A good friend of mine that really wanted a modern OS X workstation went the Hackintosh route. He built a machine that's not only much more powerful than the current line of Mac Pros but also considerably cheaper.

I can understand why Apple is neglecting this segment for financial reasons but I do think they're slowly losing their exclusive cachet with the creative set.

Edit: misspelling.

Check out this guide, it's got a full walkthrough for purchasing the parts for and assembling Hackintoshes of various calibers: http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2012/08/building-customac-buy...

I assumed that building and maintaining a hackintosh machine would be a pretty major pain in the ass but my friend says it was no more difficult than building a bespoke Windows machine as long as you did a tiny bit of up-front research on parts.

It's no different from building any other PC, except for the restrictions on parts, like you said.

Nowadays you don't even have to worry much about that - there are high quality, in-depth guides that will walk you through the entire process step-by-step, if you need them: http://lifehacker.com/5841604/the-always-up+to+date-guide-to...

I've been maintaining my Intel i7 based Hackintosh (currently running Lion) since May of 2009, and the only time I've really had any asspain was doing major OS upgrades. I went from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and then to Lion, and each time I basically spent the better part of a weekend on the upgrade.

While this box has held up fine for my OSX work, it's getting long in the tooth for Windows gaming. Now that Mountain Lion supports high end graphics cards like the nVidia GTX680 out of the box, I'm looking to build out a new Ivy Bridge based Hackintosh that I'll also boot into Windows for some high-end gaming.

Sadly, with the release of Lion, I had to retire my Hackintosh. DarkWake meant that my PC would no longer sleep and wake reliably, with random kernel panics to boot. I found the Hackintosh community to be full of wankers who would counsel people based on no real understanding of kernel internals. Perhaps it has improved since then.

Personally I would never bother with this because I'm just too damn lazy. I'm willing to suffer some installation hassles over Linux for moral reasons but if I want a Mac I'll just buy a Mac.

But maybe I'm lucky because any of the current iMacs are more than powerful enough for my needs.

Do you have a link to some information about this? Is it a new box, or changes inside the Mac Pro box? In French we say "cachet" for something exclusive, not "caché" which means hidden.

Thanks for the correction.

His machine is entirely built from standard PC parts from Newegg or some similar vendor. He said he did a little bit of upfront research on components to make sure they were supported but that everything in the box is pretty standard.

They stopped caring about the Mac Pro at least 5 years ago. I'm occasionally amazed it is still offered for sale.