I couldn't wait for the new Mac Pro
blog.hopefullyuseful.comI used Hackintosh machines in the past. The problem with those is that after you've invested lots of time and effort, you end up with a machine that doesn't work, but performs that task extremely fast and is relatively cheap.
This article is actually great, because it paints a very realisting picture of the experience. Most hackintosh fans fail to mention that your machine might not wake up from sleep, so you either run it 24/7 or shut down fully and wait ages for it to boot afterwards. Or that you'll get weird networking problems. Or that your video card driver will crash every once in a while, taking your whole machine down with it. Or that you can't click "update" next to an OS update and usually need to manually go through the process of waiting, then reading the forums scanning for people's experiences, then moving various kexts out of the way and patching them back in after the upgrade.
Yes, I realize there are many people with a nearly flawless experience. But not everyone can get one.
In my case, I decided it definitely wasn't worth it and bought a real Mac Pro. Couldn't be happier, especially as 3 years ago it wasn't easy to build a machine with 32GB of RAM. Net result: yes, it was expensive, but it works.
Building a hackintosh is all about selective hardware (similar to the Apple experience). Generally if you use one of the tested builds like the ones listed here http://www.tonymacx86.com/375-building-customac-buyer-s-guid... you should have a pleasurable apple like experience with the cost savings and fun of building it yourself.
> Building a hackintosh is all about selective hardware
Exactly. I bought hardware based on one of these lists and had no issues with my Hackintosh since building it (almost 1 year ago). Also, the build took about the same time as any computer would. I think I had to install one driver post-install, but that's all the 'hassle' I've experienced.
And researching what hardware works well with OS X doesn't take more than 5 minutes since people compile lists and/or entire build guides for every version of the OS.
I built a Hackintosh in 2011 using hardware that was recommended on Tonymacx86 as being 'highly compatible'. The problem as you say is it doesn't just 'work'. The machine sometimes randomly restarts, which is unacceptable and every update required repatching audio drivers to work.
If you can deal with this then do it since you will save a lot of money. But sometimes the stability of the real thing is worth the price.
> Expensive but it works. This seems to be the case all too often for me. The cheap solution so often turns out to be a stop-gap before the expensive and final solution. It might be sign of old age but I'm skipping the cheap stopgap quite often now days.
I started realising this last year at the ripe old age of 20.
Sure, there's a bigger upfront cost. But you'll quickly save money once you realise you'd end up buying the expensive widget two years down the line anyway out of frustration.
It's more the time saving than the dollar saving I'm interested in these days. I regularly have this argument with people about media PCs. I don't touch the AppleTV, just hit play. It's been reliable for 3 years. Sure, their systems are amazing, but they take about a day of maintenance every 3 months to keep functional. Buy the tool you need the moment you need it. And I get to have shiny new tools this way.
Actually, a media PC is the one time where it's ok to tinker around and build something esoteric. Sure, you might need to fix it every three months, but who really needs a media centre? The worst that happens is that you have to watch TV on your computer instead.
Work computers, though, need to be rock-solid.
As long as you are the only one in your house that watches movies - or everyone who does is just as much of a geek. If you have less technophilic spouse or children, you want it to work, and to be easy to operate. Otherwise you will have to operate it for them and fix it promptly every time it breaks.
I would just suggest you look at Plex. I feel the same way after being burned out on HTPC projects. But the killer feature still missing on Appletv is streaming media files stored elsewhere on the network, which Plex does beautifully. And still manages to have a gorgeous UI (using Google TV version)
How do you mean? I just watched Breaking Bad which is on my laptop via the AppleTV.
Ah maybe I'm not familiar with the current capabilities of AppleTV. With Plex I get to have cover art, libraries, and a nicely organized interface to my media library which I can navigate with my remote alone.
You get that with an appleTV. You can either hit play on the Mac then send it to appleTV, or navigate from appleTV to your Mac and find the file using the remote (or iPad/iPhone/iPod). I'm of to check out Plex now...
Building a hackintosh will give you a deep appreciation for how well Windows manages to work on such a dizzying array of hardware profiles.
Macs work so well because Apple controls the hardware pipeline from top to bottom - the fact that Windows manages to work so well without controlling any of the hardware pipeline is actually pretty incredible (and, it gives you a lot of appreciation for the work that Linux developers have done to provide a similar experience, as well as illuminating why some things still don't "Just work" like they do in Windows or OS X environments).
First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is out, network is out. I had to burn a CD rom with the network driver to download the rest of the drivers. The vendor manages the hardware profiles and puts them on the installer CD.
If manually managing drivers teaches you to "appreciate" anything, do yourself a favour and install Ubuntu, if should cure you from such folly. Even if you'll never use it a day in your life, it will show you that "managing a dizzying array of hardware profiles" might well be difficult, but it's NOT a discipline either Windows or MacOS even competes in.
EDITED to respond:
Yes, this was XP. But even back then, Windows was marketed (and had been for a decade) as the "just works" OS, hardware wise. I'm glad they've improved, but it took them long enough.
Have you ever tried building a hackintosh? If you don't have just the right hardware, the whole thing hard-crashes. It doesn't even boot with fallback drivers. It just says "nope, not what I expected, goodbye." Additionally, it only works on non-Apple hardware due to the efforts of a homebrew community - out-of-the-box OS X just plain won't run.
The fact that Windows XP would boot into an at least marginally-usable state on random hardware puts it lightyears ahead of OS X in that regard.
I've been running various flavors of Linux machines for 15 years now, as well. I'm quite intimately familiar with the driver woes there (wireless drivers still basically never work out of the box on $LINUX_DISTRO), but again, it's so far ahead of OS X in that regard, it's not even funny.
You're setting the bar extremely low. MacOS is explicitly not supposed to run on any other hardware configurations than exactly those sold by Apple. It was never it's intended behaviour. There is nothing to be ahead of, MacOS didn't even bother to get out of bed on race day.
That's my entire point. We frequently assume that most hardware "just works" because it follows some specification or another. It's not until you run into a system that just flat out blows up when it runs into unexpected hardware that the work that Windows and Linux developers do becomes apparent.
This is not correct, every time I have installed Windows 7 on different hardware the display is at native resolution, all USB devices work (keyboard, printer, mouse), sound drivers work and networking also works out of the box.
> First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is out, network is out. I had to burn a CD rom with the network driver to download the rest of the drivers.
That might have been the case with XP (and perhaps Vista), but with 7 & 8, basic things like video, USB, and networking have worked just fine out of the box. And I say this as an Ubuntu user.
What Windows version?
Windows 7 and 8, everything works out of the box. USB, video, audio, network. Everything.
This coming from somebody who's preferred OS is FreeBSD.
I built a computer last spring with Windows 7, and needed drivers for video, USB and audio. Video worked, but was slow in games until I installed the official drivers. Needed the sound drivers for the front panel jacks to work, and the USB drivers for the front panel USB ports, the USB 3.0 port, and the "fast-charging" function of the mainboard to work.
It was easier than setting up OS X, but not by far.
>First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is o
Have you tried this with any windows released on the last 5 years? Everything works out of box with 7 or 8.
windows vista/7/8 have greatly improved the out of the box driver stuff. I believe a fresh windows 7 install has something like 7 gigs of printer drivers alone (!)
