
My Hackintosh Hardware Spec - morid1n
https://infinitediaries.net/my-exact-hackintosh-spec/
======
rubyn00bie
It's sad to say but this is the only way to get a decently powerful desktop
Mac right now (that's not using server grade Xenon chips, I don't need ECC).

One thing that's unfortunate though (about a Hackintosh) I think about to
change (maybe already has) is the use of a R9 280x due to driver issues in OS
X (i.e. there are no drivers for newer GPUs). I think now you can use, or soon
will be able to, Pascal based GPUs which would great for deep learning/CUDA.
It's a shame Apple has been relentless in their quest to ship inferior GPUs in
Macs.

The biggest beef I have with this Touchbar MBP I've got is the GPU is pretty
crap compared to NVidia's offerings-- and I think it's somewhere that Apple
could dominate. Sure it'd take partnering with GPU manufacturers, innovation,
and money in the space but that's exactly what the Mac needs right now and
Apple is fully capable of... or someone's god forbid sacrificing a small bit
of portability for the power.

I really want to love the mac but outside of iOS development I don't have much
of a reason to run it these days. Windows + Linux subystem is pretty great, or
just booting directly into Linux.

To be honest developing in native Linux lately has been wonderful, it's
incredibly fast, driver support is pretty damn good, and desktop is attractive
enough.

I even have Thunderbolt 3 ports on my desktop which have been good, I just
wish VNC clients were faster so I could network-in my Macbook Pro's screen
better. The latency even over thunderbolt three is pretty atrocious.

Edit: Just so I don't SPAM another comment, as the nice folks below have
pointed out... PASCAL is supported. Upvoted you all because I'm so happy.
Gonna get my hackintosh back in action tomorrow.

Edit 2: I'd also like to say NVMe is mind blowingly fast on the desktop I've
got and something sorely lacking from Apple's offering adding another downside
to the current Mac desktops.

Edit 3: Cleared up note about thunderbolt 3 and VNC.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Mac OS "as it's now called" is a compelling offering because of third party
commercial software support including Microsoft and Adobe. Linux is great for
some developers who work with stacks that live entirely in Linux. There are
still some things though that it doesn't stack up well against like the
software available for Windows or Mac.

As someone who does front end graphic work to mockup apps before building them
as part of my workflow I couldn't see myself switching off Mac OS unless
Microsoft drops the registry, replaces NTFS, stops with the spyware being
built in, disables the forced updates and finally goes with one UI/UX for
everything.

~~~
bostand
Drops the registry? What does that even mean?

~~~
mathw
The Registry is the centralised configuration store which Windows introduced
in Windows 95. Lots of people still don't like it.

~~~
mintplant
...because it's an impenetrable tangle of GUIDs, deep hierarchies, and keys
left behind by apps long uninstalled.

~~~
rnhmjoj
What are the alternatives? The UNIX way of dumping hidden config files in
$HOME doesn't look any better.

~~~
prewett
Might not look better, but I can copy all my settings from computer to
computer, unlike the registry.

Also, the registry is used for a lot of stuff besides configs. So my
experience on Windows is that you have to run the installers (=slow), rather
than simply copying all the files to clone a system.

Plus, it tends to fragment all across the disk, or something like that, and
your Windows system inevitably slows down over time. Maybe SSDs eliminate that
problem; I (fortunately) haven't had to use Windows in quite a few years.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's straightforward to copy the per-user software settings from one registry
to another.

You can't copy full software installs like that, but it's not the fault of the
registry. Installing typical software means affecting dozens of system
settings all in different places. You can't easily copy linux software along
with every setting it affects either. You're best off either reinstalling or
copying the entire drive, both of which work on Windows.

------
SmellTheGlove
Nice build, but I'm a little surprised to see it get this much traction at HN.
The hackintosh subreddit has builds like these for days.

Mine is a dual boot setup on an i7-6700k on Z170, 64GB RAM, and a very old and
well-supported Radeon 5770 GPU. I will admit mine sits mostly in Windows with
a number of Linux VMs running for development, which is why I maxed out the
RAM.

Previous build was an LGA775 build. More specifically, an LGA771 hack. Again,
ancient Gigabyte P35DS3L motherboard, 6GB RAM, and a modified Xeon X5470. It
was extremely stable. I may bring it back, but I used the SSDs and PSU in my
new build.

------
hd4
Not a troll attempt, but I want to know why people use Hackintosh over, say,
Ubuntu or Fedora?

What can you do with Hackintosh that you still can't with a Linux distro?

Edit: Possibly a bit late to ask, but I should have asked if you had ever
seriously tried Linux and if so what your experiences were like?

