Mac users' opinion on Hackintoshs

[ej25power]

I've been a Mac user for over a decade and I just finished my Hackintosh last week.

 

My most recent Mac was terribly outdated (Dual 450MHz G4), even though it was upgraded to the max. I stumbled across OSx86 pretty randomly and I decided to build my own Mac

 

I LOVE the idea of Hackintoshes. It would have cost me well over twice as much to get the base Mac Pro comparably equipped.

 

The expandability of my PC components isn't a bad deal either

[braveskunk]

hi, you all say that mac are overpriced, but look from this way, evey mac is specially designed. only one company responsible for design, intel has to do special motherboards for mac, which for that apple has to pay extra, these mobos arent the same as in ordinary pc. then have ecc full buffered memory which is much more higher priced than you have in your pc(and me as well). the thing is when u buy mac, you'll get really well built pc, maybe not as fast as i, or u would build for the same price, but its a compromise between stability and speed. and the thing is, when u buy a mac and something goes wrong, u just go to apple store or call them. thats what u pay for, support, dedicated hardware, look'n'feel and speed and all the things, that makes mac best(if they're not, stick with windws/linux)

i cannot afford a real mac now, just don't have that much money, so i built hack, but still, someday i will buy it, cos i just like the os works, and i personally think it is 100 years before windows in terms of gui, stability, security and speed, but once again, thats my private opinion, u may agree with that or not:)

[ilikelmo25]

Sort of offtopic but,

personally if u can't afford it u shouldn't try to "build" a half assed one u know

But I thought hackintoshes used their whole asses.

 

But back on topic, I don't think Macs are overpriced. My school paid around $2000 for each new computer that they bought. If they all just bought 20" iMacs to replace them, they could have saved at least $300 on each computer saving around $3600 on the year 6 section alone.

 

Besides, the way I see it, you shouldn't just look at the price and think, "Wow that's expensive. I don't want it". You should see how much you get in a Mac for each dollar you spend and when you look at it that way, you may see differently. Especially since Apple bundles all the drivers and software with their Macs.

[39thRonin]

Wow.. I got into a heated debate with my buddy last night.

 

It all started out with me complementing how beautiful the new mac keyboard is from this picture of someone using it with his "PC".

 

to his statement of hackintoshes are "ghetto"..

Wow! Some "Buddy". Here's the deal... I have been a Mac users for some time - though my day job is beating Unix boxes into submission. I got interested in Hackintoshes in the beginning - these were DeadMoo days - and played around converting an old Dell 8400 I had lying around gathering dust. As you can see by my sig - it's still going strong. Not a bad box at all. I NEVER have a crash (it used to crash all the time with XP), it's plenty fast enough to do almost anything (don't try converting video though!), and it isn't gathering dust anymore.

 

My main machine is a full-blown Mac Pro. It's a great box - the best computer I've ever owned. It cost a great deal of money - even though I did the 3rd party memory and disk thing. I expect to have this box for many years before it's too far gone to do any good. Having said that, I don't think I'll ever get rid of my Hackintosh either. It is a technical challenge to setup and maintain, but it is FUN to run MacOS on a Dell!

[CTRL+ALT+DEL]

i've been a mac user for 5 years. i'm not completely obsessed nor do i think mac is the golden way. but i will never use a pc again unless i have no choice. i completely support people using osx on pc's. i would build one myself but, i really need to spend less time tweaking my comp and more time using it. and i'm a heavy user who is ramping up to use all the components of fcs2, ls8, and cs3. right now i can't run everythng in fcs2. so i'm really more focused on getting really dependable hi end performance. but for you that aren't running your business on your computer i salute you. maybe when i can build a compatible top of the line hackintosh and it benches the same as a real mac without any hassle....

[knyte2]

I'm having a hard time with the mentality that I get from some of the mac "fanboys". Now I'm all fot the mac, great design, superior OS, bundled with good sw, etc. I really don't have much to disagree with, and in a business environment when the $ spent is an investment that can be recovered (at least mostly) I would say "figure out how to afford it"

 

The Hac community seems to be fit in somewhere similar to the car market. Sure the ferrari is great, does everything it was designed to do, and better than most / all its competitors. So then why would you buy anything else? Well, there's the guy that can't afford one, no matter what, so he buys the neon, and puts all kinds of performance parts on it to make it the best he can afford, and fun to drive. There's also the guy that thinks "why should I put out that much money when I can build one that performs similarly" that will do his homework, make a purchase of something else, update, upgrade, tweak, and tinker until he's either satisfied, or not. Generally when he's not, he will make the decision to buy the ferrari.