When you consider that Microsoft have an (at least small) team dedicated (full time job) to pretty much every area of hardware (e.g. printer team) who are given the active support of the manufacturers, it is indeed pretty impressive that Linux does as good a job as it does. :)
I don't know that it gives me a "deep appreciation," but it definitely makes me aware of a fundamental difference in business strategy. Microsoft is a software company that tends to dabble a bit in hardware. Apple is a hardware company that tends to dabble a bit in software.
Microsoft needs to build an ecosystem of well-supported hardware in order to survive. DRM aside, to do so it needs to enable hardware vendors to build whatever type of driver support they need. However as a (mostly) hardware company, it's in Apple's best interest to build an OS which works well on their hardware, and only their hardware.
There's nothing (that I'm aware of) about the Mach kernel that prevents anyone from developing their own drivers, but no company in their right mind is going to do that when they know that it will be nearly impossible to provide support for anything other than Apple-approved configurations.
Maybe because of Windows high market percentages, hardware manufacturers build their products around Windows experience, rather than the other way around.
I actually use a hackintosh system since 2010 and I would not overstate enough how much it is a pain in the ass, I've had all kind of issues although I've always carefully chosen my components, moreover you cannot easily test previews of OS X, if you're a developer it can be a problem. And because generally xcode requires the last version of the system and also often the last version of iTunes which in turn requires to be up to date you are then forced to make every update and each update is a new risk to break something.
In short at one point or another I've had issues with the graphic card or the integrated gpu, with USB 3, with the audio, with the screen resolutions on my two displays, various kernel freezes, networking... And to this day some of these issues are still unresolved.
Moreover you generally should always buy a Gigabyte motherboard for maximum compatibility but with the new Z87 chipset if I were to buy a MB I'd like to buy an Asus I prefer their current lineup. So in the end you don't even buy what you really want to buy. And also if your mb have something fancy, forget it you'll likely have troubles make it work.
After 3 years, my conclusion is it's not worth the energy I'm waiting the new mac pro to ditch my current setup, I can't take it anymore.
Can you install the version of Mac OS, iTunes and XCode that go together with each other and stick with it?
I'm thinking of getting a Hackintosh on my laptop to get started with iOS development, but I'm not ready o get a new laptop just for that (and I don't really like Mac OS).
As I explained, yes you can but only for a limited time. For instance xcode 5 is only compatible OS X 10.8 and upward so it is likely that next year in june the new xcode will drop compatibility on OS X 10.8. Moreover to target new devices, new iOS versions you must use the latest xcode version thus at one point you'll need to make an update.
I also don't want to scary you either because it is doable, this is what I do since 2010 and I use it as my main system (I have a mac mini and a macbook pro but I prefer a big machine for my developments) and chances are that if your system works well with a given version of OS X it will likely work well with the next version. But it will always take some time to check the forums to resolve a particular issue or to check what people have experienced before making an update and breaking anything big. What I want to say is it's not straighforward because you are somehow always forced to update if you use it for developing apps.
I do IOS development in a VM on a lenovo w520 - runs pretty well and never had compatibility problems. Graphics related things not so much but if you test on the hardware itself (as you probably should with games) and are careful about your debugging process it works pretty damn well considering its a VM in a VM :)
I'd suggest trying that before setting up a real hackintosh. Here's a tutorial (havent tried this exact one but one similar):
http://www.ihackintosh.com/2012/07/install-mountain-lion-in-...
Handy ROI calculator: Trading four days of otherwise billable work to save $1,000 makes sense if you value your time at $31.25/hr or less.
Given that the tradeoff isn't even "end up with an equivalent thing at the end of the day", I'd like to take the chance to thank the author for taking the bullet for us on this one and being honest about how much work really goes in to one of these builds.
I bet he'll save a lot of people a lot of pain and money.
The return is even less when you factor system upgrades in. I'm glad you got that impression, I originally wrote it up for my friends that were interested as a form of persuading them against it. I perhaps should have made the "con" section larger.
I have to applaud anybody who can just take an arbitrary hour of their life and earn $31.25.
Most people I know earn about half of that (after taxes), and only during work hours. Outside of work hours, we get nothing. Sure, I could freelance or get a second job (which I neither want nor need), but there is no option with a one-hour granularity.
If I decide to build a Hackintosh, there is no other equivalent thing I could be doing that gives me $1000. It goes off my free time. I don't loose money, but I do loose free time in which I could be doing other nice things instead. Of course, maybe it's a fun experience, so it's not even a waste of time.
What is the ROI of the time you invested in your comment? ;)
Two cents. :V
I really don't understand this point of view, that techies don't enjoy playing with tech, so therefore any such personal work done should be compared to your hourly consulting rate. Some people get a lot of entertainment out of making hybrid systems work.
I think it's clear in the article he setup the system to get work done on Final Cut with a cheaper machine, it was not for leisure.
Business and pleasure can't ever mix? Most (not all, sure) of the techies I know enjoy tinkering, and it's kinda why they're in tech in the first place.
It's what they call, wait, what was it, yeah, fun.
He said he had done this sort of stuff before, as have I, and I would happily do this in my spare time as leisure given the opportunity.
I spent a lot of time getting OS X running on a Dell Mini 9 netbook.
At that time, I think it was regarded as the most compatible OS X netbook, and (IIRC) absolutely all the hardware worked 100% correctly. Wifi, sound, sleep/wake, external monitor, etc.
I used it extensively for 3 years as my main machine, and it never once crashed or had a single problem.
The more I used it, the more I was absolutely certain of one thing. My next machine will be a genuine Apple.
I bought a 2012 MBA 13inch for ~3 times the price of the mini 9 and am extremely happy. Apple hardware is spectacular.
You say it never crashed, but then you were certain to buy an Apple next. Why?
He bought it for the hardware.
What exactly makes the hardware better? I would say running for 3 years without issue is pretty decent.
You'll probably have to ask him that.
As a macbook owner myself, I can tell you you have to use one regularly to notice that the build quality and attention to design is just much better.
Solid unibody aluminum. Auto-dimming display. Backlit keyboard. Great battery life. A trackpad that is pleasant to use and works for scrolling, gestures, and moving the mouse. Tight OS integration with all of these hardware features. It's pretty clear whoever designed these features actually used these features. I've used cheap laptops before and they get produced with shitty features like fingerprint sensors that barely work. It's as if no one actually bothered to use the features they slap onto cheap Windows laptops, because if they did, it's pretty easy to notice how useless or unusable a lot of the features are.
Most people spend the money on a commodity windows computer because they need a computer. When people spend the extra money on a mac, they do so because they want a mac. Point being, people buy a mac and pay the extra because every feature they include has a purpose and has been tested to be actually useful and not just a marketing gimmick.
Thinkpads have better build quality than most PC laptops, though I'm not sure whether on par with the unibody design in MacBooks. My own experience is that my T410 overheats when doing serious work like encoding video. The case is sturdy, but not airtight. It's supposed to be able to withstand spills, but I've never had to find out if it really can.
I posted the comment about wanting Mac hardware, and I could not have explained it better than you have above.
Thanks, you are spot-on.
True, but cheap netbooks have plastic hinges which like to break[1] at the lightest touch, or a generally cheap feeling plastic case.
