@SirGigantor While that is a well said post, but your MacBook Pro in 2008 was running MacOSX. With non-METAL GPU Compliance it never even ran Mojave, because you wouldn't know how to take it apart and put one into it, or spend the time if you did. You would know it's a pain in the dick and stick to Sierra. It was not pure UNIX to start, it is FreeBSD *based*.

What are these Additional Pieces of software for Pro Audio which we do not have available to us on Mac?

MacOS integrates with most Pro Audio hardware devices made by other manufacturers better than Windows does (easily). All of your programs and plugins and so on are driven by low level drivers like Dynamic Linking Library and other OCX dependence. Also no thanks to that part.

 

Last edited: Nov 10, 2022

Again, please, stop this myth.
Perhaps, the assembling has a superb quality control that is second to none, the components come from 3rd party companies.
20 years ago I would say a hardware issue on a mac would be rare and machines have lasted much longer than windows pc. However, I had experience, installing 2 identical G4 with same software and configuration, even though one presented an issue with a specific software that the other did not. Kind of a mystery.
And during the last decade there have been so many scandalous issues, especially related to macbook pro that has become really embarrassing even for diehard apple fans. And the M1 mini... I had to send it to service just one week after purchase because the power supply had just died. Also a remaining problem is a monitor via hdmi loses signal randomly (the same monitor with same cable had been previously used for years with no issues. And there are software issues since Big Sur, Mail app for example doesn't show attachments in list view when use POP3, and doesn't remember your setup for column width. etc. There are so many unsolved issues and can't find solution on the web after weeks of searching. The local mac authorized resellers are a joke, they don't even know Mail app, one said their owner had forced them to use Outlook on their mac :D

Nowadays, for more reason than ever, you must rely on forums like this to handle any kind of issues.
Recently I visited MakeMusic official forum looking for answer for an issue and found a thread where many people have posted the same problem, and the volunteer mod couldn't give a proper and working solution. Then a year later os so, someone posted a solution, after that the mod appeared and rebuked him why he had reopened a long ago abandoned thread. Go figure...

Quality issues (of hw or sw) are more severe nowadays and people are losing their faith. Bigger a company, less helpful.

 

That's true, it was very annoying, I wanted something more Unix.

There are some DAWs an independently developed things. It's probably less of an issue now and goes both ways. I'm just speaking from personal experience. When I use an Apple Macbook, I was constantly searching for software, not just Pro Audio Software, but a variety of things, and finding that Windows often had free software whereas the Apple computer tended to only have for pay software.

It's probably much less of an issue now, since it's some time since Apple switched to x86, and after that many things were ported.

But I should re-emphasize, I mean ALL software, not just Pro audio software. It's from personal experience some time ago, it's one of the reasons I stopped using them. Windows has typically been more aimed at supporting a very broad range of different and retaining backwards compatibility with software even after version upgrades, whereas Apple seems to care less about things like that.

USB basically went a great deal towards fixing hardware compatibility, which was the point of USB, but there seem to be less pieces of extra software for added function. The thing about Apple is that they control significantly less market share than Windows, so you're always going to have less stuff being developed for it, and I mean in GENERAL and smaller INDEPENDENT developers, rather than just large ones.

You can emulate it, but that's always less efficient:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

https://www.appleworld.today/archives/93338#:~:text=The U.S. picture,of the U.S. PC market.

Less market share, particularly for computers, i.e. desktops, which is what we're talking about. Apple just has much less market share, so there's always going to be less development going on for it.

Likewise, you'll typically see fewer options, i.e. if you want a different File Browser, Windows will have more options, and more of them will be free, etc . . .

 

Oh, I understand quite a bit of what you described from my own personal experiences along the way. But Mac is very much more accessible to most people now than it ever was back say 2000-ish. When we used to boot up the G clone, it would take about 20 minutes for booth and Opcode Vision and Protools to be ready to go. I used to think Precisely your way! And one day I was watching a production video with Swedish House Mafia. I used to travel a lot for work. And they were showing the MBP and their simple workflow when traveling. It was nothing but Logic and they were laughing about it. They were in NYC to play sold out Madison Square Garden. Ever been there? I have many times, and that's crazy. So if it works good enough for them, what I make is not that different than them; in the greater scheme of things. So I went and spent 3 grand on a whim the very next day. 5 years later, no hardware issues whatsoever. Software little things, but I mean that's every computer ever. And I have had many pc's, starting with a 386DX running IBM Risc (unshielded and illegal). My old man got pissed as hell at me when he went and saw the movie Wargames, because he was finally able to figure out why the phone bill was too high. Zork and war dialing. lol

When you say all software, you mean general purpose things for accounting, gaming, and so on. Does anyone build a Hackintosh to do much
besides Audio/Video or other "Creative" functions? All of these things are incoporated into my view of it. I'd rather just build a PC to do those things so I would still skip a Hackintosh. And with an m1 mini being about 973$ USD delivered right to your front door from Amazon; it's damn hard to beat that little machine. I do not like when my 3000$ (older model of course) computer has a slower processor than a brand new thing that looks ready to tackle being an AppleTV. Maybe. It is tiny, but it's not exactly a portable solution for most people. That's almost like a synth you pay 1000 bucks for getting cracked and leaked all over the internet. IT only matters if you care what other people have.

