HI all
Im looking to buy a macbook soon, Id like it to be a beast for music production, 64 ram and power.
Im kind of waiting to see the new m1 16" which shouldnt be too far now... but since they would come up to £2500 easy if not more... i was wondering what would be a valid alternative in the hackintosh world.
I have to say i have a pc somebody assemble for me with hakintosh in 2016 with a i7-6700K 64 ram , which is still pretty powerful but boy did I have issues! Ive regret it for most of the time. still havent got it to work 100% as it should.
I was wondering how pc laptops perform with hackintosh and how much i would be saving realistically .
thanks!

 

Hackintoshes were always a mess.They just waste valueable time.If you have that much time to spend fixing your pc then it would be pretty much cheap.That's the only benefit of it.But after apple released m1 macs i think and i know they pretty darn good for that price.Bought a m1 mac mini it's fast reliable and also can be more powerful if you use native software.For now logic is the best daw for silicon because others are not fully optimized yet.

If you depend heavily on stability i would recommend an intel mac.beacuse some of plugins are still not supported on m1.It completely depends on what plugins you use .

But majority of plugins what i use are working perfectly.while some are not.So be careful when buying silicon macs.if you need it to be that stable
Go intel.But remember future is silicon.

 

thx, it all makes sense. i guess ill have to have a good look at what works with silicon plugin wise ... does audiogridder / parallel desktop system work with silicon ? that could be a good expedient

 

an m1 will be super expensive compared to what you could get a pre-m1 MacBook Pro for.
people getting rid of perfectly good intel mbp's just to have the newest Macs sell them cheaply. like it's a phone.

you could get one of the last intel Mac Pros for quite a bit less. either way, I would not make my decision based on what plugins you can run. especially warez. you may as well just get a pc.

 

Modern HackinTosh using Clover are much more stable. Especially with i7 CPUs from the last three generations with recommended motherboards. Hackintosh require basic knowledge of creating packages for your setup. These packages require tweaking as you add or take away hardware, make BIOS setting changes or, change OS versions.

You are better off with a Mac if tinkering is not you forte and, you want stability.

Would recommend waiting for the next realease from Apple (M1x/M2) as some of these will have features that are absent in the M1 including up to 64GB of memory & 10GB Ethernet.

 

Last edited: Jun 7, 2021

It's insanely difficult to keep a clean hackintosh running with 0 issues. I spent about 2 weeks tweaking an EFI file to work with my laptop only to have the screen burn out a week later. I know it probably wasn't the hackintosh that caused this, maybe the screen just burnt out on its own. but like someone said earlier it definitely felt like a waste of time.

If I was building a hackintosh today, it would always be offline and it definitely won't be a laptop. You can try to follow guides online that are for specific laptop models that are supposed to be 100% "compatible" but even then there might be some weird issues with your specific CPU model , or a strange USB driver. Then you gotta build your own SSDT file whick takes more time.


It is a great learning experience if you wanna just mess around and tinker around, but if you are serious about getting work done, Offline DESKTOP Hackintosh with custom parts carefully chosen, building your own SSDT, etc, is the way to go in my opinion, a laptop will be tricky.

Otherwise, get an M1 mac. I was in the same boat you were and i pulled the trigger and I bought the M1 Macbook Air with 8gb of ram , and I can do pretty heavy sessions with 40+ tracks at 48K sample rate and around 256-512 buffer size and I rarely get any stutters. All this with bare Core Audio drivers , not even using an interface ! I also use a lot of plugins that are pretty known as well as some older ones and ALL of them are compatible. Here's a screenshot of all the plugin manufacturers that are compatible with M1. I can confirm they are all working great, and REMEMBER , this is still under rosetta 2. Which means when all the developers start to support M1, there will be a performance boost !

 

Nowadays Hackintosh is being either lucky or not, there are guides everywhere on the internet you can look for, plus if you pick a very popular model, hackintoshing could be as easily as downloading an efi folder and placing it in the efi partition, and your machine should be stable and act as a real mac even with updates as long as you use Opencore as a bootloader, + few videos to understand how to do kext updates and nothing more.

Clover has been good, but it always had problems, nowadays with opencore, your machine is basically a real mac, and if you spend sometimes it is a one time thing and you can even have bootcamp to work like a real mac where you can boot into windows from mac os and boot into mac from windows.

might be true but that was years ago, you probably should take a look now, thing have changed and you should check before you talk.

i can tell you had a very bad experience, or you're just too lazy to dive in (if you can't afford the time, then afford the money)

now to my input, i had an old machine running Catalina till i decided to update, i have now a very powerful machine running on a x99 system very Solid, plus update just work smooth, launched the update went ouy with friends when i came back everything was updated to the last version and there was 0 problem...

i wont lie i spend almost a month and a half reading guides and following videos, from learning the basic stuff to learning how to patch a motherboard bios and update the cpu microcode, it took a lot of time and energy, but at the end everything worked out pretty well, now my system is running the latest big sur update very smooth, and was it worth it? Hell yeah it was...

@kindleman i suggest you spend a few hours looking for a good laptop as i said search the guides, and before you pull the trigger, do some research on github ("your laptop mode" opencore big sur efi) or something similair if you find a lot of support just go for it, if you require help hit me up i'll see what i can do, anyway at the end it's your call, but please understand that in 90% of cases a hackintosh will outperform any real mac out there, or at least outlive it, maybe the latest mac pro is an expection but still a 90% is a high pourcentage.