Nothing beats Apple's aluminium bodies. They are ridiculously solid.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/St2Daeg.jpg - Personal experience
> Apple hardware
What exactly is that?
It's a single block of metal laser cut to fit all the components within a solid yet light fixture. It's a power plug that if tugged will not drop your laptop to the ground. It's a backlit keyboard that feels great on the fingers. It's a beautiful screen that you can't get anywhere else. It's a large sized trackpad that answers to your fingers without noticeable lag. It's a keyboard that has all the keys on the top row to do all the things we do on a regular basis. In short it's a super well integrated machine that wakes up from sleep in an instant, has great battery life and is well suited for a worry free computing experience.
It's one of the greatest industrial designs, with thought of tons of details, very solid (and expensive to perform) unibody construction from a block of aluminum, and several Apple-only or Apple-makes-better things thrown in, from the hi-dpi display (that's better than anything hi-dpi on comparable price laptops) to the mag-safe adaptors, to thunderbolt, to the multi-touch glass trackpad, to the magnetic lid etc.
It's not about custom CPUs or GPUs.
The other replies explain the benefits of Apple hardware but I have to emphasise the trackpads - every other trackpad feels like dragging my fingers through mud in comparison and the gesture-handling is really slick.
The author wanted a Mac Pro, but couldn’t wait a few months for it to be released. He could’ve bought an iMac and then sold it when the Mac Pro was available, that would’ve cost him $300 at the most.
Instead, he chose to spend 4 full working days to build a computer that doesn’t work as well as a Mac and can stop working altogether any day with no recourse. A computer that is worth zero in the resale market. A computer that Apple will not service.
By the sound of it, this is the author’s only computer, which he is dependent on to make his living, and it seems he isn’t planning to buy another Mac (even though he is a professional iOS developer).
This is a cautionary tale, an extreme example of being penny wise and pound foolish.
As I stated in the post I also have a MacBook Air that still functions perfectly for development work. I would never recommend a Hackintosh as a developers sole computer. I also mention that I pursued this route because my gaming pc needs a refresh cpu/mb wise and this can be easily converted by dropping in my existing high end GFX card.
You are right about one thing though, it is a cautionary tale. I wrote it because I didn't see enough showing the pain involved.
In the article, you wrote you gave your MacBook Air to your girlfriend. I guess she doesn’t use it often and you have made separate user accounts?
As for the part about you wanting a gaming PC anyways, I had somehow missed that. (I have to admit I zone out whenever video games are mentioned.)
> seeing as my gaming PC was due for a refresh I figured I could give it a go and if it all went to hell, I’d suffer through the pain then move it to that role when the Mac Pro was ready.
he chose to spend 4 full working days to build a computer
Interesting that you count build time against his billable hours, but not resale time for the canned system. Selling something does not take a negligible amount of time or effort.
I sell a Mac about every year. It takes me under 5 hours of work. That includes formatting the drive and reinstalling OS X, placing the ad, negotiating with buyers, and having them visit to inspect it and seal the deal.
It isn’t skilled work and it’s not taking time away from my actual work. It’s hard to put a price sticker on, just like I don’t calculate how much money I waste by going to a movie.
There is another reason why I didn’t mention the time it takes for resale. From reading the article I got the impression that OP didn’t count the time it took to research the various components of his Hackintosh, the time it took to look them up and order them, and dealing with the delivery. I think those activities easily take longer than reselling a recent Mac.
Interesting that you say selling things isn't skilled work - when you need to know how to get payments, where to list, how best to list, how to deal with purchasers, what the best way to take payment is, figuring out shipping and packaging. These things are skills, and once you know them, sure, it's easy... but you still had to learn those skills.
While I think it's less time overall to resell than build, for sure, I also think you're stacking the deck by handwaving away the time and skills involved in reselling.
Could have got a previous gen off ebay. Lotsa cores, lotsa ram etc.
It's not worth zero.
Looking at eBay listings, lots of used Hackintoshes are offered, but very few are sold.
If OP wanted to successfully sell his computer, he would have to put Windows on it before offering it on eBay. And even then, I don’t think he’d get much more for it than the price of the Windows license.
On the other hand, had OP spent his $800 on a Mac mini, he would be able to sell it for close to retail price. Even after a year, he could easily resell that computer for $600.
Used Apple products do hold their value better than anything - personally I think people pay way too much for used Apple gear, but hey, they have their high-end niche and people are willing to pay for it.
But to say that selling his computer would net him little more than the Windows license is absurd. It wouldn't be Apple resale prices, but he should definitely be able to get %50 back. He'd get the most value by parting out the system.
So what you’re saying is that, of the $850, he’d be able to recoup $425, as long he’s willing to take the computer apart, put all the components back in their boxes (assuming he kept those), listing all the components as separate ads (writing descriptions, taking pictures), communicating with all the buyers and sending out a dozen packages to separate addresses? They will easily take 20 hours. Unless his time is worth less than $22 per hour, he’d be losing money by selling the computer as parts.
The Mac Pro is a beast - I am still running a first gen MacPro1,1 - it's got an IDE drive installed in the second optical bay, four 3.5 SATA drives in the main bays and 2 2.5 SATA drives connected to the extra SATA connectors hidden under the front fan. At various times it has a hardware RAID card, extra FW+USB card, extra video card, video capture card, etc. I'm just about to grab a pair of 4 core xeons, extra ram, a Radeon hd5770 and some SSD drives - flash it to a MacPro2,1 and I can run Mavericks on it, with a Geekbench of about 10k. US$400 for the upgrades not including the SSDs.
I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro - it is like the Cube, it looks cool but the Mac Pro is not a machine that requires form over function - people buy them to upgrade them, swap things in and out, stick them in racks, etc. Thunderbolt is not a replacement for pro use expandability - it just means a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit.
A good excuse for Apple to discontinue the Pro line eventually though - "hey we made this great new machine, but nobody bought it, so sorry"
> I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro
Guy English made some great points about potential for the new Mac Pro:
"The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with."
Guy says it's not about benchmarks but the innards seem to be entirely designed around generating a ridiculous Cinebench score for a keynote demo.
Right now it's trendy to criticize the new Mac Pro for boxes it doesn't check that the current version does; mainly a lack of enclosure space. That's something Apple can easily address with their in store setups. But when the thing releases all anyone will be able to talk about is how much Apple is charging for the high end version with the E5 2697 and 2 W9000 Firepro cards.
> Guy says it's not about benchmarks
I think what he meant was that the current benchmarks are unable to quantify the benefit to users of having a GPU for computational power while the other is driving the displays. The new Pro configuration suggests you'll be working in real-time when doing graphically intensive tasks rather than waiting for something to render. Animators & video editors will benefit from this in ways that are difficult to slap a technical benchmark on.
These machines are probably aiming to scoop up some high-margin high-end workstation business, hence the demo by Pixar at the last WWDC.
The case design is really phenomenal. I've been inside mine (2009) a lot lately trying to fix a stability issue (the north bridge is possibly getting to 120˚C, the ATI Radeon 4870 was running very hot and disassembling showed 4 years worth of dust jamming it up). Swapping components with nary a screw and the general cleanliness (no SATA cables snaking around, air channels from front to back) is excellent.
