The Hackintosh Reborn

I did run a Hackintosh back in 2015. I bought all the 100% compatible hardware, ran all the updates and firmwares from tonymacx86, etc. And even went through a couple painful upgrade cycles, until the M-chips came out....

Now, I just want a Arch-based custom dev machine, and in the era of vibe-coding self-indulgent vanity software, I can more than make up for the flows and tools I had on my mac that won't work on Linux, which isn't much.

Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0], they have more ports without funny dongles, and I get to use the winning combo of server and desktop OSes in market share, and industry APIs.

Yes there are more powerful Apple laptops available when money is no question, but I don't live in that world, nor am I getting into debt unless there is no way around it.

Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.

But... why?

Like, Windows is a pile of dung, Windows 11 follows the general consumer Windows trend of "decent, braindead, decent, braindead" that we saw ever since Windows 98 (decent), ME (braindead), XP (decent), Vista (braindead), 7 (decent), 8 (braindead), 10 (decent), 11 (goddamn fucking braindead). And this time unfortunately I do not see Microsoft ever backing down.

Mainstream Linux, hardware compatibility questions aside, is nowhere near macOS in terms of functionality and usability, and completely off the charts in terms of UI polish.

"Linux on mainstream desktops" will only be a thing when someone shows up and invests like half a billion euros into UI and UX designers into the most common pieces of software - and yeets GNOME in the dustbin.

I'm kidding of course. Really looking forward to the days of the liberated mac hardware though!

That is something asahi has vowed to never enable.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...

It might have worked out better if Apple had forbidden Linux on Apple Silicon instead of controlling a pet Linux project.

I much prefer ARM over x64 and Linux/BSD over the alternative but it's a wasteland of patches and technical debt out there.

> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.

https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_idea...

Maybe we can say that they’re still the best, but it’s not 2x better like 2020, it’s more like 10-20% better.

For example, Panther Lake beats M5 battery life in real laptops available on the market, GPU performance, and multicore performance.

Just look at Marques Brownlee’s review of the Framework 13 Pro. Or the review of the ThinkPad X9 15p from Just Josh Tech.

I see this mistake all the time where there’s an assumption that MacBooks are still far and away the best without looking at more up-to-date information and evaluating current competition.

I just got a new-to-me Android phone and told AI to use adb to debloat and install the custom APKs that I normally run.

Asahi Linux has great support for M1/M2, or so I heard.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772#ipadobsolete

And. It. Sucks.

It's a terrible, shitty experience.

I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.

Apple itself also had a project, started in the late '80s, to port the Mac OS to x86[2].

Incidentally, PowerPC Mac OSes, especially later pre-OS X OSes like Mac OS 9.x, run quite well today on vanilla QEMU, no hacking required.

[1] https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n6/mac_pc_on_st.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.

Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.

Apple, by the way, was a co-founder of Arm and helped develop ARM processors for use in the Apple Newton. Its early work on making ARM CPUs highly power efficient paved the way for their now-widespread adoption in mobile devices. There's some irony in how a part of the Apple Newton reverberates throughout the industry today.

Given Apple's recent trajectory and custom silicon, I can only imagine that the stability of these AI-assisted ports be even worse than it was back in the x86 days. These are neat demos, but nothing I would want to seriously run in any capacity.

Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.

For the brief period where Apple refused to sell you non-Butterfly keyboards, it was one of the best ways to use macOS.

An example could be as simple as somebody whose Mac broke and needs to use MacOS specific software and workflows, but can't afford to get a new Mac.

For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.

When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.

I got my current job thanks to having one. I probably wouldn't have a tech career without hackintoshes being a thing.