 

Where are you getting your figures from ? "90% of cases a hackintosh will outperform any real mac out there, or at least outlive it" just curious how you arrived at this number.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh...s?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

https://www.quora.com/Can-a-Hackint...er-than-the-high-end-iMac-Pro-and-Macbook-Pro

a hackintosh will outperform a real mac because of two major thing, one being thermals, don't even get me started on thermals with apple macs, from the dead cpus to dead gpu on MBP to dead gpu on the imacs...

otherwise because of thermals most Mac products will thermal throttle to keep from going boom, while on a Hack even with stock setting the machine will outperform and eventually live longer...

please check those link and do your own research... i came up with those link in like 2 minutes.

 

enjoy the video.

 

I wonder why nobody sells PCs built specifically to install macos. I don't mean suitable spare parts, but ready-made workstations 100% guaranteed. The only action I will then have to do at that point is to install macos in it.
Nobody sells them: why?
Yes I know, there is a copyright problem with it, but can Apple prevent hackintosh ready PCs from being sold? (no macos inside)

 

that's still facilitating something illegal, which means it is probably illegal...

that being said i think this is by far the most informative guide you'll probably need

https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/building-a-customac-hackintosh-the-ultimate-buyers-guide/

 

Of course i was a hackintoshert. Built 3 machines.
El capitan ,sierra and mojave.But the only one that worked fine was only the sierra.Updating hackintoshes are not that easy right.After all
those attempts it still not that good(at least for me.)I saw near hackintosh guides.yes they are much easier than before.But it's not for all.

That's not true at all.any hackintosh can't outperform a mac unless it's well equipped with those hardware.those videos all had good specs.
And yes when apple used intel chips they always had issues.But hackintosh against an m1 mac for that price is nearly impossible.(nearly 100bucks off on amazon)On other hand hackintosh lives but it can't get that full juce out of macos.i don't hate hackintoshing for some it will be a great deal.

After all hackintosh or not,it depends on user.No
Matter what if it fits you.js.

 

I would be surprised if Intel was releasing a good alternative to the M1 CPU in less than two years.

Bottom line: No Hackintosh is going to be faster than the new M1 based Mac in the foreseeable future and their sole advantage will be their price.

 

Having always been an apple user it would be a dream for me to have a computer that works with macos but that has a third of the pricetag (with the same performance). It's easy to say "Hackintosh", unfortunately it's not that simple: I studied the tonymacx86 website enough to understand that I will never be able to build a working hackintosh from scratch or manage complicated updates (I'm a user, not a technician).
If there was a pre built pc 100% ready for macos I could start thinking about it, but so far I haven't found anyone really reliable who can sell it.
A question: apple has abandoned intel and is now addressed on the m1 processor: does this mean that starting from Big sur onwards a hackintosh will no longer be able to work?

 

My next build was a Hackintosh I opted for

a 512/16 gig up mac Mini

and an i7 Nuc 2.7 ghz /32gb/ 512 gb (SSD) + 7.6 TB SSd (for Kontakt ect) system using Audio Gridder via ethernet (3ms delay)

The best decision I ever made and the best system I ever have used.
Forget a Hackintosh, I did EOS...
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1/

 

Last edited: May 27, 2021

i perfectly understand your point, let me try to explain mine, but first,

There are 3 major bootloaders chameleon, clover and opencore, i have no idea about chameleon so i'll ignore it for now as i started hackintoshing with clover, clover was easy, you don't need that mush of knowledge to run mac os on a pc just follow few guides and you're good, some offered distros some offered app like Unibeast, which are not a vanillla install and WILL cause problems because the "hacking" part is done on the os level therefore inroduced some unwanted glitches and problems like usb, wake, gui glitches ect ect, now clover tried to do the hacking on the boot phase, did okey but the method is described as "brute forcing" while i did work, apple could break a setup with a simple update, so poeple had to becareful or not update at all, to fix all that, opencore was made, 2019 i blv, the opencore method, was waay more complicated but resulted in a way better experience, as opencore made the computer act as a real mac, so the way of how did the os react was basically indistinguishable from a real mac, like faster booting, not braking isp, and even bootcamp work as i mentioned earlier...

so what i'm trying to say, if you're lazy tryna get mac os to run as fast as possible without putting in the work, don't be mad and upset when something break, but if you want the real vanilla experience, you gotta put in the work...

besides the time and effort there is literally no cons to using a hackintosh (as long as you use opencore i know i'm starting to sound like a broken record) and i don't need to quote the usual reasons, like money or performance or longevity of your hardware... (both my gpu and cpu are watercooled and they dont go beyond 60c at full load, real mac idle at 50c if not more...)

now to the m1 subject, i heared how m1 is powerful and efficient and all, but as long as there is compatibility issues i will steer clear, let them perfect it, give the devs more time to work on bringing their software to work with it, then we talk, still for now i stand by my choice, if you need work done and a powerful machine to do it, either invest in the money or time and do a hackintosh, let https://github.com/ be your friend.

 

your dream is already true, i literrally went to picked a random motherboard, (ASUS ROG Strix Z490-G) did some research on github and here is what i got.

so basically if you buy the said hardware "Rog Strix z490e Gaming - i7 10700k - Asus Rx5700XT" download the efi drive you basically can have a vanilla mac experience in less than an hour...

 

You are still talking about spare parts, not a ready made pc 100% guaranteed: not for me

 

not sure what is your point friend ? this hardware is indeed guaranteed to work 100%, and if you don't have some experience in assembling a computer, some store offer it for cheap other even do it for free. after that i can help you get to mac os same day.