I'd like for Apple to carry both lines going forward, but I guess that is unlikely. The issues I'm seeing now discourage me from dropping another 3-5k on the new ones knowing they are even further from being fixable.
I would recommend getting the hd5770 and trying the 10.8 upgrade before going all out on a build for Mavericks. My experiences with 10.8 on Mac Pro 1.1 (flashed to 2.1) have been hit or miss, and I'm honestly not sure about Mavericks. The 10.8 install did work (it booted), but the machine would lock up on me from time to time, and some stuff wouldn't work. It was also obvious that Apple did not want this to work, so maybe they'll put more effort into making sure Mavericks does not work. I concluded that it was not stable enough (for me personally) as a development environment, but maybe it will work out for others. If someone wants to do a Mac Pro build for Mavericks, I'd recommend they start with a 3.1 or 4.1 (something with the 64EFI)
The new Mac Pro 2013 is beautiful man. I'm not the target market, but I can see professional audio/video engineers getting excited about it. Editing 4K video in real time? Pretty badass. I was also impressed with the case engineering, but we'll have to see how it performs. I don't really see the design as form over function. It was designed to use a single fan for the entire machine.
Thanks - well I can still use all the performance bumps from the add-ons even if I stay in 10.7, but I'll let you know how it goes with 10.8 to start with.
> a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit
I think that the jury is still out on if there will be a significant performance hit. Thunderbolt is like having a direct connection to the PCIe bus, isn't it? Now, you're right about the extra cost, but I think that they will still be sufficiently upgradeable, albeit with more cost and fewer choices.
Thunderbolt is like PCIe x2, but a slot is x8. Whether you need that much bandwidth is being fiercely debated.
Fiercely debated by whom? I routinely set up machines with multiple 10GigE cards, each requiring 8x PCIe to function properly. 4K uncompressed RGB 10 bits video is 1,3 GB/s (2D, 24 fps; 3D and 48 FPS would demand 5 GB/s), this just doesn't go smoothly through a 10Gb/s link. I think this is quite typical of professional workstation work (vs something you could work on a laptop).
Obviously not you... I don't think that having multiple 10GigE cards is quite the norm though, at least for the market Apple is targeting. (Unless you are doing this on a Mac Pro, in which case, I don't know what I'm talking about).
This is one of the reasons people purchase the Mac Pro, so you can stick cards in them (audio, video, data capture, networking, RAID, etc.)
Slightly off-topic: Does anyone run Mac OS X under VirtualBox on Linux (or tried to)?
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA, 15") that I used almost exclusively (and occasionally used a Windows 7 VM on) until this past May when I bought a beefed up Thinkpad W530 (32 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD + 500 GB SATA, 1920x1080) and installed Linux on it
I've barely touched the MBP since then and only occasionally miss it, but I did notice that OS X is apparently supported on recent versions of VirtualBox. Like the Windows 7 VM that I keep around, it might be useful to have an OS X VM that I can fire up if the need arises.
No experience with VirtualBox, but I use OS X in ESXI and VMware Fusion and both of those work for me. Initial installation of OS X can be a challenge - you may need to disable some virtualization features e.g. interrupt remapping and you can have some driver challenges depending on your specific hardware (e.g. recent mac mini needs a network driver).
Officially, VMware only supports mac pro (1). Unofficially, minis also work. Haven't tried a macbook pro.
1: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?dev...
Thanks, I appreciate the reply. It's looking like I won't bother actually attempting this, though. If it were real easy I might do it but from all of the replies it sounds like way more trouble than I want to deal with.
> I did notice that OS X is apparently supported on recent versions of VirtualBox
Indeed. I've used VirtualBox to prime OS X images on attached USB storage to run on stock X86 hardware. Just remember to use EFI boot and you should be OK.
As long as you are running virtual, graphics support is limited to 1024x768 geometry though (even in fullscreen) and I can't say I've found any working ways around that.
That said, Linux does everything I need these days, and I no longer see any point in putting down effort to run a OS which Apple clears doesn't want me to run.
I haven't done it with VirtualBox, but I have with VMWare - it is monstrously slow, until you install VMSVGA2[1], then it's pretty gravy. It's not as quick as native but it's massively improved.
Some applications render better than others; I see a nearly order-of-magnitude better framerate in Safari vs Chrome, which is too bad, but all in all it's usable and I do some development in it with few issues.
To rescue an old iMovie project of mine, I used 10.6 (or whatever version last had Rosetta) in Virtualbox 4.something. From memory I needed a completely hacked version of OS X and I wouldn't have had a chance of getting it working from my retail disc (yes, I own one!)
Given the option again, I'd rent a machine or borrow one.
Heh, I'll keep the MacBook Pro around then. I don't foresee the need to ever fire up an OS X VM other than at home.
TL;DR: use VMware player.
Yes, I ran several versions of Hackintosh VDI files on VirtualBox under Linux. It all works, but it is slooooooow (on some seriously fast hardware too). I tried many versions because of that, and used both OSS and Oracle versions of VirtualBox, but nothing helped. I finally gave up and tried using VMware player. What a difference... It runs smoothly, things "just work". I didn't have the courage to enable network connection to the world though - I have no idea what else is installed on the (pirated) OSX. But if you install it yourself (from a legal copy) you should be ok.
That sounds like more trouble than I want to deal with. If it were as effortless as running Windows in a VM I might pursue it but I don't have enough of a real need for it to bother. Thanks!
I've successfully booted OS X on VirtualBox in Windows, but it is slow. It's useful when you're completely out of options for debugging an OS X-specific bug or something, but it's basically completely worthless outside of that.
Good to know, thanks. I'll just keep the MacBook Pro close by.
I tried that with QEMU once. It sort of works but I didn't really go too far into it. I did it more to see whether it could be done or not. That's actually the only time I've used OS X by the way, so I might have missed some things that didn't work. Either way I wouldn't recommend it. The install took about 8 hours and the whole thing was rather slow. VirtualBox might do better though.
I run it under Xen with a GPU passed through using VT-d. There are dozens of guides for running it in Xen and also many guides for passing GPUs through to Xen guests. No problems to report. The OSX guest has full access to the GPU. Yet to attempt an OS upgrade though.
I feel this would have been more comparable with a Xeon, otherwise it's effectively a decked out iMac.
Also: I toyed with the idea of building a Hackintosh to replace my 2011 iMac, instead of waiting for the 2013 model (Haswell, 780MX GPU). By the time I'd specced a comparable machine-i7, 16GB RAM, GTX 770, 3TB HDD, SSD, and a 27" Dell UltraSharp (to match the iMac panel), I really wasn't that far off the iMac's price with only a larger (256GB vs. 128GB) SSD to show for it. About < AUD$400 off, which if you consider the time to order, build, etc, isn't as significant as many make it out to be.
The actual Hackintosh process seems to be relatively "smooth" if you use compatible parts and set a day aside (and a couple to research similar builds), but I dread any warranty issues (and therefore dealing with > 6 manufacturers).
I'm still open to the idea, and maybe it makes more financial sense in US (there's about a 20% markup on parts here in Australia), but the price different wasn't substantial enough to offset the added effort/risk.
