- #Hackintosh requirements mac os#
- #Hackintosh requirements install#
- #Hackintosh requirements drivers#
- #Hackintosh requirements upgrade#
- #Hackintosh requirements pro#
And even if you manage to install it you might not get your components to work or have problems with certain Applications not running as expected. For a Hackintosh all this means that you can only use the hardware that Apple uses or you won’t be able to install Mac OS.
#Hackintosh requirements drivers#
They only supply the drivers for these components and this means that such driver incompatibility issues aren’t quite as common – although you can still easily crash a mac with an incompatible printer driver.
Macs don’t have that problem, because only Apple sells Macs and they choose all the hardware that goes inside. This can be good and bad – it can significantly reduce prices because there is quite a lot of competition in the PC component market – but at the same time driver issues are very common and they tend to cause the infamous blue screens and instability issues that plague Windows.
Windows then has the drivers to support all these different hardware components and makes them talk to each other. So what’s the difference between a PC and a Mac? Well, PCs have a standard architecture (usually x86) and this means that all the components on the market fit certain standards that make them fit together in a specific way. So, what do you need to build a Hackintosh? Well, a Hackintosh is simply a PC which thinks it’s a Mac.
#Hackintosh requirements upgrade#
This means a Hackintosh built right now is going to have support for another 5 years at least and that’s practically an eternity in computer hardware terms, so it will be about time to upgrade anyway by the time Intel Macs aren’t supported anymore. During their previous architecture transition from PowerPC to Intel we learned that they supplied their PPC Macs with security updates until 5 years after the last PPC Mac was sold. Well, for now, yes, Hackintoshing still makes sense since Apple still sells Intel Macs and this means that they are going to continue supporting Intel Macs for quite a while still. Going the Hackintosh route was also a way of getting more performance for my money, since I could get a pretty powerful desktop machine for the price that I would have normally paid for a laptop.
#Hackintosh requirements mac os#
Also, I actually need Windows compatibility for my Pakon Scanner and for various other reasons, so one of the new M1 Macs would be a pretty expensive paper weight for the way I use my computer! I even needed to stick to an older version of Mac OS – namely Mojave – so that all my music production plugins still work since Apple already abandoned 32Bit support in the already outdated Catalina. Even now, half a year later a lot of the software I use is still in Beta. By the way, if you’re already tired of reading, here is the video that goes with this blog post: Why Hackintosh?Īpple’s new architecture M1 runs significantly cooler than Intel and it could have been a really good choice if my MacBooks had died a year or two later, but of course Apple only just announced their architecture transition after my MacBooks broke and practically none of the software I use was compatible when they launched. In retrospect it’s really no surprise that Apple decided to go the route of using their own processors in the end, the all new M1 architecture, because the cooling issues caused by Intel’s chips were starting to give Apple a bad reputation. The issue here was not as much one of Apple’s designs, but was due to the increasingly hot temperatures of Intel’s processors that were quite incompatible with the slim and passively cooled Mac design philosophy. It turned out that virtually every recent Intel Mac suffered from this problem, causing throttling and early thermal death like on my 2015 MacBook Air. It was just out of warranty and this seemed to be happening with MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, iMacs and I was quite angry about it, since I had spent a lot of money on that machine so that it would last as long as all my previous Macs. I investigated the issue when it started happening and it turned out that the cooling issues present on that particular machine were actually systemic. I used to repair PCs for a living and this just seemed like the right choice after my 2015 MacBook Air started crashing randomly after only one year of use. So, after scraping all my savings together and getting generous support from you wonderful people via Ko-fi I finally decided to embark upon the journey of abandoning Apple hardware and going the Hackintosh route, which means installing Mac OS on a PC.
I use a computer in almost everything I do and both the machines I had were now crashing randomly and making it quite difficult to get any work done at all.
#Hackintosh requirements pro#
Both were quite old at the time – a 2015 MacBook Air and a 2009 MacBook Pro -, so this was pretty much inevitable, but it was still quite bad timing because it was virtually impossible for me to increase my income thanks to the pandemic and being risk group. In September 2020 my old Macbooks both died due to cooling issues.