I saw a dude with a ryzen hackintosh rig, it performed incredibly but... even among enthusiasts he mentioned 'This was not for the faint hearted. I don't recommend you actually do this- even though I got it to work with minimal quirks it took probably more than a month of my life".

Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.

I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.

If you stick to "standard" parts there is little to no risk. There is so much information out there on which parts are compatible and which aren't.

The hardest obstacle for me was sourcing some parts because they weren't available here in Vietnam. I had to fly to Singapore for most of it. Ironically, it was cheaper to do that for the parts I could get here, so everything worked out in the end.

> Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.

> I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.

The lock-in to Apple products should also be considered as a large blocker.

> I've got a beast of a rig that has been flawless.

Can you guarantee that ? Who is responsible if an upgrade doesn't work or bricks your machine ?

Of course not. macOS has no DRM, but that could change at some point.

Information on changes for updates come quickly, and it's pretty standard practice to clone your boot drive before major updates.

In a worst-case scenario, you just stay on a version of macOS until it makes more sense to use that same hardware for a Windows/whatever OS change.

Not true IIRC. Several OS components are decrypted at runtime by “Don’t Steal Mac OS X.kext”. Not very effective, of course.

I'm aware of DSMOS, but as yet it doesn't do any verification of anything before decryption. Also, the actual key used is simply "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc". To virtualize OSX/macOS on hypervisors that don't natively support Mac, you have to pass this in yourself.

That's why you wait a few days. The hackintosh community is very active.

Also, at this point, the things that would brick you in the past are no longer applicable with a modern hackintosh.

> That's why you wait a few days. The hackintosh community is very active.

That may be fine for a home user, but if my livelyhood was dependent on this machine I'd rather buy something less hacked together and with actual support options.

This is not about wether or not it will actually work, it's about liability.

I depend on this machine to pay my rent, keep the lights on, keep insulin in my kid, keep us all fed.

If this machine bites the dust, I swap out the part or I restore from Time Machine. At least with this machine, I have the option of swapping out the part.

It's not some mystical black box. These are standard PC parts that are supported by macOS. I think I only use two kexts that aren't shipped with macOS to get to 100%.

If the hardware fails you can replace it, but what if Apple improves the security of the OS and prevents the next OS update from working on a hackintosh ? What if a bug in one of the hacked parts wipes your entire drive ?

People who depend on Macs for a living also have to stay behind on OS updates for reasons of staying compatible with production software. For instance, my friend works at a publishing house and they are all running Mavericks.

Is that really a big deal? You barely notice any benefits between 2-4 versions on Mac. What's Mavericks? 10.10? And High Sierra is 10.14? I have a computer that is 10.9 or 10.10 and a 10.13 computer. I can barely tell the difference between them.

My 10.13 computer is my main one and was on 10.11 before when I upgraded only because I did a clean install right before the newest release. Don't remember noticing any changes.

I'm a huge Apple user but don't keep up with OS changes since they are so minor. This really isn't an issue. And if it's for business then the apps that are trendy and only for newer versions won't matter either.