I loved OS X on my MacBook but I wanted more power and a larger screen, and I couldn't afford a Mac Pro.

Compared to both Windows and Linux, I preferred OS X's behavior in:

- the systemwide emacs keybindings in every textbox

- the consistent keyboard shortcuts (Cmd+C was always Copy, Ctrl+C was always Interrupt)

- the dedicated keyboard key (Option) for typing non-ASCII characters

- the general higher quality of apps that were available (Transmit was a better FTP client, TotalTerminal a better terminal, Preview a better PDF viewer, iBooks a better ebook reader, MplayerX a better video player, iTunes a better music player, Adium a better chat app, Transmission a better torrent app, Parallels a better VM, than anything for Windows or Linux)

- the consistent look-and-feel of apps

- the centralized notification system, Growl (before any OS had built-in notification support, the third-party Growl library was the de-facto standard on Mac, at a time when in other OSes, every app used their own notifications that constantly got in each other's way)

- QuickLook

Compared to Windows, I liked:

- the presence of a bash terminal underlying everything

- multiple desktops (Windows has this now, but didn't back then)

- Exposé (the thing that showed all open windows so you could click the one you wanted to easily switch to it)

Compared to Linux, I liked:

- Homebrew, a package manager which actually installed up-to-date packages instead of years-old packages (this was before Linuxbrew)

- official support for various paid apps like Photoshop and MS Word

- the ability to do many important things in a GUI (and therefore, the ability to do new things without needing to Google them)

Aside from the complications updates posed, I ran into no major problems with the hackintosh setup, other than I think the microphone didn't work? Everything else worked fine. I had overall much fewer problems than I have with Linux.

When I updated to OS X 10.7 Lion on my Hackintosh, I got a weird issue where the hard drive would wipe itself every few days – like, I would turn on the computer, and it would tell me the hard drive was blank and had no operating system on it, and I had to reinstall everything all over again.

(To be clear, this was the first issue of any kind my Hackintosh had ever gotten.)

At that point, my business had gotten successful, so I could afford to buy a 2013 Mac Pro and stop worrying about what went wrong.

So I bought the Mac Pro... and its SSD still wiped itself after a few days. Turns out, the problem was in Lion's exFAT driver. I'd partitioned it into HFS+ for Mac, NTFS for Windows, and a shared exFAT partition, like on my Hackintosh, and Lion just couldn't handle that.

I gave up on having an exFAT partition after that, but kept the Mac Pro because it was so nice (it was also much quieter and smaller, which let me put it in my backpack for hackathons).

If you're a developer, OS X is great.

Windows is a second class citizen if you aren't using Visual Studio.

Linux is great - it's basically your deployment environment - but you often have to mess around with it a bit.

OS X is 90-95% of the benefit of Linux, but it just works™. If you want to get work done, that's a pretty good feature.

The trouble is that, if you want to run a desktop, there are basically no good options. Mac Mini is very limited, same with the iMac. The Mac Pro is not limited, but it supports such enormous expansion that the base config is extremely expensive, while not being very performant.

This doesn't make sense. One definitely, in general terms, has to mess around more with Hackintosh than with a Linux installation, as the hardware compatibility is much higher with the latter than the former.

I did use a Hackintosh, for some time. I still need Mac occasionally, but nowadays I just run it in a VM.

I just upgraded my hackintosh from El Capitan to Catalina. It wasn't all fun, but wasn't too bad either. I'll probably get another couple of years trouble free with this OS, so it was worth it. After that I'll switch to Linux or Windows for my main system, though.

I can see how someone in a particular field, such as video editing, might prefer certain macOS apps. For general software development, though, a Linux machine feels like a much safer bet.

As someone who lived with an Ubuntu installation for 5 years up until 10.10 and then with Arch for arount 4 years - you statement about linux being an easy thing to handle is correct as long as you are fine with a distro like ubuntu and don't want to change much.

As soon as you embrace something more hacky or at least more bleeding edge - you are in the world full of unexpected surprises. Any major update can cause you hours of problems because distro devs decided to switch from somethingX to somethingY and you had to prepare your installation before updating but alas, you rarely read the fron page of https://www.archlinux.org and now you have to rollback and do everything right.

Not a too common scenario but not an uncommon one too.

Not to metion that for the most part linux remains a second-class citizen to software devs, so you won't see much of a general purpose software of the same quality macOS has to offer. Which is a problem if you are going to use the machine for something other then software development.

With a hackintosh, as long as you’re using supported chipsets, cards, etc the larger overall configuration of your machine doesn’t really matter much — it’ll just work. Point in case, macOS handles the aforementioned dual monitor dual GPU setup without so much as a hiccup both on AMD (and if you drop back to High Sierra) Nvidia. It’s paradoxical, but hackintoshed macOS is often better at smoothing over differences between machines than Linux is.

I certainly wouldn't do it again!

Not all Android phones are like that -- what are you buying which doesn't get any OS updates?

For native macs that’s probably the case, but I spent so much time just getting basic features of my hackintosh to work. If I wanted to change audio source from headphones to HDMI I needed to add/remove kexts and restart!

Also: could you write which models of components you bought:

a. 580 gfx card ? /nitro? pulse? others :)/

b. in terms of 5700 youre planning to buy do you have exact model?

c. which exact memory (size of one) and 3600 was base or overclocked

The only reason I bust out OSX is for iOS development.