At the very least he should have used a Xeon E3 to get ECC support, but even that wouldn't be directly comparable. The Xeon E5 and E7 processors have a ton more I/O bandwidth than the desktop platform. The new Mac Pro will actually be able to run 2 GPUs and several Thunderbolt ports without bandwidth starvation, but no system based around LGA1155 or LGA1150 can. Also, the server platform has quad-channel memory, compared to dual-channel on the desktop platform.
Workstation parts are expensive, yes, but they do offer capabilities that you can't get from consumer parts. If you don't need a workstation, then workstations may seem ridiculously overpriced, but if you do need a workstation, then ordinary desktops are crippled unreliable crap.
I did this exercise about 2 years ago.
The price difference between a decked out mid-2011 iMac (with a DIY RAM upgrade) and a custom-built machine via NewEgg was ~$200 ... the difference largely being that with ordering from NewEgg I wouldn't pay sales tax. The difference with the DIY was I had a desktop video card instead of the mobile 6970M w/ 2GB of texture memory.
The other difference is I had separate speakers, webcam, more cabling, and a large physical box.
Although folks will fault the current iMac on storage expansion, don't rule out Thunderbolt. Yes, it's expensive, but being able to plug in a RAID array only loses points because the enclosure manufacturers always include disks to pad their margin. However, at least you can always plug that array into your next computer a few years down the line.
>I toyed with the idea of building a Hackintosh to replace my 2011 iMac, instead of waiting for the 2013 model
The prices are comparable if buy an iMac in the launch window. But the 2011 iMac is still being sold today. If you were buy a computer now there is a huge difference.
It's also worth considering overclocking given the stagnation in processor advances over the last generations. Getting a 40% clock increase out of a chip is like jumping ahead multiple years now -- it used to be that you could always wait a year and catch up, so why bother overclocking. But an inefficient old i7, originally 350 dollars, at 4.5ghz from 3 years ago is still faster than anything Intel is even selling today at any price.
Have to second this. I've got the Nehalem i7-875k in my Hackintosh/Win7 machine cooking at 3.8GHz (with no real work from me - the motherboard had a "smart overclock" button and it's been completely stable) and I am thrilled with the perf.
The bigger problem is that it only supports 16GB of RAM.
but I dread any warranty issues (and therefore dealing with > 6 manufacturers)... / here in Australia
In Australia, your warranty is with the entity you bought from. If they supplied you faulty parts, it is their responsibility to deal with the manufacturers. Buy everything from the one place, and the warranty is all with that one place.
You can, of course, try your direct warranty with the manufacturer, but you won't have the benefit of supplier channels. Similarly, dealing with a parts store is a bit more random than the usual "we're so big that we'll just replace the part" story you often get from Apple or Dell.
> In Australia, your warranty is with the entity you bought from. If they supplied you faulty parts, it is their responsibility to deal with the manufacturers. Buy everything from the one place, and the warranty is all with that one place.
This is true, and I'm aware of this; however the store still has to deal with the manufacturer, and they aren't as bound to timeframes/timelines as the store is. Waiting 3-4+ weeks for a replacement part isn't unheard of, and although the store might have to offer you a "like" replacement, that may not be the same/compatible.
> In Australia, your warranty is with the entity you bought from. If they supplied you faulty parts, it is their responsibility to deal with the manufacturers. Buy everything from the one place, and the warranty is all with that one place
From what I understand, the law is actually pretty vague about this one. In the advice the ACCC gives to businesses, it actually puts responsibility on both the retailer and the manufacturer.
Apple has taken this and will follow the same guidelines for their products regardless of whether you purchased it from Apple or not.
It's the retailer's responsibility - after all, the manufacturer might not even have a channel for the general public to access, or even go by the branding on their parts.
The problem is as elithrar points out - 'doing something about it' doesn't necessarily mean 'replaced right now'. Responsibility for the repair may lie with the manufacturer, but the retailer sold the goods - if they're faulty, then it is the retailer's responsibility to make good on them. Just as it's the manufacturer's responsibility to make good on faults encountered by the retailer.
MSY (a super-cheap retailer) got slapped for foisting warranties back onto the manufacturer, and 'now honour warranties' (see section 2 here http://www.msy.com.au/pdf/TermsofTrade.pdf).
>About < AUD$400 off, which if you consider the time to order, build, etc, isn't as significant as many make it out to be.
Not only does it make financial sense - the upgrade-ability and repairability of a custom build in unparalleled by the iMac - esp. the newer one. You would at least need the $169 AppleCare to allow for the possibility of free repairs on the iMac for 3 years. That still leaves out upgrades. Whereas for the custom build it's just a matter of yanking out the failed part and putting in a new one at cost.
Only if your time has no value. With at least one day to setup (according to the poster) and issues popping up from time to time (not to mention OS upgrades), the difference is not that big.
We are not even factoring the resale value after a couple years, of an iMac vs a generic hackintosh.
Well the resale argument doesn't really apply to a hackintosh - I wouldn't need to sell it - not at least in 5 years or so - I can just keep upgrading. And a 5 yr old iMac will fetch you roughly $200 from Gazelle.
About time - I suspect more than a handful of people will find spending a day here and there worthwhile if it saves them $400 + $169. (Also if in best case Apple keeps your iMac for 2-3 days in repair - that's time lost as well. You could do the Hackintosh repair faster yourself.)
The OS upgrades however - yeah they will be a pain. I can see that as a significant deterrent.
My greatest deterrent is the OS upgrade. I've been mulling over whether to just buy a Mac, or to build a Hackintosh. I would like the upgrade ability, but I would also prefer to not have to worry about accidentally upgrading my OS and having a few hour downtime every so often.
> That still leaves out upgrades. Whereas for the custom build it's just a matter of yanking out the failed part and putting in a new one at cost
I can sell a $3000 iMac for $2000 two years down the track; making the upgrade "cost" $1000. It'd cost me roughly the same to buy a GTX 770 (AUD$500), a new i7 Haswell and a 128GB SSD, which are effectively the major upgrades between my 2011 iMac and the (predicted specifications) of the 2013 refresh. And then I have to hope that someone else has tested those parts before I have!
I was commenting on your speculation that it might make more financial sense in the US - to give you an example GTX 770 is USD 399 and the top of the line stock iMac is $1999 before tax and I can only upgrade it to GTX 685 which runs me $150. So yeah in the US I think it is not as clear cut as it is in your case.
Right, I think this is where the OP's hackintosh is meaningfully similar to a Mac Pro, regardless of its specs.
The Mac Pros are the only Macs in recent memory that I've kept in service for 5+ years, with multiple rounds of disk upgrades (boot SSD + 3TB, then 6TB, currently 12TB), and graphics card and RAM upgrades as well.
If that's important to you, you currently either need a Mac Pro or a hackintosh.
Of course, once the new trash-can Mac Pro ships, there won't be any Macs from Apple like that anymore...
I am still using a MacBook Pro from 2007... still runs the latest version of OS X (although I wonder if it is going to get dropped this next round).
Yes, it is slow compared to the newer machines, but it has lasted a hell of a long time!
I'm working fine on a late-2009 MacBook Pro, still pristine with <50 battery cycles, just lacking some RAM upgrade (still on 4gb). If I replace the HDD for SSD down the line, it will last even longer.
