Building a Hackingtosh, good/bad idea?

Demonstrably false. (Unless you foolishly believe the totality of a computer is CPU, GPU, RAM)

It takes an especially narrow and ignorant world view to compare an unassembled pile of parts to a ready-to-go package.

Wisdom.

 

I think building your own system has the advantage of telling you a bit of handwork. A lot of kid these days don't even know how the magic happens inside their pc... Some barely know you can actually change the cpu of a desktop! It's a part of what I dislike about macs, you can't "build your own", except for hackintoshes, but that's not for newbies.

Another part is because their laptops are meant not to be serviceable... My laptop here is 6 years old, I've change the HDD twice (god bless SSD), upgraded the ram and swapped the dvd-drive for a second hdd, I think I'll keep it another one or two years as it's still pretty fine and use-able. I don't think I could've done this easily with a macbook bought six years ago...

 

Did I say i was a fanboy, no, stop putting words in my mouth. Seems alot of you people on this forum have a bad habit of that.

Just basically saying its Mac has absolutely no advantage over PC what so ever. You can build a PC with the same specs of a $1000 mac for around $500.
Do it and ill prove you wrong. The only thing you can get is the rectum display or whatever its called. Last i knew that was mac only.

 

When your only contribution to the otherwise pragmatic and constructive thread was little more than bile and rhetoric, there's no need to put words in your mouth.

 

Not if the underlying hardware isn't correctly supported. And yes, < 8GB is also minimal for a Mac these days. It works okay, but if the underlying hardware isn't supported, it will be slower than it needs to be.

Run:

Reboot.

If the power saving isn't working correctly, you are using a hacked kernel and your system is using EFI emulation to boot, I'm sorry, you *will* have a worse experience. Creating a Hackintosh it fairly trivial, but tweaking the hardware config to make it fully supported and absolutely as close to a real Mac in performance is not. I got extremely good performance with Leopard on my MSI Wind u100 because someone who knew what they were doing pre configured the image, went through and created a driver package and 90% of the hardware was supported. With Snowleopard on the same hardware, it was awful. The system would continually freeze and everything was choppy. There was a driver issue somewhere, but to be honest I never bothered to track it down. Bottom line, your mileage is seriously going to vary on random hardware.

Why? Given Apple expect it to be run on a Mac Mini these days, I can't see that anyone would take it seriously anyway.

 

Sure you can. My MacBook is late 2007 (last but one black model, Santa Rosa chipset), so almost 6 years old. All the Macbooks prior to mine use the same hardware footprint. Flip it over, remove the battery, remove a couple of phillips screws and a metal plate surround, and the RAM slots are fully accessible, they even have an eject arm built in to the slots. The hard drive is on a tray and can be removed with absolutely no effort. I've both upgraded the RAM (from 2GB to 4GB) and the hard drive (from 160GB 4200pm to 500GB 7200rpm) myself, with no extra tools other than a small head phillips screwdriver. I'd go as far as to say, replacing the HDD/RAM is actually easier than 90% of modern laptops. My Lenovo work laptop, as an example, requires one to remove the keyboard to access one of the RAM slots!!!

 

Sure it does, it runs Mac OS X out of the box! Plus, it can *also* run Windows 7 flawlessly. I see that as a real advantage personally.

 

Then their recent models have gone badly hard to service compared to the old ones! Good to know though!

 

I have 2 models of the latest (and the one previous) Mac Book Pro and they both are as henderson described. Like 4-6 screws and you get to the ram easily enough.

 

I think that is mainly the Air models and possibly the Retina Macbook Pro. The MacBooks and MacBook Pro's are always user serviceable. With the Air's, it's a trade off between small form factor and user servicing. I think Apple will go more towards non-user serviceable in the future, mainly because they seem to like soldering the RAM/SSD's to the motherboard.

 

The latest (ie mid-2012) rMBP and MBA have socketed SSD's. Soldered RAM though.

 

The language you use is that of a fan boy "rectum display" would have taken you no effort to call it a retina display, anyhow it's only present in the rMBP.

I'm not disagreeing with you, I have proven your theory and my new Hackintosh is more powerful for less money BUT I'd still rather own an actual Mac, I couldn't give a fuck if I'm "being scammed" it's my money and it's no different to buying a Porsche or a modified Audi both can achieve similar levels of performance but I'd rather have a porsche.

