This article is actually great, because it paints a very realisting picture of the experience. Most hackintosh fans fail to mention that your machine might not wake up from sleep, so you either run it 24/7 or shut down fully and wait ages for it to boot afterwards. Or that you'll get weird networking problems. Or that your video card driver will crash every once in a while, taking your whole machine down with it. Or that you can't click "update" next to an OS update and usually need to manually go through the process of waiting, then reading the forums scanning for people's experiences, then moving various kexts out of the way and patching them back in after the upgrade.

Yes, I realize there are many people with a nearly flawless experience. But not everyone can get one.

In my case, I decided it definitely wasn't worth it and bought a real Mac Pro. Couldn't be happier, especially as 3 years ago it wasn't easy to build a machine with 32GB of RAM. Net result: yes, it was expensive, but it works.

Macs work so well because Apple controls the hardware pipeline from top to bottom - the fact that Windows manages to work so well without controlling any of the hardware pipeline is actually pretty incredible (and, it gives you a lot of appreciation for the work that Linux developers have done to provide a similar experience, as well as illuminating why some things still don't "Just work" like they do in Windows or OS X environments).

In short at one point or another I've had issues with the graphic card or the integrated gpu, with USB 3, with the audio, with the screen resolutions on my two displays, various kernel freezes, networking... And to this day some of these issues are still unresolved.

Moreover you generally should always buy a Gigabyte motherboard for maximum compatibility but with the new Z87 chipset if I were to buy a MB I'd like to buy an Asus I prefer their current lineup. So in the end you don't even buy what you really want to buy. And also if your mb have something fancy, forget it you'll likely have troubles make it work.

After 3 years, my conclusion is it's not worth the energy I'm waiting the new mac pro to ditch my current setup, I can't take it anymore.

Given that the tradeoff isn't even "end up with an equivalent thing at the end of the day", I'd like to take the chance to thank the author for taking the bullet for us on this one and being honest about how much work really goes in to one of these builds.

I bet he'll save a lot of people a lot of pain and money.

At that time, I think it was regarded as the most compatible OS X netbook, and (IIRC) absolutely all the hardware worked 100% correctly. Wifi, sound, sleep/wake, external monitor, etc.

I used it extensively for 3 years as my main machine, and it never once crashed or had a single problem.

The more I used it, the more I was absolutely certain of one thing. My next machine will be a genuine Apple.

I bought a 2012 MBA 13inch for ~3 times the price of the mini 9 and am extremely happy. Apple hardware is spectacular.

Instead, he chose to spend 4 full working days to build a computer that doesn’t work as well as a Mac and can stop working altogether any day with no recourse. A computer that is worth zero in the resale market. A computer that Apple will not service.

By the sound of it, this is the author’s only computer, which he is dependent on to make his living, and it seems he isn’t planning to buy another Mac (even though he is a professional iOS developer).

This is a cautionary tale, an extreme example of being penny wise and pound foolish.

I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro - it is like the Cube, it looks cool but the Mac Pro is not a machine that requires form over function - people buy them to upgrade them, swap things in and out, stick them in racks, etc. Thunderbolt is not a replacement for pro use expandability - it just means a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit.

A good excuse for Apple to discontinue the Pro line eventually though - "hey we made this great new machine, but nobody bought it, so sorry"

I have a 2011 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA, 15") that I used almost exclusively (and occasionally used a Windows 7 VM on) until this past May when I bought a beefed up Thinkpad W530 (32 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD + 500 GB SATA, 1920x1080) and installed Linux on it

I've barely touched the MBP since then and only occasionally miss it, but I did notice that OS X is apparently supported on recent versions of VirtualBox. Like the Windows 7 VM that I keep around, it might be useful to have an OS X VM that I can fire up if the need arises.