Market Share. That is an interesting one I will type more. I am sorry about the tldr; if I could explain my perspective more succinctly, I would.

I do not worry about their market share. Are they going to sell us some version of Logic and disappear into the Jungle with our moneys? The company is worth 2 Trillion dollars. All of the "Creative" aspects of MacOS are funded by these people who need a new iPhone upgrade every year. I'm not worried about their money at all. When 50% of people don't know what they are doing anyway, you can't really say it's a good idea to follow their crowd. They aren't musicians. Look to the state you live in and what happened yesterday, if you do not agree with the 50% mark. Works for my purpose of discussion, as your state almost elected an illiterate hypocrite yesterday. Didn't it? ;)

Almost all my sounds come from my shitty hardware anyway. If apple runs away with my 200 bucks on Logic, oh well. I can always get another DAW suite like Ableton for 2x the Attempted Retail Price.


One last word, I had this friend who was using a Mac a long time ago and cranking out tracks that were so nice. And I would always say, damn what did you do to get it to sound that great? And he was say, Nothing it's just Logic. And I never believe a word he said about it. Until I got one. A lot of people you probably know swear up and down they are PC users and get known for that. They just lie to you or you might beat them to an unedited Alchemy preset. Any guesses?
They will stay guesses. But you get my drift.

 

Last edited: Nov 10, 2022

It was a real issue for me with Apple when I discovered that they expect you to pay for every OS X upgrade. By the time I finally stopped using the thing all of my software was completely out of date and it very much limited how useful the computer could be.

It's hard to tell where Apple will go because of Tim Cook, we'd have to know more about him, his track record, intentions and so on.

At some point I read through a variety of books about the development of 80s era Silicon Valley, Microsoft/Gates, Apple/Jobs, Amiga, etc . .

Jobs, simply put, was a very bad businessman who got very lucky and had basically the bare minimum programming/etc . . . skills necessary to do what he did. Gates, on the other hand, is actually a first rate programmer (10x programmer) who has a very high degree of business acumen. The result is that Microsoft has consistently made better long term decisions over time than Jobs-Apple.

The very fact that Jobs tried to cure his own, completely treatable, cancer by going on what you could call a "hippie diet" and meditating in the desert instead of just having it treated via normal medicine says quite a bit about Jobs. . .

Do you think Gates would do something like that?

That's the sort of thing you have to take into account when considering Apple long term, Cook is now CEO, but it's based around Job's cult of personality. He had to be fired once before driving it into the ground, then he set about driving NeXt into the ground.

He consistently pursued a certain aesthetic knowing other people like him would like that aesthetic and, eventually, they did make up enough of the desktop market for that to work.

The other thing to keep in mind with Apple is that they cloned most of their "creative" software from Amiga. In an alternate reality where the founders of Amiga had just kept running their company instead of selling it to Commodore, we would all be debating Windows Vs. Amigas on these forums, Apple would have just gone bankrupt, Amiga was the actual front runner for creatives until they sold to Commodore and were subsequently mismanaged.

That's all the kind of stuff I wonder about with Apple. Gates is still alive and understood what he was doing very, very, well, but Jobs is dead because of arrogance, succeeded because of luck, and now someone else is in charge . . . .

 

HUH? The Amiga didn't exist until Commodore came along and gave them money to design their next computer.. The Amiga was nothing but a bunch of prototyped circuits, and they were going broke with no one else interested in their ideas, when Commodore bought them.

Nobody in America really cared or knew what the Amiga was. I doubt Apple payed much attention to it. The Amiga came out a year after the first Mac, and Apple stole their desktop from Xerox, they were already on their way to what they would become. The Amiga floundered and ended up being Europe's darling PC, not the US.

 

I get a feeling that most users in here don't even work with macOS but are feeling the urge giving advice on why NOT to do it and then they defelct to off-topics.

What have Gates, Jobs and Amiga got to do with THAT?

 

I'm trying to hack my HAL9000... nothing on GitHub. Damn...

 

They left Apple to start the company. They had actually come up with a way to make a color monitor and Jobs just refused to implement it in the Macintosh for some reason, so they left and made a computer with it built in. Commodore did help them, but they also mis-marketed the product, it was a computer for more creative type people and they tried to market it for business related stuff.

I could do business type things, because it was a computer, but it was never really the purpose of it. It was very difficult to compete with Gates/Windows in regards to business/practical, economic, uses, because Gates was just so on top of things.

But most of the "fun" stuff we associate with Apple was on the Amiga more simply because it had a color display.

Like the paint program, those were developed far more and used quite a bit more on Amigas because they were in color.

Jobs/Apple definitely knew they existed because they tried to get Jobs to implement the color display at Apple, which he should have done.

 

I'm just pointing out that there are very specific reasons to consider OS X. It's mostly a specific aesthetic rather than for the point of performance. If you really like how it looks and they way Apple stuff interacts, it's worth doing.