Also while powershell is great, I find it just too wordy. Many commands that are 4 characters in unix systems are multiple words, with hyphens etc.

Spite is another one. Or fun. It's a neat thing to do. Hacking-wise.

You might want the high performance hardware without the premium price.

I've considered it but will probably go Linux for my next desktop work machine.

Apple is a company. Companies do not have feelings; they have interests. Who are you (financially) hurting by running Hackintosh?

This is a bad reason to spend any of your life on something.

My somewhat humorous take back in the day - the terms said the OS must only run on Apple labeled hardware. So I labelled the hardware with a couple of Apple stickers. That should do it, right?! :-D

(If I recall correctly the stickers even came with the Snow Leopard DVD...)

Because for a variety of reasons they don't want to pay for a "real" Mac I'd assume.

Personally I'd not consider it as the value I get from a Mac is that I don't have to worry about updates, hardware, drivers and spending hours reading up on Hackintosh forums what's safe to do.

Performance-wise a MacBook Pro is and has been a great machine and not incredibly expensive, plus you get the portability aspect. For the "semi-professional" market that a Hackintosh is appealing to, most folks would be better off with a MacBook Pro and a Thunderbolt dock. You also miss out on a number of core features of the OS because the hardware that supports them doesn't exist.

Combined with the headache of keeping the machine current, it's not really a good tradeoff for a couple hundred bucks. You'd be better off buying a used MacBook Pro.

* Native bash terminal.

* Just works and the defaults are fine.

* homebrew package manager is quite nice.

* iPhone integration is pretty awesome (file air drops, calls, messages all available from macOS)

Best example is finder: windows explorer, I could basically navigate by keyboard alone. Finder pretty much requires the mouse.

Updating an audio rig, in my experience, is done only when absolutely necessary. So, I don't bother (still on 10.12.6).

Anyone doing this should support any of OEMs selling the BSD or Linux based hardware instead, like System76, Tuxedo, Dell, Asus.

Either one buys into the full Apple experience, or not.

Speaking from experience here -- if the price of a Mac is your barrier, forego the Hackintosh and buy a used Mac.

There is no Mac that supports my needs, used or new.

I'm genuinely curious -- what needs do you have that a used Mac would not support?

That being the case, better contribute to BSD and Linux OEMs.

Oh, for the "Apple experience"? Please.

The last two Apple experiences I had involved them wanting to charge me $900 to repair a charging circuit in an otherwise perfectly functioning MacBook, and another where they repeatedly denied me warranty service on a maxed out MBP which could repeatedly be made to crash, oftentimes multiple times a day (due to what Apple begrudgingly admitted nearly six months later was in fact a design issue).

To be clear I'm perfectly happy with Apple hardware and software and realize that my experiences are outliers. But "because I'm a cheapskate" isn't really a valid argument here.

That's backwards. Rich megacorps are the ones that should be pressured to change their behavior, not individuals.

Plus the full Apple experience is just about getting your money, it's not actually better than the full Linux experience or the full Windows experience.

But it is?

- Can I view my iMessage texts / make and receive calls using FaceTime on Windows/Linux? No? There you go, a feature I'd miss on day 1.

- Can I run the Affinity suite on either of those? Nope. For that matter, you still can't use Adobe products on Linux, can you?

- Can I develop for iOS/macOS? Nope.

- Is there a consistent UI for native applications on Linux yet? Nope. For that matter, is Gnome still the bare bones GUI of choice for the most widely used distros?

- Do either of those two platforms integrate nicely with the rest of my Apple devices? Nope.

- Is the X Window System still a thing? How about Wayland, is it ready yet for a retina grade multi monitor setup? Am I able to take screenshots now, for the love of all that's holy? Let me guess, probably not.

- Is Windows still the insane mess that contains Win95/2000/XP UI elements?

- Is Windows still the telemetry infested product it was a few years ago?

I could go on, and on, and on, frankly, but what would the point be? I have slightly different preferences than you have, and that's totally fine. I'm sure you get by well with Linux/Windows, just as I get by well with using macOS.

Of course Apple created macOS and Mac hardware to make money! I assume correctly that Microsoft didn't create Windows to lose money on it, did they?

What do you have in defence of the other half other than empty platitudes about "buy in", which is of course somehow different from the "lock in" Apple sheep do?

For me I like the hardware of Mac but hate the software (macOs) as it assumes the users is a dummy, it is particularly hostile to power users.

Heck, even my wife (which is not a power user) thinks that macOs on her MacBook Air is too limiting and tries to hide "too complicated stuff" from the user, and considers getting a Windows laptop after using Air for 6 years. The only benefit of macOs from her perspective is integration with iPhone and airpods.

Similar feelings from my coworkers who choose MacBook over Lenovo at my work (particuarly using fullscreen on 2 monitors is a PITA).

Some of the issues that my wife had (ordinary user):

- directory structure in Finder is strange, you don't know where your Documents is located

- photos after transferring from iPhone using the default app land in some strange format, should would expect to have jpeg/heic/mov files, but what she sees is a binary DB file (how to send photos to relatives from e.g. gmail, when you can't select it from the filesystem?)

- closing apps - when I click on the red button I expect the app to close, not just one of the windows, so the only way on macOs is to go to app menu and click Exit (too many clicks and needs scanning for a text), while I think most would prefer the other way around (my wife does)

And from myself: Why the default unix tools are in ancient versions? One has to install brew to do anything non-trivial in Terminal.