50 in four years? Wow, I have a new retina that I bought first day and its at 75. I thought I was not all that big on cycle counting my laptops.
You sir, win that award.
It's a late-2009 Macbook, it doesn't mean I've been using it for the last 4 years. I bought it second-hand, but the person didn't used it much :)
> You would at least need the $169 AppleCare to allow for the possibility of free repairs on the iMac for 3 years
Kind of off topic, But in Australia the AppleCare is kind of a moot point as consumer protection laws mean Apple provides free repairs, replacements or refunds for something like two years.
From what I've heard it's similar in EU and China (and I believe Mexico, but I'm not sure where I've heard that from).
> Kind of off topic
No, good point actually! (I was commenting on OP's speculation that a hackintosh might make more sense in the US)
I think all the negativity is a bit unfair. I built a Hackintosh last year, I'm very satisfied with it, and I think it was worth it also economically. The PC includes a Core i5 2500K, Radeon HD6870, 8GB RAM, SSD, nice screen of my choice, etc.. I started by installing Windows 7, but very soon I tried to install OS X (I bought the components with that option in mind).
The benefit of OS X for me is that on the one hand it can run all my consumer software (especially games, MS office). On the other hand it is also a pretty nice Unix, so I can run all my work stuff (mostly scientific computing, and stuff that is distributed as source code). It took me a few evenings, but eventually I got everything working (including sound, network, and standby mode). Now its probably the most stable system I've ever had.
The thing is, I was fully expecting to put in some hours of work. That is the price you pay for building your own computer, whether you install Windows, OS X, or something else. Installing OS X was only slightly more complicated than installing e.g. Linux. If you include the time needed for choosing components, assembling everything, installing applications, the difference is very small. Especially considering how hard it is to get UNIX stuff under Windows (cygwin, mingw32, and so on), or games and big proprietary applications on Linux (using Wine).
Now, may people say you should just pay a bit more, and get a solid Mac that you know works fine, and has a warranty. The problem is, I couldn't afford a new Mac with the specs I needed. And you are never as flexible with a prebuilt computer as with one you build yourself.
I guess my bottom line is that it is unfair to compare buying a Mac with building a Hackintosh. The alternative to a self-built Hackintosh is not a Mac Pro, but a self-built Windows PC. The Mac Pro is the alternative to an assembled Dell, HP, etc..
On the Retina MacBook Pro
"Scrolling and animation tasks are jerky or just plain slow. I can’t deal with that in a new machine. Maybe in a year or two when it can drive its screen and a large external retina smoothly."
What? Has the author used one recently? These problems were fixed within a month of original release. I've been using one for over a year and love it.
They are not completely fixed.
They did fix some of the issues (and continue to), but I just don't think the hardware has the capacity to make it right. There are all kinds of graphical lagging, jerking, and stuttering in my completely-maxed-out-with-all-upgrades latest model Retina MacBook Pro, when using it with 30" external monitors.
Like using Exposé with a couple dozen apps open is like:
EDIT: AND, I should add, my monitors are the old stone-age 2560x1600 type of 30-inch, not the awesome modern high-res type ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJ4BIKA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_... ). I don't believe the current MBP can even drive an external 4K display, which is what I think the OP was referring to.- Hit button - Wait... thinking... thinking... - Still thinking... wait for it... - OK, here is the Exposé mini-window view, sans animationEDIT2: woah, I realized at that price, I really should be using an affiliate link where I get a kickback if anybody buys it. ;-)
My Retina MacBook Pro bogs down graphically all the time. Websites with a lot of position:fixed or transparent backgrounds are a common culprit. iPhoto is another one. I can't imagine how bad the Apple pro apps run.
I think it would have been better to compare this build to the iMac or the Mini. While I definitely applaud osx86 builds, I don't really find this build comparable to a Mac Pro of any recent generation. I think a much better comparison build would have been to upgrade an older Mac Pro 3.1 or 4.1 (EFI64 being the key) to 12 core with maximum ram and video card upgrades. I think right now the 4.1 is the sweet spot (considering memory prices). But even if someone maxed out the build, I don't think it would come close to the new 2013 Mac Pro. Another thing to think about here, especially for developers, is the software aspect of hacked/upgraded osx builds. When Apple releases a new OS version, or a new Xcode version, it might not work or it might be buggy / unstable. This is what happened with my old Mac Pro 1.1 and OSX 10.8 (flashed to 2.1 and upgraded 8 core 3.0ghz w/ 32gb). I was able to get up to 10.7 but 10.8 is messed up and the new 10.9 look like a no go. Which is why my old Mac Pro is now an ESXi Server (working on getting v5u1 working so I can run osx 10.8 virtualized)
I don't disagree, I'm not comparing the build I did with an actual Mac Pro. I just didn't have time to wait for it (I did this build months ago). As I mentioned at the end of the post if I had seen the tiny mac mini-esque build I linked to before I bought the case I did, I would have built something like that instead.
Luckily for me, I don't do anything particularly CPU-intensive.
I just bought the current Mac Pro. Sure, I'd like the shiny new one. But I also needed a faster Mac that could accept a bit of expansion that I could get before the end of last financial year.
The hardest part about being an Apple tragic is separating my need for the zomg new shiny from simple business decisions like "is it worth getting something better now or limping along until some indeterminate future time?"
Curious to the reasons you didn't go with the iMac? Did you need a ton of cores, didn't want to deal with external disks...?
I am not the poster you are replying to, but one other reason I always choose Mac Pro is the ECC RAM.
This may be mostly superstition on my part, but the fact that it can correct when cosmic rays from outer space[1] flip arbitrary bits in my computers' RAM really satisfies me.
I have tried to use spare Mac Minis or notebooks as servers, too. Among my couple dozen Macs, nothing other than a Mac Pro has ever had a > 1 year uptime when really being used.
Don't really know that it's the ECC RAM, but I'm sticking with it.
[1]: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-r...
Two reasons.
First: I have 2x30" screens. I don't want to go down.
Second: I can't put multiple HDDs and SSDs in an iMac.
The new system replaces a 24" iMac I bought in 2008. It made it for 5 years; the only upgrades were extra RAM when new and swapping the HDD for an SSD about 2.5 years into its lifetime.
I don't know how long I'll keep this one. Under Australia's small business equipment rules, it's already fully depreciated. So there's no accounting purpose to hold onto it if I don't want to.
With the iMac you would have 1x27" and 1x30" — that's not too bad is it? (That's my current setup and I find it quite good.)
I dunno why, but the inconsistency is grating to me.
I'm the same. I even put my monitor on a book to make it perfectly in line with my imac.
I did this too, when I had the iMac. I have a nice hutch arrangement now.
The 27" iMac has two ThunderBolt ports so you could run both of those monitors, and the 27" that's built-in.
As an ex-hackintosher im always thrilled to see people pull great stories like this off! I gave up on rolling my own due to the small irritations (system error when my logic mouse's USB dongle was removed) and the upgrade-paralysis; Every new rev of OS X would met w trepidation as a carved out a weekend "just in case". Either way, I hit a point where investing in an MBA was more economical... Now I can get by with a MBA; if we're talking about a MacPro then the value trade off might still be there :)
I built a very similar system using the "confirmed working" parts listed in the buyer's guide at http://tonymacx86.com
To those poo-pooing the hackintosh, my experience was quite different this time around from when I had OS X running on a netbook a few years back.