~~~
jwr
Context: Linux user since 1994, also uses Windows often, software developer
(anything from low-level embedded to Clojure and ClojureScript).

It's all about Mac OS. It lets me get things done without dealing with silly
things.

Let's quickly list what I sorely miss when switching to my Linux machine:

* Multiple monitor support: connect any number of monitors, any time, and have them Just Work. HiDPI or not, doesn't matter. The OS even remembers which of your windows where placed on which monitor at which size, and will do its best to move them when you connect a monitor. No other OS even comes close.

* Consistent keybindings (Emacs-style) in _all_ windows and dialogs. Control-a always gets me to the beginning of the line, whether in a text editor or in a file-open dialog box.

* Reasonably consistent keybindings in apps. Can expect Cmd-q to quit every app.

* Flawlessly working suspend/resume on laptops.

* Full-screen any app and it works fine.

* Apps like LaunchBar (I think quicksilver used to be a free alternative).

* Spotlight, which finds everything.

* Ability to remap any key to whatever I want and have it work everywhere.

* Drag & drop everywhere. And if you laugh at this, consider that this is coming from a command-line guy with 25 years experience with computers. The way Mac does drag & drop is faster and more convenient than fiddling with command line. For example, did you know you can drop a file or a directory from anywhere into any file/open dialog box?

* Apps like Simplenote, Bear, Ulysses: excellent tools for specific purposes.

* TextExpander.

* Predictable ubuquitous working clipboard.

For me, switching over to my Ubuntu machine is an exercise in frustration. I
can't redefine my keys, there is nothing like TextExpander, multiple monitors
just don't work unless stars align just right and you have all the monitors in
just the right order at boot time and you better not mix hidpi with normal.
Drag and drop is nonexisting. Copy/paste is a free-for-all where each app does
things differently and you have multiple clipboards (Ctrl-V vs middle mouse
click).

Basically, in order to get things done, I'd much rather work on a Mac.

A side note: to really understand why the Mac is so good, you have to work on
it for a while, with someone showing you things (like dragging files into
file/open dialogs). People seem to think this is about superficial things like
aesthetics, or Adobe software. It's not.

~~~
hd4
Great response. Did you manage to post any/all of this to the feedback-request
thread by the guy from Ubuntu about 3 weeks ago? If not, I think you should. I
might even do so on your behalf as I've definitely felt some of these pain-
points myself.

~~~
nottorp
Ubuntu tried to make a decent desktop with Unity and failed. Unity was the
trigger for me for switching to OS X.

The problem was, they need to put a LOT of polish in to reach OS X levels of
usability, and they didn't look like they were doing that, they had some
nebulous dreams of making a unified mobile/desktop interface instead.

There isn't anything in particular I'd suggest to them, because they need
improvements just about everywhere. Say, is the network manager actually
usable these days? When I switched it was easier to just disable it and move
along.

And the main elephant in the Linux room right now is systemd. Low level Linux
is basically being taken over by an incompetent developer who doesn't
understand the Unix philosophy of software design and can't deliver working
software anyway. He's the author of the abomination called pulseaudio - back
then it was required to uninstall/disable it to have sound again. Now,
software written by him is becoming a dependency of almost everything - he is
trying to replace all the Linux infrastructure layer with his ideas. Sorry, I
see no reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop again.

~~~
vetinari
Pulseaudio in Linux has the same role, as Core Audio in macOS.

Systemd in Linux has the same role, as Launchd in macOS. Some aspects of
systemd were inspired by launchd and SMF.

Interestingly, it is a good, useful thing that contributes to polished
experience when it comes to macOS, but for some reason, when someone does
equivalent for Linux, it is suddenly a bad thing, just because it is different
than in the past and moves the polish and experience with Linux to a higher
level?

~~~
nottorp
Pray tell, what "polish" is contributed by systemd's binary logs that get lost
in case of a crash?

Unix philosophy aside, Pottering can't be trusted to provide working
software...

~~~
vetinari
There are pros and cons for binary logs, they get you something
([https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...](https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBAGRL6wl97tFxgjLUEHIX3MSTs)),
and you may lose something.

If you have such problems, that your machine crashes and loses filesystem
data, just redirect it to the syslogd and go on.

------
askafriend
I just broke down and finally got a 2015 5k iMac. At some point I just need to
get work done instead of waiting for the latest and greatest and the 2015 iMac
is powerful enough. I got a good deal on a refurbished one too, so I'm pretty
happy with it.

There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at
the desktop level. I just pray that external GPUs will become supported on
MacOS. That's the final piece for many people, I think.

