The Hackintosh Thread

[Jack Neill]

I can't wait to see Apple trying to convince professionals (video editors, music producers, architects and others) to use ARM Macs. It will be hilarious. )
But we all know Apple, it can afford to waist billions in marketing to promote anything. After all, the first iPhone was a 2G phone. ;-)

 

[Azrael9]

Let me ask you this. Would you want to spend 40,000 on one computer today, with the knowledge that Apple was about to change platforms?

I wouldn't. £40k is half a terrace house here in the UK. That could go a loooooooooooooong way to paying off someone's mortgage.

Announcing a new direction whilst selling the old direction is 'Osborne' devaluation. But I will pony up for the 'new' iMac when it hits as I'm currently Mac-less. And it will last me well past the footnote of the next Mac ARM transition. (And I'll probably be offered a few hundred by Apple, if I'm lucky, towards the cost of an iMac ARM computer...) Even 2nd hand eBaby, it's value will have tanked.

Apple had a decent tower market product from £1500-£2.5k historically. These are not 'cheap' price points, either.

The recent move to sell a £6k tower with low end specs. It feels like it was done to prove a point. A simple betrayal of that creative market. Or what's left of it after Apple abandoned it of Mac Towers for 6 years.

It's iMac. PC Tower. Or Hackintosh.

Azrael.
[automerge]1592149393[/automerge]
I'll be getting the new iMac, sure. But I'll be doing a PC TOWER/Hack' build as well. I just wanted to see the shake out of the RDNA2 launch. (Would like to put that in the Hack'....)

Azrael.
[automerge]1592149730[/automerge]

Apple's marketing is a bit hard to take these days without the messiah like Steve Jobs behind it.

I wouldn't bet against Apple out performing Intel. Intel's single core performance seems like a sitting duck to me. As for the multicore. Intel were very slow to offer more than 4 core with AMD upending them on cores right up to 8, 12 and 16...and on and on up to 64. :O

I doubt we'll see a Mac ARM product that's going to up end the Mac Pro in 2021. The 'low hanging' fruit is probably the laptop market where Apple sells the most Macs. Eg. Macbook Air with Mac ARM is a ripe opportunity to add an A14x chip in that. I wouldn't bet againt that product.

As for what comes in 2022 and an A16X? We'll have to wait and see. I wouldn't bet on that being a slouch.

But in the here and now? I don't like what Apple themselves have done to their own tower market. It's not a product for the 'rest of us.'

So I'm glad people can get a decent Intel or AMD based product in a tower at a rational price. It's a shame I, we or they have to do that...but that's what you get when your primary supplier of Macs thinks that an iPad is the only computer you'll ever need.

Geeze. Apple. Revive the Power Computing brand and let it sell us towers...with rainbow leds.

Azrael.

 

[Jack Neill]

I wouldn't. £40k is half a terrace house here in the UK. That could go a loooooooooooooong way to paying off someone's mortgage.

Announcing a new direction whilst selling the old direction is 'Osborne' devaluation. But I will pony up for the 'new' iMac when it hits as I'm currently Mac-less. And it will last me well past the footnote of the next Mac ARM transition. (And I'll probably be offered a few hundred by Apple, if I'm lucky, towards the cost of an iMac ARM computer...) Even 2nd hand eBaby, it's value will have tanked.

Apple had a decent tower market product from £1500-£2.5k historically. These are not 'cheap' price points, either.

The recent move to sell a £6k tower with low end specs. It feels like it was done to prove a point. A simple betrayal of that creative market. Or what's left of it after Apple abandoned it of Mac Towers for 6 years.

It's iMac. PC Tower. Or Hackintosh.

Azrael.
[automerge]1592149393[/automerge]
I'll be getting the new iMac, sure. But I'll be doing a PC TOWER/Hack' build as well. I just wanted to see the shake out of the RDNA2 launch. (Would like to put that in the Hack'....)

Azrael.
[automerge]1592149730[/automerge]


Apple's marketing is a bit hard to take these days without the messiah like Steve Jobs behind it.

I wouldn't bet against Apple out performing Intel. Intel's single core performance seems like a sitting duck to me. As for the multicore. Intel were very slow to offer more than 4 core with AMD upending them on cores right up to 8, 12 and 16...and on and on up to 64. :O

I doubt we'll see a Mac ARM product that's going to up end the Mac Pro in 2021. The 'low hanging' fruit is probably the laptop market where Apple sells the most Macs. Eg. Macbook Air with Mac ARM is a ripe opportunity to add an A14x chip in that. I wouldn't bet againt that product.