 

These threads always end up going to shit because of PC and Mac fan boys arguing over little details that mean almost nothing. I've been building hackintosh computers since it first became a possibly when a leaked dev version of Tiger (10.4) made its way to the torrent sites. Hackintosh has come a very long way since those days and now can be run stock with no software modifications on very specific hardware.

Today's Macs are PC's, this is how they run windows natively with boot camp. They contain Intel x86 processors Intel chipsets, and Intel graphics cards (excluding the more powerful macs with upgraded cards). The only difference between a Mac and a Windows PC is that Apple has written custom EFI software to boot the OS X operating system. Here's a good picture describing hoe EFI works.



In order to run apple's custom EFI we need to have an EFI emulator. Keep in mind that EFI emulation is not anywhere close to as complex (or demanding) as a game console emulator. An EFI emulator does not actually emulate any hardware. Try to think of it as simply a software environment that translates EFI calls into BIOS calls (and vice versa). While i am sure there may be an small performance reduction by using EFI emulation, it cannot be noticed by the end user. The most popular EFI emulator to date is Chameleon.

Many newer motherboards support UEFI which is almost the same, you still need to use chameleon but the you will not need to tell chameleon how to translate to your hardware (no DSDT needed)

So essentially if you were to build a hackintosh that contained the exact hardware of another mac you could install a completely retail copy of OS X with no modifications made to it using Chameleon. This would perform exactly like a retail Mac.

This most likely isn't going to save you much money unless you're trying to build a mac pro. I suggest you read this for the latest hardware information.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/344-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-april-2013.html



At the end of the day, if your system breaks you have no AppleCare or any type of warranty other than what your hardware came with. You cant really call apple support because they will want your serial number. Apple could come up with a way to disable hackintosh computers and you will be SOL if they do. The point is that buying a real mac is easier and will work out of the box, the trade of is you will save some cash with a hackintosh and you can build a hackintosh that is more powerful than any mac apple currently offer's.

 

UEFI Mobo's are amazing things.

Apple disabling Hackintoshes is probably my biggest fear, it's nigh on impossible to get iMessage working unless you own an iDevice and have an active iTunes account with a valid card on file, some people believe that this is a step put in place to stop people from using Hackintoshes but then I'm not sure many people are going to care to much about iMessage.

I'm praying that 10.9 can also be used as well, I can't really think what Apple can do to totally cripple a system unless they pick a particular piece of hardware (GPU for example) and make it so OS X will only run with a particular variant or serial number.

 

Nothing stops vendor IDs from being changed. So Apple can do what they like, hackers will always find a way around it.

 

Clover takes care of the message bug, eventually we will have EFI emulation / hacked apple EFI's that run on non apple mobo's that are so near perfectit will be hard for apple to tell the difference unless they start adding specialty hardware.

I agree, apple already does this with the LSI fiber channel cards.

The big killer will be if apple ditches x86 for ARM. IMO it will kill a ton of their computer sales because boot-camp wont work unless Microsoft will expand Windows RT to include all of the C/C++/C# libraries (which is going to take a damn long time).

Apple may stick with x86, ARM is just a rumor. Who know what will happen now that MIPS has put itself back into the game. Only time will tell. OS XI will be the game changer if i had to guess.

 

Precisely, I must admit half the fun of having a Hackintosh for me was just getting (and keeping) the darned thing working.
Those days are behind me now though. Sadly I no longer have the time to tinker and will probably just end up running this MBA into the ground.

But a MacBook six years ago? Of course you could have! I mean sure you'd be limited to a PATA drive in the OptiBay slot and 2GB maybe 3GB of RAM... but it could have worked!
Whether or not 2GB of RAM is enough to visit any website with Flash is another question altogether... :congratulatory:

 

The Santa Rosa chip set in the late 2007 MacBooks supports 4GB officially, and 6GB unofficially. With 6GB, there's a slight speed trade-off, as not having matched memory pairs slightly affects performance (i.e. memory not in not dual channel mode any more.) The model before was the one that only supported 3GB of RAM (2x 2GB, unable to address 1GB of the installed RAM.) The late 2007 was November, so it's on the cusp of 6 years old.

 

Mac OS loves ram, it's not really usable with 2gb of ram. Maybe older versions would be fine but i wouldn't use any less than 4gb with mountain lion.

 

My GF's 2009 iMac quite happily works with 2GB of Ram on Mountain Lion (I updated for her when we first met as she'd been on 10.5.8 since the day she bought it). Granted it's not used for anything but pages, web browsing and iTunes but it copes quite well.