I already had a monitor, PSU, video card and ram, so the money investment for me was fairly small when compared to builing a system from scratch.
It took one evening to put everything together and install the OS, I followed the instructions there and have done several system updates without new problems coming up. I had to mess around a bit with kernel extensions to get my Radeon card put out 2560x1440 properly, but my problems were solved in under an hour. I've had strange problems connecting to my wireless printer, but I solved them by plugging it in and forgetting about it.
I've used it as a development machine w/ xcode and have not had any problems there.
All that said, I would NEVER use this as my only mac. I'm careful about keeping work backed up and off the machine in the event that something strange comes up, so there is that added overhead, but for any data/files you care about this should be done anyway.
I couldn't wait for the new Mac Pro as well, so I bought an 27" iMac a few days ago.
Building a Hackintosh is something I considered as well, but based on my previous experiments in that area I absolutely have to concur with the others here who say it's not worth the hassle and at the end the machine never works quite right.
The biggest issue for me is multi-screen support, it was the main reason I bought my old Mac Pro. But it's a loud machine and it eats a lot of power, even when idle. And let's face it, most computers spend most of their time in idle. The new iMac supports two external displays, so that was my minimum requirement met right there (possibly by accident on Apple's part). I thought I'd miss the Pro's raw computing power but when rendering or gaming the iMac doesn't seem to be significantly slower to be honest. The entire setup consumes less than half the wattage of the Pro, it's relatively cheap (around € 2k), and most importantly it's very very quiet.
I tried a Hackintosh a while back, it was mildly interesting, sucked more time than I really felt happy with and I abandoned it.
Part of the reason I moved to Apple hardware (and OS X) was to avoid spending time digging around with graphics cards, and RAM and making sure I have the correct drivers. I'm sure plenty of people enjoy it, but I don't, and it's just diverting time from things I do enjoy. There was also lots of other side issues, updates could cause it to break and require a revert back to a known good point, and hope it still worked okay, or having some slight system instability.
The Hackintosh project is pretty useful, but I currently don't need Mac Pro level of power, and if I did then I'd prefer to pay the premium to avoid spending time working on it. 4-5 full work days doesn't cover the cost of one, but it's certainly a non-trivial amount of it.
It would be a good exercise when I were in college, not enough money, more than enough time. Tinkering and optimizing a rig was what i liked to do. Fast forward to now, still a hacker at heart, but the extra time I would rather to go out for a walk, do some workout, or talk to friends. Just the priorities have changed
I didn't build my desktop to be a Hackintosh, but it took me about two and a half hours my first time. The second (and last), it took me an hour and fifteen minutes. It's really not that rough.
The one time I tried to make a Hackintosh, it ran wonderfully for weeks (after spending tens of hours getting it going in the first place). Then an OS X update came out, I installed it, and it never recovered. Nowadays, I don't have the time or desire to have to screw with it every time a major update drops and it messes up (or even has the potential to).
One of the greatest things about Apple's combination of software and hardware, IMO, is that It Just Works(TM). A Hackintosh doesn't.
> One of the greatest things about Apple's combination of software and hardware, IMO, is that It Just Works(TM). A Hackintosh doesn't.
For sure, and my primary machine is a rMBP 15", but my Hackintosh is also about $2K less than an equivalent Mac Pro would be (if they even fielded Sandy Bridge ones). Personally, I can be a point release or two behind as the kinks in the updates get worked out for two grand in my pocket.
Totally understand. I paid just under $2300 for my MBP in June 2011 and a few dollars more for this Thinkpad in May. Five or six years I probably would've put a serious effort towards the Hackintosh but nowadays I'd rather not have to spend much time maintaining or fixing it if/when it broke.
I've been using one since about 2011. It's true that there can be some issues depending on the hardware you have. I've only had issues with waking up my PC, and sound, and only had to download a DSDT for my motherboard.
To be honest, if you already have a desktop which is somewhat compatible, then this makes total sense. The fact that you can continue upgrading hardware, add SSDs, change graphics card is fantastic. I did this as an experiment, and it worked so well that I never switched back. You no longer have to buy the latest Macs to get the latest hardware.
That said, I don't think buying new hardware for making a hackintosh is necessarily the best idea. You _will_ run into problems that can vary, and these aren't necessarily things you expect when buying a new desktop.
The problems mentioned in the article were harder to solve than the ones I had. But a hackintosh's return over investment is HUGE, if it works!
I would have gone with a 15" rMBP; I assume he was only considering a 13" rMBP.
I bought a Mac Mini 2.6 GHz i7 a month or so ago, and added a 240GB M500 SSD, 16GB RAM, and 4 x 4TB external HDDs. Pretty happy with it performance-wise, even for Final Cut. I'd probably get an Areca ARC-8050 8-drive Thunderbolt RAID (http://www.areca.us/products/thunderbolt.htm) if I needed faster storage beyond 100GB, though. It's mostly a Plex server, VMware server (although I just use Fusion at home), and testing some proxy/etc. stuff, and is connected only to a 1080p projector and 5.1 HT system. I figure not much will get upgraded on the Mini in the next 6 months -- maybe no upgrade at all, or if it is upgraded, only some pretty irrelevant-to-me stuff.
It seems like the Mac Mini was dismissed too quickly. It and the Air have i7s, but the one in the Mac Mini has four cores. The geekbench numbers look to be about 1000 units(?) under the hackintosh he built, so ~8% performance loss for considerably less hassle. The Mini is more expensive as well, but will hold its value much better than the hackintosh if he wants the new Mac Pro in a couple of years.
> ... and added a 240GB M500 SSD ...
This is a long shot but would you happen to know anything about the built-in encryption on this drive?
I bought the 480 GB version a few months ago to put in a new laptop and the primary reason I chose the M500 is because it is a "Self-Encrypting Drive". IIUC, third-party software is required to actually benefit from that -- but I'm not sure that I do understand correctly.
Yeah, it is standard Opal, but I just use FileVault 2. I find AES-NI supported FileVault performance to be more than adequate. I don't know of anything but Wave which does Opal key management for OSX, particularly for boot drives.
I use Fusion Drive with the 1TB drive I already had, too, so SED on just one of those drives wouldn't help.
A very similar situation here, although I'm running Linux on this machine and not OS X. I feel that the SED stuff (while technically true) is misleading -- I specifically chose this drive over cheaper and better drives because of this feature. Lesson learned, though.
The only thing I could ever find for Linux that supported Opal was "SecureDoc for Linux" which, apparently, is impossible to get ahold of unless you're an enterprise with a fat bank account. Fortunately, like with FileVault, dm-crypt (which also leverages AES-NI) is more than sufficient for my needs.
Thanks for the reply.
It shouldn't be too hard to do a SED control utility fundamentally. It is maybe a licensing or TCG membership issue though. I thought it was just some extra drive commands.
Am I the only one that is irked by the first paragraph: "Macbook Air hard crashed rendering in Final Cut Pro [...] I had been asking too much of the little 11” wonder."
I'm used to things taking forever when I ask too much from a computer, not it outright crashing. Is this "normal" on Macs?