As for what comes in 2022 and an A16X? We'll have to wait and see. I wouldn't bet on that being a slouch.

But in the here and now? I don't like what Apple themselves have done to their own tower market. It's not a product for the 'rest of us.'

So I'm glad people can get a decent Intel or AMD based product in a tower at a rational price. It's a shame I, we or they have to do that...but that's what you get when your primary supplier of Macs thinks that an iPad is the only computer you'll ever need.

Geeze. Apple. Revive the Power Computing brand and let it sell us towers...with rainbow leds.

Azrael.

100% agree with everything you said. I Hackintosh because of their desktop offerings. I also own several real Macs too. I just got a 20 i5 Air and its excellent. If it was running on a A14x or something like it and could only run Apple store apps, I still would have bought it for my use case.

 

[bogdanw]

I'm not sure what your point is with that video. I still enjoy my Power Macs and I hackintosh for the freedom of choosing my own components and upgrading my hardware as I please. Next year I plan to build an Intel Gen 10 one and, for me, it should be good for at least 5 years.

 

[robbieduncan]

Will ARM have 28 cores and 56 threads and 64 PCIe lanes?

If Apple want it to. The Ampere Altra is an 80 core ARM CPU with 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes. It's aimed at servers (but so are Xeons really) but shows what Apple could do if they wanted to

 

[bogdanw]

If Apple want it to. The Ampere Altra is an 80 core ARM CPU with 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes. It's aimed at servers (but so are Xeons really) but shows what Apple could do if they wanted to

Look at the specs - Power Supply Dual 2000 W
Apple's Mac Pro has - Power Supply 1.4 kilowatts (1400 W) https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
And it's not only about the CPU. What ARM GPU can match AMD Radeon Pro 580X? And that's the cheapest GPU for Mac Pro.

 

[joevt]

And it's not only about the CPU. What ARM GPU can match AMD Radeon Pro 580X? And that's the cheapest GPU for Mac Pro.

If ARM has PCIe then it can use AMD Radeon Pro 580X or any GPU the Apple makes a driver for.

 

[bogdanw]

If ARM has PCIe then it can use AMD Radeon Pro 580X or any GPU the Apple makes a driver for.

The whole point of using ARM now is to have everything in one relatively cheap, efficient chip (CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and other cores Apple might design). ARM CPU + AMD GPU makes no sense.
ARM has lost the desktop war once, it will lose it again without a sound strategy.
Getting back to topic, I think we will enjoy a few more years of building these weird, wonderful machines. Or at least I will. After that, I’ll build a Linux PC with macOS running in a virtual machine so I can enjoy the latest poop animated emojis presented by Craig Federighi

 

[robbieduncan]

Look at the specs - Power Supply Dual 2000 W
Apple's Mac Pro has - Power Supply 1.4 kilowatts (1400 W) https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/

Hardly Apples with Apples (sorry). You are comparing the redundant PSU of a two-socket rack server that supports 24 drives off that power supply. What this really tells us is the CPU is at least not that much worse than the Xeon: take off 1 CPU and most of the drives and you are down at 1400W just like the Mac Pro. The server will happily run on 1 PSU...

 

[StellarVixen]

Running this setup since the end of previous year:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z170-HD3(DDR3)

CPU: Intel i7-7700K

RAM: 16GB of 1660MHz memory (will upgrade if needed, have two more slots free. This motherboard supports the speeds up to 3000 MHz, so if I desire faster RAM, I can add that, too.)

GPU: Radeon Vega64 8GB HBM2

(Edit) 1.5 TB of storage (512GB NVMe SSD + 1TB HDD)

600W PSU


I am sticking with this until Apple decides to offer us normal desktop tower (which will probably never happen), or until Mac OS becomes incompatible with x86.

 

[pshufd]

Running this setup since the end of previous year:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z170-HD3(DDR3)

CPU: Intel i7-7700K

RAM: 16GB of 1660MHz memory (will upgrade if needed, have two more slots free. This motherboard supports the speeds up to 3000 MHz, so if I desire faster RAM, I can add that, too.)

GPU: Radeon Vega64 8GB HBM2

(Edit) 1.5 TB of storage (512GB NVMe SSD + 1TB HDD)

600W PSU


I am sticking with this until Apple decides to offer us normal desktop tower (which will probably never happen), or until Mac OS becomes incompatible with x86.

I keep thinking of turning my PowerMac G5 into a Hackintosh but the amount of work is daunting.