~~~
micaksica
> There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore
> at the desktop level.

I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with
at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time
in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is
anything giving you _that_ much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the
PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP?

However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2
when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old
hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound,
even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10
images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can
usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure.

I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems
about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes,
the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm
inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and
probably 80% of HN readers.

~~~
sedachv
> Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but
> functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine
> 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.

A couple of months ago I dusted off an Acer Aspire One netbook (released in
2010, Atom N450 processor, 2GiB RAM) to install OpenBSD 6.0, after a few years
with Linux and Mac OS X on other systems. Surprisingly it is my primary
machine now.

Today I wanted to see if there were even smaller netbooks with usable
keyboards around and came across this video comparison of the Sony Vaio P and
Fujitsu UH900:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI)

The video was posted in February 2017 and the thing to notice are the
complaints about the mini netbooks being unusable for web surfing and viewing
videos in 2017. 99% of users are absolutely convinced that the reason web
pages load slowly is not in fact horrible garbage JavaScript bloatware, but
that their computers are too old and slow. HN users do things like uMatrix
filtering and `youtube-dl -f`. I think that the 99% of users are much more
demanding of their hardware than HN readers, unfortunately for all the wrong
reasons.

------
grecy
I ran a Hackintosh laptop for a couple of years - a Dell mini 9, probably the
best supported laptop for Mac OS ever.

It was great. Basically everything worked, and it never crashed.

Well, almost. Sometimes sound would stop working until reboot. Sometime wifi
would not work after wake from sleep. I couldn't upgrade Mac OS. The keyboard
was garbage, as was the screen. Ironically, A friend tripped over the cord and
smashed the screen - if it was a real mac MagSafe would have saved it. (I
replaced the screen for $35, which was nice).

All in all it was great, and after it I saved and saved and bought a real Mac
Book Air 13 in 2012. I could not be happier. I have used it for tens of
thousands of hours and it's still going strong taking a lot of abuse in West
Africa.

At the end of the day, a Hackintosh just approaches the Apple experience, but
I don't think it will ever get there.

~~~
5_minutes
The sleep/awake problems you're describring here also happen quite often of
"real" Macs.

~~~
e40
I have a fairly large sample size, and I've had zero issues with sleep/wake,
except one: rarely, when I used to use a 2014 MBP for my desktop (external
monitor, keyboard, mouse), about 1 in 30 times I would disconnect it to go to
a meeting, it wouldn't wake from sleep and required a hard reboot. It seems to
be related to losing the monitor/keyboard, as it never happened other
situations.

~~~
swozey
I unfortunately buy a new MBP every year (except 2017 because I've got a 2016
and the upgrade didn't have the 32gb I expected). I have had problems with
sleep/wake on probably every single machine.

Did you leave it on to where it got to 0-5% battery and shut off? When I do
that it takes me about 10 minutes to start actually using the thing again it's
so throttled regardless of the fact that it's now plugged into an outlet. Even
restarting it at that point doesn't help much. I have to just sit there
waiting for it to hit 8% or 10% or whatever it hits to stop throttling
everything.

More often than not when I plug in my two monitors one won't come on until I
do it again. Or maybe the third time.

Then about 30% of the time when I close it and unplug everything and remove my
headphones the thing is still running and my music blasts through the office.

No manufacturer is infallible but this is the kind of stuff I would've quickly
replaced my laptop and gone to another brand over if I wasn't so tied into
OSX.

------
kuon
I had a hackintosh build that was working really well for two years. At the
time I would never had considered windows. But I did the switch to windows
about 2 months ago (using a linux vm as dev backend). And I surprisingly had
zero issue.

The hackintosh can be a good way to taste the hardware diversity (even if the
article don't go very far on the hardware side). Once you do, you realise how
locked up you are by Apple.

~~~
KSS42
Does Windows support of BASH help at all? I am curious if anyone finds that
useful.

~~~
kuon
It is getting more and more useful. Microsoft is really working on it. I am
using a VM for now to be sure to get 100% linux environment working. But I
hope to be able to do all my dev work in Windows in a few months.

There is one thing missing still, it is something like iTerm 2. I am currently
running terminator on linux via X11. Having a nice native Windows terminal
emulator would be a big plus. There is ConEmu, but after a lot of tinkering I
was unable to make proper color and mouse support working.