 

End judgement is similar, the ferrari owners will spend all their time telling you how great their car is, and how sub par your solution is.

 

Basically, if you decided to go mac - good for you, you bought a really great machine. If you decided to build a hack - Good for you, you saved some coin, and have taken on a worthwhile project, good luck. If you decided to stay with a windows box - the world has plent of room for people who drive minivans.

[exman]

I built a Hackintosh, mainly for the fun of it. To see what the fuss is all about. Then I bought a Macbook Pro.

I am a power user so I can never buy a Mac desktop, I hate the idea of being locked into non-upgradable hardware. I upgrade my PC regularly to the latest tech when it's available, not because I have to, but because I am a geek and I gotta have the latest

 

Thanx to the people on the "scene" who makes Hackintosh possible.

[dimbulb]

I am a mac fanboy.

 

One of the reasons I liked the Apple platform was it let me run all the commercial apps I needed, and it gave me a worthwhile shell locally when I needed that, which I do often. When Apple was still on the PowerPC platform, the hardware was bulletproof and quality. Now that it's on Intel, Apple appears to be trying how to recreate that quality with off-the-shelf hardware-- with mixed results.

 

If we were still on PPC, this wouldn't even be a question-- the extra price would be worth it to run an operating system that's actually worth my time. But my Intel hardware just isn't taking the beating that my PPC could. So I'm transitioning to hackintosh for my own use.

 

That said, I'll continue to buy apple hardware that isn't their PCs. I own an iPhone, I have the keyboards and the cinema display, and they are consistently the best hardware in it's class that I have interacted with. Apple may recapture that with it's systems eventually, but for now, I can do better.

[ghettro]

I think the hackintosh scene is great, I am still having to yet run OSX86 successfully on my hardware (too tight to shell out for a new mobo/CPU) but will persist. I also run Ubuntu and have a macbook.

 

I think what a lot of people fail to see the computer other than the mobo/cpu/ram etc. There have been comparisons of generic PC desktops with mac minis and imacs. Seriously try to design something as small, sexy, quiet and power efficient with generic parts and get OSX86 to run on it and then price it. Its probably going to be more expensive, same with the imac. A large part of the appeal of apple's hardware is the form factor and industrial design which isnt generic. Sure the internals may be from large multinational suppliers but they way it's put together, designed and packaged is completely unique. Same goes for the laptops, there is much more attention to detail, like how the bottom half of the macbook doesnt lift up with you open the lid (because the hinge damping is just right). This {censored} me on pretty much every other non-apple laptop i've encountered because you either need two hands to open it, or the bottom half will lift up and then hit the ground with a thud (potentially causing the hdd damage).

 

Even the mac pro, it's actually very cheap for that level of hardware. Sure a Q6660 can probably beat it in some cases, but it's not the fault of the mac pro, its the fault of xeon hardware, A Q6660 could beat a Xeon system from Dell, HP or whatever, simply because xeon hardware is farkin expensive and only really cost efficient for very specific things like multithreaded video encoding etc. where it hauls arse. If only apple would release hardware on the consumer C2D level. bah

 

Anyway. For a mid-level desktop the hackintosh is hard to beat as it fills in the niche for the enthusiast tinkerer type. Although it's quite a small niche. I would love to get leopard running on my hardware, but it's time consuming to research hardware compatibility and spend time troubleshotting if/when it goes wrong. It doesn't substitute real macs outside of the enthusiast scene, eg. I cannot see sane non-enthusiasts running a business on hackintoshes. It makes no sense in this scenario.

[DarkPrince86]

Personally i have no problem with people using hackintosh's, i started off on that and it's what finally made me buy a nice shiny Mac.

 

If it wasnt for using a hacked version i would of never, ever buy a Mac, i wouldnt of known what the OS was like, or its features etc. There is no apple stores anywhere near me and no i know uses macs so i would of just stuck with windows.

 

I think mac users who complain about people using leopard etc on normal pcs should just shut up, surely getting people interested in mac osx through hackintosh or real macs is a good thing, it takes people away from the microsoft userbase and opens them up to a whole new world.

 

And i'm sure many people have bought macs because of being able to use hacked versions in the first place.

[GeekofComputers]

I use a MacBook Pro but I use the Computer main one as a Hack Pro

[Henrik C]

I started off with a MacBook I borrowed from my dad, and then I bought my own.

One day my father came home from the US with some new motherboards, after we looked a little at OSx86.

He bought an ECS 945GCT-M/1333 with an Intel Celeron 430, and 2GB RAM. We built the computer, and it was genious.

I was looking for a nice Mac with expanding options, low price and a decent processor.

