You can check here to see what is actually supported.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211238

They tend to support older tech for a few years, then drop it in the following yearly OS update. They will support the later intel for a while yet. There will come a time where they won't so you'll be frozen into an older version. If you can live with older non updated software then it isn't an issue. If you need the latest, say, Logic. It becomes an issue. Yes sometimes you can hack it to work on older OS's but it's not generally a smooth ride. Part of the problem has been almost every OS update they remove functionality that the older software depended upon. Developers are in constant flux keeping up and sometimes it takes several months for things to settle down again.

*Should you be updating a production machine? Hell NO. But people do it anyhow and pay the price*

 

Did the math a while ago.Wtf it's almost 1000bucks for those 3.you can buy a macbook air for that price easily bro.No assembling,low power consumption guaranteed support.i don't think that's a good deal.

 

true most of the time, but people should know better and backup, what i do is have a pen drive stached somewhere with an efi folder in it as a backup, plus a 80bucks ssd to clone your system in is always the right move, so even you if update and break your system you can revert to a working system in 10minutes, plus your data isn't going anywhere as you can always access it from the main drive with the broken system.

 

Last edited: May 27, 2021

good point, but does it have the necessary power to haundle your work?

in the audio domaine alone, with the rise of "ai" plugins not to mention "better" more updated emulation, more and more cpu horse power is required, i do a lot of mixing and most of the time i ran out of cpu horsepower on a very powerful machine, what a macbook air gonna do for me?

 

Of course , hackintoshing will be safe for a while.
But once apple complete the transition it wil be f*cking bumpy ride.Even after that hackintosh will be possible beacause there are some genius dudes do this.But it will be a hell of a work.

It will be a safe bet to buy a mac, if you care about stability and future.

 

Both points are correct, as i don't see apple dropping support for a platform almost 2 decades old in a day,

i hope that's true, but what i more hope for is a competitive pricing for a competitive hardware, basically eliminating the need for hackintosh, then i'll do the transation.

 

Got your point , but hey listen there will be some downsides , but it's pretty minimal. On my mac i can do pretty much anything i want.I created some pretty heavy projects with it, i dunno what kind of mixing you are doing but for most out there it will be enough. Specially ones who use logic.

I am using waves,fabfilter,izotope plugins with it and it handles those work pretty nicely.plus it's very silent and cool and that will be a plus for a studio.

If you do some killer mixing 100+ tracks with fully loaded plugins then it will be a problem.

That's why i said it depends on the user.For @MrLyannMusic it is not enough.but for most it will.

 

Nobody's going to force anyone, all of these are individual opinions.i hope these will help someone to make his/her decision precisely.

 

Your point is valid friend i totally understand

 

LOL I thought we were talking about audio dude, of course a PC will outperform a mac in GFX. Most of those videos you posted are using NVIDIA graphics of course they're gunna get REKT.

Super irrelevant! You show 3D and Encoding benchmarks when clearly the OP is focusing on music production. Weak argument still.

 

M1 MacBook Air 8GB ram , runs Acustica audio plugins better than most windows laptop. Core Audio and the faster single core speed of the M1 will always be better for music production. Name a laptop with faster single core scores.

 

i'm happy to take you on round 2 friend, but my point is the following, i was talking about the benshmark part of the videos, sadly audiosex did not take that into account and did not start the videos at the requested timing, in the videos they clearly show that the hackintosh is more powerful (cpu part of the benshmark of course) which is what's relevent in audio work...

given that there's no alternative to m1 i wasn't talking about apple chips at all, i was talking about x86 cpus all the time, feel free to look at my point however you see fit, but m1 to me is a joke at the time being simply because fraction of the the programs and software that you actually need to work have been ported and supported, most of the major devs recommand or strait out tell you not to update...

let's give m1 more time to develop and mature and let's give devs more time to work on their craft, once we have the whole story we can pick up this conversation

 

Yeah that’s cool and all but, the fact is that all those benchmarks including the Linus one all favor the M1 in single core workload which is what most if not ALL DAWS favor. You say “CPU part” but clearly don’t realize that single core performance is what matters in AUDIO not multicore workload. The OP is looking for a music production laptop. I watched all those videos you linked when they were released and it seems you still don’t understand that the X86 architecture excels in graphic design, film editing and data science workload NONE of which the OP even mentions or talks about. All those videos that you linked are you using premiere pro , and davinci resolve to test thermals / benchmarks , again all which are favoring multi core workload. Of course if video editing and film editing is what you’re after then everything you say is actually all correct. The X86 architecture will beat the M1 macs any day. But again, the OP is not asking for that. They are looking for a beast music production laptop!


Name a quieter laptop with better battery life, better single core performance, and with a modern promising architecture? There’s nothing better right now for the price range. Sure you can spend a month and a half perfecting your hackintosh laptop but not everyone wants or needs to dive into that. Maybe they just want something that works right out of the box so they can get to making music! Again not saying it’s impossible run a smooth hackintosh. The guides and methods have gotten really good at helping people build their own hackintosh with guided part list which is awesome but if you don’t know much else about computers except for your DAW and making sure things work good then hackintosh is a gamble.

