[Tfug] Roll your own Mac

[Zack Breckenridge]

Yeah, I personally recommend buying a used mac mini for this reason. I just
purchased a 2011 mac mini with only 4GB of RAM and it runs the latest copy
of yosemite just fine for the purpose of messing around with OS X, using
Xcode every now and then, etc.

The "hackintosh" route is more of a sport and a constant battle against the
changes Apple introduces. For example, they recently changed the boot
process in Yosemite enough that popular hackintosh bootloaders (e.g.
Chameleon) have to play catch up. I'm sure they're doing just fine, but
they probably have plenty of bugs too.

Then theres the Apple SMC chips and the fact that the core hardware is
basically Nvidia and Intel. Allegedly plenty of people have gotten AMD
hardware and other graphics hardware to work, but I think its more trouble
than its worth, as any non-apple hardware will require custom kexts.

I truly wish apple would open up OS X a bit more to non-apple hardware or
at least facilitate its use in virtualized environments such as KVM.
There's a lot of possibility that I think they're missing out on.

Zack B.
On Sep 23, 2014 1:14 PM, "Zack Williams" <zdwzdw at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 9:27 AM, Matt Jacob <matt at jacobmail.org> wrote:
> > It's relatively easy if you have the right hardware.
>
> You might get it installed once, but there's no guarantee that your
> hardware will continue to be upgradable with future versions of OS X.
>
> Highly technical people can make it work.  That said, if your time is
> worth anything, it's probably better for you to buy hardware from
> Apple - if you don't like OS X, you can always run another OS on it.
> It isn't inexpensive - Apple does make some incredibly opinionated
> hardware (SSD's, Thunderbolt, high resolution displays, custom heat
> management, small form factors, etc.) which is obviously costs more,
> and you may or may not like depending on if your hardware values match
> theirs.  It's more likely to match in the laptop form factor than
> desktop.
>
> Also, using OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the license
> agreement, if that's a concern.
>
> - Zack
>
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