Also: I toyed with the idea of building a Hackintosh to replace my 2011 iMac, instead of waiting for the 2013 model (Haswell, 780MX GPU). By the time I'd specced a comparable machine-i7, 16GB RAM, GTX 770, 3TB HDD, SSD, and a 27" Dell UltraSharp (to match the iMac panel), I really wasn't that far off the iMac's price with only a larger (256GB vs. 128GB) SSD to show for it. About < AUD$400 off, which if you consider the time to order, build, etc, isn't as significant as many make it out to be.

The actual Hackintosh process seems to be relatively "smooth" if you use compatible parts and set a day aside (and a couple to research similar builds), but I dread any warranty issues (and therefore dealing with > 6 manufacturers).

I'm still open to the idea, and maybe it makes more financial sense in US (there's about a 20% markup on parts here in Australia), but the price different wasn't substantial enough to offset the added effort/risk.

The benefit of OS X for me is that on the one hand it can run all my consumer software (especially games, MS office). On the other hand it is also a pretty nice Unix, so I can run all my work stuff (mostly scientific computing, and stuff that is distributed as source code). It took me a few evenings, but eventually I got everything working (including sound, network, and standby mode). Now its probably the most stable system I've ever had.

The thing is, I was fully expecting to put in some hours of work. That is the price you pay for building your own computer, whether you install Windows, OS X, or something else. Installing OS X was only slightly more complicated than installing e.g. Linux. If you include the time needed for choosing components, assembling everything, installing applications, the difference is very small. Especially considering how hard it is to get UNIX stuff under Windows (cygwin, mingw32, and so on), or games and big proprietary applications on Linux (using Wine).

Now, may people say you should just pay a bit more, and get a solid Mac that you know works fine, and has a warranty. The problem is, I couldn't afford a new Mac with the specs I needed. And you are never as flexible with a prebuilt computer as with one you build yourself.

I guess my bottom line is that it is unfair to compare buying a Mac with building a Hackintosh. The alternative to a self-built Hackintosh is not a Mac Pro, but a self-built Windows PC. The Mac Pro is the alternative to an assembled Dell, HP, etc..

"Scrolling and animation tasks are jerky or just plain slow. I can’t deal with that in a new machine. Maybe in a year or two when it can drive its screen and a large external retina smoothly."

What? Has the author used one recently? These problems were fixed within a month of original release. I've been using one for over a year and love it.

I just bought the current Mac Pro. Sure, I'd like the shiny new one. But I also needed a faster Mac that could accept a bit of expansion that I could get before the end of last financial year.

The hardest part about being an Apple tragic is separating my need for the zomg new shiny from simple business decisions like "is it worth getting something better now or limping along until some indeterminate future time?"

To those poo-pooing the hackintosh, my experience was quite different this time around from when I had OS X running on a netbook a few years back.

I already had a monitor, PSU, video card and ram, so the money investment for me was fairly small when compared to builing a system from scratch.

It took one evening to put everything together and install the OS, I followed the instructions there and have done several system updates without new problems coming up. I had to mess around a bit with kernel extensions to get my Radeon card put out 2560x1440 properly, but my problems were solved in under an hour. I've had strange problems connecting to my wireless printer, but I solved them by plugging it in and forgetting about it.

I've used it as a development machine w/ xcode and have not had any problems there.

All that said, I would NEVER use this as my only mac. I'm careful about keeping work backed up and off the machine in the event that something strange comes up, so there is that added overhead, but for any data/files you care about this should be done anyway.

Building a Hackintosh is something I considered as well, but based on my previous experiments in that area I absolutely have to concur with the others here who say it's not worth the hassle and at the end the machine never works quite right.

The biggest issue for me is multi-screen support, it was the main reason I bought my old Mac Pro. But it's a loud machine and it eats a lot of power, even when idle. And let's face it, most computers spend most of their time in idle. The new iMac supports two external displays, so that was my minimum requirement met right there (possibly by accident on Apple's part). I thought I'd miss the Pro's raw computing power but when rendering or gaming the iMac doesn't seem to be significantly slower to be honest. The entire setup consumes less than half the wattage of the Pro, it's relatively cheap (around € 2k), and most importantly it's very very quiet.