The Mac Mini is too small, the iMac isn't what I'm looking for and the Mac Pro is way to expensive.

 

So for $500 bucks I got a decent machine with expanding options. Genious!

[Pirateo]

I can't afford a Mac right now, but once I can I'll be purchasing one. I semi-use OSx86 because my wireless doesnt work, but I want to get the feel of Leopard. So OSx86 is more of a "test drive" than a steal in my opinion.

[cremestar]

well, about a statement on the first page about "proper" mac users - first off, my friend, an apple fanboy, doesnt even know what a hackintosh is. One of HIS friends, a high-ranking person at apple (in charge of apps division), is neutral and doesnt care about the osx86 project.

[Ben30]

I started my experience with macs when I had a friend stay over while his house was being renovated. He brought his G5 and powerbook. So naturally, in curiosity, I wanted to see what mac was like, so set my machine (surprisingly enough, almost all the hardware was compatible) up as a hackintosh. A couple of months later I sold the PC, and bought a macbook.

 

Have since sold the macbook, and back on a hackintosh until I've saved enough pennies for a macbook pro

 

The macbook didnt have enough graphics grunt to play games in winXP under bootcamp. Did everything else I wanted it to, and boy did the battery last ages!

[ Suzie's Soliloquy]

It's hard to get the actual 'mac user's' opinion on a thread like this, since the vast majority of users on here are already heavily involved in the hackintosh scene... and thereby don't disapprove of it

[feckn_eejit]

I built a Hackintosh because I wasn't happy with the volume/thermals of the Mac Pro (there are 30 on our 350-user lan at work, and an Xserve, so I know the hardware...) and knew I could do better. I do have a 17" 1GHz PowerBook for which I bought a Leopard Family Pack, and could easily afford to buy a well-optioned Mac Pro and a maxed 17" MacBook Pro to replace the p'book but just can't see why when I don't need the power on the road, and the Hack does what I need at home, while running quieter and not roasting the internals...

 

I love the aesthetics of Apple hardware but can't deal with the compromise in reliability caused by running everything so hot... I am in it for OPENSTEP 11

[Mark Yoseph]

I used Hackintosh on my old notebook (Celeron M420) and it was quite fast.. Now, I've bought Macbook after i've got enough money to buy it, and i don't have any regret other than the keyboard (Macbook has fewer keys that i don't realize when i saw it before..?), but that's not a big problem. Thank you Hackintosh for introducing Mac OS X for me

[MikeyMike01]

I dunno about other people, but getting it to work was half the fun.

 

Provided, I did get it to work.

[zeke parabola]

I used Hackintosh on my old notebook (Celeron M420) and it was quite fast.. Now, I've bought Macbook after i've got enough money to buy it, and i don't have any regret other than the keyboard (Macbook has fewer keys that i don't realize when i saw it before..?), but that's not a big problem. Thank you Hackintosh for introducing Mac OS X for me

Kinda did the same, went from a XPS M1330 to a BlackBook, but now i miss my 9 cell battery and LED screen... other than that, I'm happy to have my macbook... and I have been lucky enough to not open my XPS's screen since the day I got my black book

[kiwi89]

mmmm, If I had the money Id buy a mac. One of those sexy 13" black mac books or what ever they are called. But personaly I think if you build a hack you need to take the look of it into consideration - build a computer that wouldn't look out of place in a mac store. Thats what I unintentialy did. But then I love computers that look very minimilist and professional.

[coolied]

A 500 doller pc is gonna have some pentium single core {censored} with 512 mb of ram.

Well, the last $500 PCs we ordered for work back in August 2007 contained Core2Duo e6400 2.13GHz CPUs and 2GB of DDR2-667 RAM; now the ones i've just ordered contain Core2Duo e6550 CPUs at 2.33GHz and 4GB of DDR2-800 RAM and were only $430; so i'm not so sure your argument holds any weight.

lol! Vice versa. OS X would be fine with 2GB of ram. Vista on the other hand... eek..

Vista runs just fine with 2GB of RAM, as a matter of fact right now it's sort of the "sweet spot".

[m16]

I love how you can cheaply build a mac that spanks a Mac Mini in performance...

[Konami®]

I don't own a mac because I don't have the money, but the only thing I am going to say is this, We (Hackintosh users) are "test drive" because we love OS X and we are in a strong position of switch and buy Apple computers. I personally after my experience with my Hackintosh I will definitely going to buy an Apple computer in the near future.

[zeamp]

I love how you can cheaply build a mac that spanks a Mac Mini in performance...

 

Amen. No matter what Hackintosh you end up putting together -- it'll always spank the Mini and save you a couple hundos.