Definitely not normal. I covered this in much greater detail in another post http://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/2013/07/22/ios-app-prom...
I've never had a "real" reason to use OS X over anything else, only convenience (numerical programming in Python, works pretty much everywhere, slightly easier on Linux in fact) - Thus, if I were in this situation I'd hack together a cheap Linux box (of which I have...three lying around the flat now, including old laptops) and work on that for a few months while waiting for a new release (more likely, saving up for the new release.)
That said, if I had to work on OS X, hackintosh would probably have appealed to me (if I was spending my own money on the hardware and needed a good GPU.) Thanks for thoroughly disabusing me of this preference!
A hackintosh is only an option when you don't mind breaking your word. In fact, this is why I bought a Mac mini instead of built a Hackintosh; I even wrote Tim Cook about a "system builder" license being something I'd dream of. The license explicitly states that you agree to install OSX on only Apple-approved/sold hardware (paraphrased).
I'm aware of most the arguments why EULAs are unenforceable, why/how to bypass them, etc, but is any of that honest?
I guess I must be in the minority. I've had 3 Hackintosh machines in the past, all with different hardware. They have all worked almost perfectly.
Each one did require some post-install setting up. For example, dual monitors, sound card issues, graphics etc. But the set up never took longer than a few hours, and I get a machine that is 1/4 the price of a retail Mac.
I also think I can count the number of the times they've crashed on one hand.
Wouldn't it be great if you could just build a Mac Mini stack? Like a Mac Mini, on top of a Mac Mini, on top of a Mac Mini, with some sort of a daisy chained thunderbolt connection that also shares CPU/RAM/Graphic resources. That would make for a perfect Mac Pro set up and also for servers. If you would ever need extra resources, just buy a new Mac Mini and put it on top.
Hackintosh is fine as secondary/backup computer. I built one after I had to send my Air for repairs.
But there will always be little issues. For example you can't install OS X Mavericks just yet. Being a developer this bugs me very much because I would very much like to try the new APIs.
Seems to me that this is something between OS X and Linux. Beautiful and will work with most apps on OS X (the OS X part), but not that easy to set up and may require some tinkering (the Linux part and I'm not saying that it's a bad thing or that Tux is not beautiful).
2 of OPs biggest gripes were onboard WIFI and BT not working, these could have been fixed with a 40 buck TP-Link card which requires no kexts and is recognized as an Airport card and a 10 buck Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle which again requires no install or configuration.
Ive used OSX on relatively old (2009) Intel hardware a couple of times in the past and generally only had minor problems. Certainly less than when going with Ubuntu or other Linux distros. If youve got the money a real mac is still the way to go though!
Aaron couldn't wait either, but...
I would love to do this too, but the licensing situation bothers me. Even if you owned an OSX disc, you aren't in the clear, right?
IIRC, OS X is only licensed to run on official Apple hardware, so yes, it's a violation of the license to run a hackintosh.
Am I the only one who thought (per the photo) that the author was saying he needed a Mac Pro because he makes fancy toilets?
AFAIK the Apple Mac OSX licensing doesn't allow you to do so. Here's an article about different involved aspects: http://www.lockergnome.com/osx/2012/02/24/are-hackintosh-com...
This has been covered hundreds of times. There is nothing illegal about buying software and modifying it for your tastes. Where a lot of hackintosh resellers fail is they modify it and then distribute it, which will certainly lead to failure.
That's irrelevant in many countries. The EULA is non-binding in many countries.
Interesting, I didn't know. Can you tell me some examples of these countries?
Seems ridiculous, if not snobby that the author will only run OS X.
Why? His video software is on OS X. Learning a completely new workflow that will provide no benefits in the long run? Money is cheap. Time is not.
As a programmer, I won't use a non-OS X machine as my main computer. I have a desktop with Windows 7, but that's basically for games. I need Unix to feel comfortable (Cygwin doesn't cut it) and I need a desktop environment that doesn't feel hostile to just-pick-up-and-use (and that knocks out every Linux DE out there). It is the only choice that really fits my needs.
I run Win 7 basically as a thin terminal + Steam machine, and do all my actual development (web stuff) on a LAN-connected Fedora machine via Samba and SSH. It works great, and it also means that I can pick up my Macbook or Chromebook (or just find a machine with an SSH client) and have my entire development environment immediately available.
I've done that before for web stuff, but I quit when I found IntelliJ; I'd rather develop locally and not have to screw around with sbt (I use Play) because sbt is a tire fire. And there's no thin-client solution for game development (Xcode and as little MSVC as I'm forced into using), so I'm sort of stuck there too.
But for me the OS matters, too. I have a strong aversion to how Windows handles...well, Windows, and Linux isn't much better there either. Mission Control is good enough to be a "nope, won't go back" for me.
I challenge you to give Linux Mint a whirl. Unless you require OSX software or someone else is paying for your hardware, you're probably just throwing money at having sexy hardware.
I've used Ubuntu as recently as 13.04 and I've used multiple iterations of Mint. For me they are fundamentally unpleasant to use. GNOME is an eyesore with visually unappealing applications sorely in need of UX help; KDE is worse. Oh, yeah, and OS X handles four monitors on two graphics cards without breaking a sweat, on a Hackintosh. Ubuntu and derivatives can't handle that without multiple X sessions and the couple hours every other month I have to spend updating my Hackintosh are worth the time for that alone. Even Windows isn't as crippled as Linux is here.
I haven't touched on software, either. Audio software is a mess on Linux. (Ardour, against the combination of Logic and Ableton and Reason? Ever having to configure jackd, versus Core Audio which literally just works? Why spend the time?) Programming software honestly isn't a ton better unless you find "live in Vim" fulfilling and while I used to do that, I'm much more productive in more modern software. Swing apps--i.e., IntelliJ--look like garbage on Linux and there's nothing on Windows or Linux that comes close to Xcode for C++ development.
Perhaps you should reserve your "challenges" for folks who haven't been there, done that.
> Perhaps you should reserve your "challenges" for folks who haven't been there, done that.
Not looking to get into a flame war. You obviously have good reasons to stick with OS X, so I wouldn't try to get you to use anything else. Others, especially web developers, would find Mint more suitable than you do.
"Especially web developers"? I was a web developer (at a fairly you've-heard-of-them company) until August of last year. I do ~10 hours of it a week in my spare time today. Web development was exactly why I mentioned the train wreck that is Swing apps on Linux.
I'm talking rails / python / php. I see a lot of developers using OS X just to run Sublime Text and a terminal.
I'm having trouble taking you in good faith if your definition of "web developer" is going to continually shrink in the way it is.
I do PHP and Python as well as Java/Scala. In IntelliJ. Because it's a more comfortable environment for me. Like I said: I used to do the vim-and-terminal thing. I've gone
how about: http://elementaryos.org/ very plesant to use and in active development
A few years ago, after having used Macs almost exclusively for a few years, I decided that I would never again buy a computer that wasn't a Mac.
(I bought a new Thinkpad W530 in May, though.)
Among other things, he may have a financial and training investment in Mac software. E.g. Final Cut only runs on OS X.
Similarly, I will only run a Linux OS because I need it as a developer. I imagine its same with video editors and Final Cut Pro.