Part of the reason I moved to Apple hardware (and OS X) was to avoid spending time digging around with graphics cards, and RAM and making sure I have the correct drivers. I'm sure plenty of people enjoy it, but I don't, and it's just diverting time from things I do enjoy. There was also lots of other side issues, updates could cause it to break and require a revert back to a known good point, and hope it still worked okay, or having some slight system instability.

The Hackintosh project is pretty useful, but I currently don't need Mac Pro level of power, and if I did then I'd prefer to pay the premium to avoid spending time working on it. 4-5 full work days doesn't cover the cost of one, but it's certainly a non-trivial amount of it.

To be honest, if you already have a desktop which is somewhat compatible, then this makes total sense. The fact that you can continue upgrading hardware, add SSDs, change graphics card is fantastic. I did this as an experiment, and it worked so well that I never switched back. You no longer have to buy the latest Macs to get the latest hardware.

That said, I don't think buying new hardware for making a hackintosh is necessarily the best idea. You _will_ run into problems that can vary, and these aren't necessarily things you expect when buying a new desktop.

The problems mentioned in the article were harder to solve than the ones I had. But a hackintosh's return over investment is HUGE, if it works!

I bought a Mac Mini 2.6 GHz i7 a month or so ago, and added a 240GB M500 SSD, 16GB RAM, and 4 x 4TB external HDDs. Pretty happy with it performance-wise, even for Final Cut. I'd probably get an Areca ARC-8050 8-drive Thunderbolt RAID (http://www.areca.us/products/thunderbolt.htm) if I needed faster storage beyond 100GB, though. It's mostly a Plex server, VMware server (although I just use Fusion at home), and testing some proxy/etc. stuff, and is connected only to a 1080p projector and 5.1 HT system. I figure not much will get upgraded on the Mini in the next 6 months -- maybe no upgrade at all, or if it is upgraded, only some pretty irrelevant-to-me stuff.

I'm used to things taking forever when I ask too much from a computer, not it outright crashing. Is this "normal" on Macs?

That said, if I had to work on OS X, hackintosh would probably have appealed to me (if I was spending my own money on the hardware and needed a good GPU.) Thanks for thoroughly disabusing me of this preference!

I'm aware of most the arguments why EULAs are unenforceable, why/how to bypass them, etc, but is any of that honest?

Each one did require some post-install setting up. For example, dual monitors, sound card issues, graphics etc. But the set up never took longer than a few hours, and I get a machine that is 1/4 the price of a retail Mac.

I also think I can count the number of the times they've crashed on one hand.

If manually managing drivers teaches you to "appreciate" anything, do yourself a favour and install Ubuntu, if should cure you from such folly. Even if you'll never use it a day in your life, it will show you that "managing a dizzying array of hardware profiles" might well be difficult, but it's NOT a discipline either Windows or MacOS even competes in.

EDITED to respond:

Yes, this was XP. But even back then, Windows was marketed (and had been for a decade) as the "just works" OS, hardware wise. I'm glad they've improved, but it took them long enough.

Microsoft needs to build an ecosystem of well-supported hardware in order to survive. DRM aside, to do so it needs to enable hardware vendors to build whatever type of driver support they need. However as a (mostly) hardware company, it's in Apple's best interest to build an OS which works well on their hardware, and only their hardware.

There's nothing (that I'm aware of) about the Mach kernel that prevents anyone from developing their own drivers, but no company in their right mind is going to do that when they know that it will be nearly impossible to provide support for anything other than Apple-approved configurations.

I'm thinking of getting a Hackintosh on my laptop to get started with iOS development, but I'm not ready o get a new laptop just for that (and I don't really like Mac OS).

You are right about one thing though, it is a cautionary tale. I wrote it because I didn't see enough showing the pain involved.

Interesting that you count build time against his billable hours, but not resale time for the canned system. Selling something does not take a negligible amount of time or effort.

Guy English made some great points about potential for the new Mac Pro:

"The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with."

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349

I'd like for Apple to carry both lines going forward, but I guess that is unlikely. The issues I'm seeing now discourage me from dropping another 3-5k on the new ones knowing they are even further from being fixable.