At the same time, the relatively small market share and tendency of Apple to update in a manner that fails to support earlier software, and charge for it, are serious drawbacks.

Gates/Windows have been consistently more forward thinking in those regards. When you update an operating system, and even when you release a full version upgrade, you should support earlier software when possible. Updates to functionality and/or bug fixes should also be free, at least as far as I'm concerned, whereas as Apple charges for every single one and routinely implements them in a manner that causes all kinds of software to stop working.

 

What are you going about. I haven't paid for a MacOS update in I don't know how long, the wife has the oldest computer in the house an over 10 year old Macbook Pro laptop that still gets OS updates and they don't cost a thing.

We all like what we like, but this is getting way outside the scope of would it be cool to build a hackintosh right now or not.

 

I only had one once, and it insisted that I should pay for updates after a certain point, maybe we different plans or something. It was definitely one of the reasons I never bothered with one every again.

 

It’s definitely still worth it as long as you don’t wanna use the de/encoders from the CPU on the 13th Gen.

Performance wise 13th Gen Kicks Apple Silicons Ass.
No matter in Single Core Performance or Multicore performance.
Yes, of course Apple is shutting everything slowly down but that doesn’t mean that you can not run macOS Ventura on it, which have support for 5 years. If you pick your components wisely, you will have a perfect Audio Production Setup and faster then M1 Max/M1 Ultra/M2.

Don’t believe people who obviously never build a hackintosh!!!
Yes, you need to know what you are doing and how to configure the EFI but it’s all possible.
If you need help, let me know via DM.

 

Last edited: Nov 25, 2022

Hm... This idea was appealing to me when I was younger and wanted to experiment. Now I rather choose to simply buy a MacBook (which I did) as I don't have more time (wife, kids, day job, music...). I'm on Intel as there are still plugins that are not available natively for M1.

 

I think it's still absolutely worth building a "Hackintosh". For example, I just assembled a low budget machine for a friend for about 400,- Euros, i5 10400 with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. That's half the price of a Mac mini M1 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD which is 799,- Euros here.

Sure, Geekbench single core performance of the M1 is about 50% faster, but multi core just about 15%. It's performing very smooth as many other Macs that are still running on Intel CPUs. It's running macOS Monterey 12.6.1 and latest LogicPro 10.7.5 absolutely fine. Installation using OpenCore is done in one evening if it's not the first time you're doing it. Downloading Logics sound library takes much longer...

Some people talk like it's not possible to work with a CPU that's a bit slower than the M1, but pure processing power is not everything. I would never buy a machine with non upgradable 8GB of RAM and a small 256GB system SSD. And the mini M1 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is sold for 1259,- in my country. Apples RAM and SSD upgrade prices are just ridiculous.

 

I agree with you entirely @Myfanwy; but still you touch upon every reason why I think a Cheese Grater or Garbage Can Mac Pro is still a more value added expense that simply another processor then. You're all over it with your numbers. I am currently setting up my old Cheese Grater again so that it may be air gapped from the internet, run Logic 10.4 or 10.5 as an audio gridder server with the combined processing power of the intel MacBook Pro providing clock cycles of processor support inside Agridder running as server. It can be connected via CAT5 or whatever way you want.

How much would a 1tb SSD Dual Xeon 12core and 64GB memory cost in a MacBook Pro? I'm not running Final Cut. I think these older Macs will provide a TON of value on the cheap. If I had the PC going already, I'd still buy a standalone real Mac. This machine was 1/2 a mini m1. It has a PCIE Express Virus card in it but I haven't bothered to try that yet. It's locked and I have no reason to do anything to it. My point is I would leave my PC alone. There are other ways to spend your money, rather than in the endless quest of using Mac OS with a crutch installed from the getgo.
Because you won't learn it, in most cases. Fixing anything is beyond many users' reach. Maybe not yours, but not understanding an OS and then running it on unsupported hardware most definitely can be not for the feint of heart.

That's all. This is a 100% Mac user's perspective of how to spend money/per options to run Mac OS. On the cheap. If you don't care about money, this entire thing is a waste of time. That's just called shopping. Are you needing this much CPU to process Serum exports and then claim you used hardware or something? I'm not sure why I'd need this unless I didn't have any hardware to use. Certain Softsynths (and of course fx) can quickly gobble up your cpu.

Hardware Overview:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 2
Total Number of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per Processor): 12 MB
Memory: 64 GB

 

Last edited: Nov 26, 2022

you do not believe this video to be clickbait with some wild claim?

a current Pro is about 15 grand.

 

Big amiga fan here. Amiga in the late 80s was THE one to get for graphix and video. (deluxe paint / amos pro etc) The first VR systems aswell, crazy creative stuff.First 32bit computer with the CD32. I used to run octamed on a A500/A1200 and also a CD32 with communicatorIII and octamed, it even had midiports. For me apple fills that spot now these days.Got a 14core 10940 with 128GB ram 3 td SSD hack and a 2019nMP 16core beast.