 

I have to agree with this guy, as a hackintosh and a genuine mac user.for a musician that much cpu power is not essential.The time we have to fiddle with hackintoshes are much higher, for a musician or a creative time is so much valuable.

In past the only issue people had with macs was the price.but i think apple responded it with a good answer (apple silicon).

For a bare minimum percentage of pro users these arm cpus won't be enough.

But a lot of softwares almost work perfectly without much issues.

If you want a portable setup (laptop) then don't look for hackintosh.Buy a silicon mac and you won't regret.the performance will be great.

 

laptop hackintosh is not worth the hassle, wireless chips are unsupported, dedicated graphics cards don't work, power/thermal/battery management is very limited...

I'm running handful of hackintosh rigs, but they are all desktops, all rock-solid, my main i7-5820K @4.3GHz which is 7 years old, outperforms last Intel i7 MacMini and is on par with new Apple M1,
Mojave (and newer) doesn't support nVidia cards and Catalina (and newer) doesn't support 32bit apps,
given the fact latest solid MacOS is High Sierra then, be aware any newer hardware platform/Mac does not support High Sierra

 

If you can afford it and also can wait until the end of the year, the new macbook pros will be quite powerful with 10-core CPU's (8 high performance and 2 efficiency) and up to 64gb RAM. They will also have more TB4 ports, HDMI, SD-card slot and MagSafe charger connector. If you definitely want it to be a laptop I think it will probably be your best bet, otherwise you could probably put together a stationary Hackintosh with similar specs for less. Buying a high-grade workstation PC-laptop with similar specs to install OSx on will probably cost just as much and from what I've read, it's a bit more tricky to install OSx on some laptop brands/models because of non-compatible hardware etc.

 

I've built two hackintoshes for myself, turned two of my laptops into hackintoshes and built seven for my friends.
It's an extremely time-consuming project and I don't recommend it if you get frustrated easily. Clover is definitely easier but prepare to troubleshoot things for a few hours. Opencore is the way to go but prepare to spend a day or two double-checking every step.

You can't currently build a desktop Hackintosh that matches the M1 machines' performance (CPU-wise) for anywhere near what one of those machines costs right now.

Laptop-wise? Tough luck.
While Intel's latest mobile offerings from Q1 are getting *closer* to the 8-core M1 you still can't really match it, especially in iGPU performance. Most of the higher end i7s are only found on either workstations that are around the higher end 16" MBP's price or gaming laptops intended as desktop replacements. Here's a good list of reasons why you shouldn't consider either:

• The more decent screens usually cost quite a bit more depending on the brand, the low tier ones on ~1500€ machines are GARBAGE, especially from Asus and Acer. 4K ones are nice but remember that they cost quite a lot of resources to run
  
• Desktop replacements are too bulky and heavy, power bricks are massive
  
• Lighter offerings lack ports just like the macbooks, expandability is usually limited to a single SATA connector (might as well use an external tb3 drive)
  
• Batteries are garbage on both the desktop replacements and lighter laptops, especially low end ones. The average gaming laptop has a 48-60Wh battery, M1 MBP has a ~60Wh battery too but remember that the 8-core M1 consumes half the power of something like an i7-1165G7 found mostly on ~1.5K machines
  
• You're paying extra for a dedicated GPU that you won't be able to use at all (AT ALL for the 2xxx and 3xxx gpus) unless you bootcamp into Windows, making this whole ordeal quite pointless IMHO
• Cooling that's often (almost guaranteed on thinner/lighter gaming laptops like ASUS' TUF or Acer's NITRO series) just as inadequate as the old Intel macbooks. The M1s still aren't the coolest things ever but the Pros actually run surprisingly cool
• Storage. You won't find laptops equipped with good storage around 1500€. Apple's SSDs are AMAZING and that's exactly why storage is so expensive.
• Bluetooth and WiFi. What are you gonna do if neither are compatible with OSX? Replace the cards? I mean, sure, if they even let you.
• Unless you go for a Thinkpad say goodbye to a good keyboard. And even then I've heard the newer (2014+) Thinkpads have pretty bad keyboards. I've never tried Apple's butterfly keyboards but I know about the myriad of problems that plagued them and they've been gone for a while now.
• Touchpads. I know, I know. Who uses a touchpad? If you need to use one (on the train, plane, etc) then you'll want to use a good one. I've never found a single touchpad I actually like aside from Apple's. I'm not kidding.

And that's not even mentioning any compatibility issues you might have hardware-wise, let alone stuff you might need to fix once you install OSX. IMHO laptop hackintoshes have never made too much sense (only reason why I did mine was to have access to FCPX, Logic and Xcode on the go) and desktop ones are slowly dying due to how hard it is to match M1 performance AND find a good deal on used AMD GPUs. And with the new (upgraded) iMac costing just 1500 bucks? Tough luck matching it when you need top tier i7s or even i9s to be in the same league as the M1.

Honestly, save up for the 8-core 16" or settle for the 8-core 13". Not having 16GB of RAM on the 13" is a compromise but I've found that I only exceed 8GB of *total* (OS + Live + Browser + Steam + Discord) memory usage on Windows when I abuse Kontakt libraries and never purge the unused samples.

 

Last edited: Jun 7, 2021

Many moons ago, Apple, sued the pants off of those who would dare to make an industry out of Mac clones.