The new Mac Pro 2013 is beautiful man. I'm not the target market, but I can see professional audio/video engineers getting excited about it. Editing 4K video in real time? Pretty badass. I was also impressed with the case engineering, but we'll have to see how it performs. I don't really see the design as form over function. It was designed to use a single fan for the entire machine.

I think that the jury is still out on if there will be a significant performance hit. Thunderbolt is like having a direct connection to the PCIe bus, isn't it? Now, you're right about the extra cost, but I think that they will still be sufficiently upgradeable, albeit with more cost and fewer choices.

Officially, VMware only supports mac pro (1). Unofficially, minis also work. Haven't tried a macbook pro.

1: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?dev...

Indeed. I've used VirtualBox to prime OS X images on attached USB storage to run on stock X86 hardware. Just remember to use EFI boot and you should be OK.

As long as you are running virtual, graphics support is limited to 1024x768 geometry though (even in fullscreen) and I can't say I've found any working ways around that.

That said, Linux does everything I need these days, and I no longer see any point in putting down effort to run a OS which Apple clears doesn't want me to run.

Some applications render better than others; I see a nearly order-of-magnitude better framerate in Safari vs Chrome, which is too bad, but all in all it's usable and I do some development in it with few issues.

1. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmsvga2/

Given the option again, I'd rent a machine or borrow one.

Yes, I ran several versions of Hackintosh VDI files on VirtualBox under Linux. It all works, but it is slooooooow (on some seriously fast hardware too). I tried many versions because of that, and used both OSS and Oracle versions of VirtualBox, but nothing helped. I finally gave up and tried using VMware player. What a difference... It runs smoothly, things "just work". I didn't have the courage to enable network connection to the world though - I have no idea what else is installed on the (pirated) OSX. But if you install it yourself (from a legal copy) you should be ok.

Workstation parts are expensive, yes, but they do offer capabilities that you can't get from consumer parts. If you don't need a workstation, then workstations may seem ridiculously overpriced, but if you do need a workstation, then ordinary desktops are crippled unreliable crap.

The price difference between a decked out mid-2011 iMac (with a DIY RAM upgrade) and a custom-built machine via NewEgg was ~$200 ... the difference largely being that with ordering from NewEgg I wouldn't pay sales tax. The difference with the DIY was I had a desktop video card instead of the mobile 6970M w/ 2GB of texture memory.

The other difference is I had separate speakers, webcam, more cabling, and a large physical box.

Although folks will fault the current iMac on storage expansion, don't rule out Thunderbolt. Yes, it's expensive, but being able to plug in a RAID array only loses points because the enclosure manufacturers always include disks to pad their margin. However, at least you can always plug that array into your next computer a few years down the line.

The prices are comparable if buy an iMac in the launch window. But the 2011 iMac is still being sold today. If you were buy a computer now there is a huge difference.

It's also worth considering overclocking given the stagnation in processor advances over the last generations. Getting a 40% clock increase out of a chip is like jumping ahead multiple years now -- it used to be that you could always wait a year and catch up, so why bother overclocking. But an inefficient old i7, originally 350 dollars, at 4.5ghz from 3 years ago is still faster than anything Intel is even selling today at any price.

In Australia, your warranty is with the entity you bought from. If they supplied you faulty parts, it is their responsibility to deal with the manufacturers. Buy everything from the one place, and the warranty is all with that one place.

You can, of course, try your direct warranty with the manufacturer, but you won't have the benefit of supplier channels. Similarly, dealing with a parts store is a bit more random than the usual "we're so big that we'll just replace the part" story you often get from Apple or Dell.

Not only does it make financial sense - the upgrade-ability and repairability of a custom build in unparalleled by the iMac - esp. the newer one. You would at least need the $169 AppleCare to allow for the possibility of free repairs on the iMac for 3 years. That still leaves out upgrades. Whereas for the custom build it's just a matter of yanking out the failed part and putting in a new one at cost.