 

[StellarVixen]

I keep thinking of turning my PowerMac G5 into a Hackintosh but the amount of work is daunting.

That’s too bad.

Well, I guess if you’re still determined to build one, you can get some nice case. There are a lot of nice models out there, maybe you can find one you like.

 

[pshufd]

That’s too bad.

Well, I guess if you’re still determined to build one, you can get some nice case. There are a lot of nice models out there, maybe you can find one you like.

I tried installing Hackintosh on an old computer and I guess it was too old. My options are buy a 2012 12-core Mac Pro, do a complete build with a 10th gen i9, buy an XPS Studio (old ones were better with a full tower) or buy a new Mac Pro. You can piece together a fairly powerful system from a bunch of older systems. Cooperative computing as it were.

Update: I tried again and was successful in getting to bootable but then ran Multibeast and it's now dead. I don't know how much time I want to spend debugging this. It's fortunate that this truly is a spare system - I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with the system. It actually performs quite well - but I have five systems that perform decently, 3 macOS and 2 Windows 10. That's besides older equipment that's just barely usable.

 

[pshufd]

I got macOS running on one of my 2008 Delll Studio XPS 435mt systems. It was pretty hairy getting it working and it only works via USB 2.0 external drive but I'm learning a lot about macOS in the process of trying to get drivers to work. This is like porting in the old days.

 

[bogdanw]

Tim Cook: “We plan to continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come. In fact, we have some new Intel-base Macs in the pipeline that we are really excited about”

https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6499

 

[redheeler]

Tim Cook: “We plan to continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come. In fact, we have some new Intel-base Macs in the pipeline that we are really excited about”

https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6499

Same was true with the new G5s released after the Intel announcement happened. Those G5s lasted about 4 years before getting shuttered from Snow Leopard.

 

[nathansz]

Same was true with the new G5s released after the Intel announcement happened. Those G5s lasted about 4 years before getting shuttered from Snow Leopard.

i just started building my first hackintosh well aware that this was coming

i’m guessing at least 4-5 years from the last intel mac being sold to end of intel support

that gives me a good 6 or 7 years on this build

 

[StellarVixen]

Tim Cook: “We plan to continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come. In fact, we have some new Intel-base Macs in the pipeline that we are really excited about”

https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6499

I kinda like the Big Sur. And I am glad we are gonna see Mac OS on Intel for some more.

Nice things do happen.

 

[nathansz]

thinking about it a bit more. perhaps the cutoff for hackintosh won’t be support for
intel but support for machines without t2 chips

 

[robbieduncan]

thinking about it a bit more. perhaps the cutoff for hackintosh won’t be support for
intel but support for machines without t2 chips

Fortunately the non-Pro iMac still doesn’t have a T2. I think they will have to support it for 3 years from last day of it being for sale as a new (not refurbished) machine

 

[StellarVixen]

Hackintosh community is having problems with 11.0 right now. Clover doesn’t work. At least OpenCore shows some promise.

 

[robbieduncan]

Hackintosh community is having problems with 11.0 right now. Clover doesn’t work. At least OpenCore shows some promise.

This is unfortunate for sure. I hope the resolve this as I'm sure it's easier to upgrade Clover than covert Clover to OpenCore

 

[Yebot]

My i7-8700k hack is less than 1.5 years old and I cant see replacing it for another two years. If Apple takes 2 years to transition, then they’ll still be selling Intel machines into mid-2022. At which point building a new hack could still be compelling if you assume mac OS will be Intel-supported for a few years after that. Thought?

(I haven’t posted on this forum in years. Nice to be back. )

 

[robbieduncan]

My i7-8700k hack is less than 1.5 years old and I cant see replacing it for another two years. If Apple takes 2 years to transition, then they’ll still be selling Intel machines into mid-2022. At which point building a new hack could still be compelling if you assume mac OS will be Intel-supported for a few years after that. Thought?

(I haven’t posted on this forum in years. Nice to be back. )

It all depends on your own personal expected lifespan of your machines and your personal need/desire to be on the latest OS or even an OS with security patches. I'd not build a new Intel Hackintosh in 2022. But I expect a machine to last 5-7 years

 

[StellarVixen]

Just a heads up to people who might be upgrading from Mojave to Catalina now.


If your AMD GPU worked fine on Mojave without WEG, install it (preferably to Clover/kexts/other, if you are using Clover).

Otherwise, some of you might end up with black screen. Happened to me. Didn't need Whatevergreen for Mojave, but it was necessary for Catalina.