
| right hardware.
|
| People are free to look to support the hardware they have but
| 've always though it's stupid not buying well supported
| hardware in the first place, of which there is plenty.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| I'll add this to reasons why I'm opposed to always-on
| telemetry. A hackintosh should know that its crash reports will
| be unhelpful to Apple and not bother sending them. It's a waste
| of your time to deal with data coming from unsupported
| configurations.
| yardie wrote:
| Sorry, that must have been me. LOL.
|
| I had a Hackintosh and felt that any crash was 99% my fault and
| probably an edge case for MacOS. But in my defense,
| CrashReporter is way too permissive and will send a report even
| when the user doesn't want it done. After a app or hard crash
| I'll get the window that a bug report was sent and I know damn
| well some engineer is going to look at it and it won't make any
| sense that a MacBook has this particular GPU.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I installed Snow Leopard on a 2009 MB for kicks and sent in a
| crash report when Safari died due to something on the modern
| web. I would love to know whether these still arrive at the
| fruit company.
| comprev wrote:
| A Hackintosh was my entry point to the Apple ecosystem and I'm
| still here 15yrs later both at home and at work.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This article is nonsense. If "I've had compatibility issues with
| my hardware" is proof of Hackintosh dying then it's been dying
| from day one.
|
| If there are genuine issues across the board Hackintosh software
| is generally updated to patch the issue, it's always been like
| that and only improving over time.
|
| Personally I'm still on 10.14.6 and will probably never upgrade
| to 11 since it and its successors suck so hard.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I don't know, but reading on v2ex shows that there is still a
| sizable community in China. It's called Hei Ping Guo . (Black
| Apple)
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| Now it's the other way around: you hack Linux onto Apple Silicon
| (Asahi Linux).
|
| For me buying a new Macbook Air or Pro is definitely made more
| palatable knowing I could turn it into a Ubuntu laptop down the
| line.
|
| And if the Asahi team keeps kicking ass, we may even use Asahi to
| run Windows games with Proton inside Linux Steam. Thus replacing
| the Bootcamp partition for those who dual booted to play Windows
| games.
|
| I don't miss Hackintosh. The one build I made it all looked like
| it was genuine macOS, but you could feel it wasn't the same.
| Photoshop felt more laggy. Unless you used an equivalent iMac
| beforehand as I did you might not notice that something was off.
| That said this was like ten years ago.
|
| Even if it works well "Hacking" isn't worth it imho, whenevr
| there is the slightest lag or issue, you just never know. Is it
| because of the hackintosh, is it a genuine bug in macOS? Is it my
| hardware? Too many unknowns.
| johnklos wrote:
| Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term
| "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards
| in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance,
| "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL /
| Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac
| Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for
| years.
|
| > While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts
| to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...]
|
| Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular
| back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not
| necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had
| an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could
| run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple
| Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;)
|
| Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern
| macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever
| Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can
| be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual
| machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on
| ARM systems at some point.
| pointlessone wrote:
| With Arm CPUs becoming more common I wonder whether we'll see
| rebirth of the Hackintosh in a couple of years.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| While I never jumped on the Hackintosh bandwagon, I had many
| friends who did for almost a decade. They built systems that ran
| macOS for considerably less when it came to the price/performance
| ratio.
|
| Nowadays, those same friends are all using Mac Studios because
| the price/performance ratio for running macOS is better. I
| believe this is one of the major factors to why the Hackintosh
| community is dying today (not just changes to drivers and the
| macOS codebase as the author suggests).
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