MacOS is a very nice system for developers, and I am very sad to move away
from it. I wrote about it here: [https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-
macos-part-1-moti...](https://medium.com/the-missing-bit/leaving-macos-
part-1-motivations-b10accc10889)

~~~
KSS42
There was an interesting interview on Windows Weekly podcast eps 514.

Q & A with Special guest Rich Turner, Senior Project Manager, Bash on Windows
and Windows Console.

He talks about future bash/Linux support.

------
lucaspiller
Kind of hijacking the thread, but what's the best software for running
graphical VMs on top of a Linux desktop? (i.e. a Parallels equivalent)

I tried setting up MacOS through Qemu/KVM (using these instructions [0]) and
it installed pretty much fine. I don't have a spare graphics card or monitor
for VFIO, so I tried running it in a window, but the mouse and keyboard
capturing was really finicky, so it was completely unusable.

[0] [https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM](https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM)

~~~
xaduha
Do you have a spare M/KB or a KVM switch of some kind? Then what you should do
is pass an USB hub (most MBs have more than one built-in anyway) to the VM and
connect second pair of M/KB there.

~~~
lucaspiller
Yes, but I'd prefer not to do that. I have a 27" UHD screen, so it's big
enough to display both the VM and my desktop. I'd like to display the VM in a
window, like this:

[http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v7/update3/docs/en/Par...](http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v7/update3/docs/en/Parallels%20Desktop%20User%27s%20Guide/pdwindowmode.png)

------
codinghorror
While I agree CPU perf improvements have been quite incremental, PCI express
SSDs and 64gb ram make Hackintoshes worth it.

I almost wish Apple would just quietly make this easier for folks, blessing it
without explicitly blessing it.

~~~
nedsma
Just use Hackintosh approved components[1] and you'll have an easy ride.

[1]
[https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017](https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017)

~~~
valarauca1
I can't overstate how common parts are for this. My motherboard wasn't
officially on their list yet the only difficult I had was my USB keyboard
windows/alt/ctrl key wouldn't properly work. I had to drop $50 on a Mac
keyboard.

Was about on part with the difficulty of installing Ubuntu now-a-days.

------
atVelocet
Just as with any Hackintosh setup: The guy who builds the system seems to have
"no" knowledge about hardware and thinks he could write about it. This guy
says it's a eight core CPU which is just wrong. The power supply is WAY too
oversized resulting in bad efficiency and thus a bigger power consumption. He
also states he needs no special kexts. Well.. that's because you are using
Clover! God damn.. there is so much wrong with >90% of those articles online
on how to build a Hackintosh... it's amazing.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
The way I'm reading it here he's referring to the Mac Pro he _didn 't_ buy.:

 _" The spec I was going to go for was an 8-core model, with 32 gigs of RAM, a
1 TB flash drive, additional external storage, two D700s"_

Unless I missed something.

Also, I've often wondered who needs a 700+ watt power supply? How many video
cards, drives, CPUs, etc etc could that handle?

~~~
monochromatic
Electronics that are running at capacity tend to have more issues. If a 700
watt power supply wastes a couple bucks worth of power a year, but lasts twice
as long, who cares about the power?

~~~
wtallis
Power supply longevity is already extremely high compared to any other
component, if you're looking mostly at high-quality brands like Seasonic.
Their top tier product line (with 650W models and up) has a 12-year warranty,
and the next tier down (with 550W models and up) has a 10-year warranty. If
you want a long-lasting power supply, you can just buy one directly.

~~~
crispyambulance
When troubleshooting electronics, in general, power supplies/converters are
always the first thing to check.

While I believe that power supply longevity is better than for hard disks/fans
and other mech components, power supplies are still prone to failure and also
damage caused by line voltage irregularities. That's part of the reason why
serious servers have two redundant power supplies, its not just for battery
back-up. Power supplies do fail, that's why they're FRU's (field replaceable
units) in datacenter equipment.

Warranties are more about getting people to buy stuff than they are about
actual longevity. Very very few consumers will bother to warranty a power
supply from a 10 year old gaming rig, for example. Few people excercise
warranties period. But they do create a warm-fuzzy feeling for buying
decisions and if the margins are high enough for the MFG its not a big risk
anyway.

~~~
monochromatic
What's more, a failing power supply can cause all manner of _weird_ symptoms
that don't immediately trigger the "bad psu" thought in most people's heads.

If I can avoid that by not pushing the limits, it's worth doing.

------
dawnerd
I built a hackintosh the other day using clover. Overall went very smoothly.
The only thing that was tricky was audio. The bundled realtek drivers didn't
work and had to find some github repo with a modified version (can't recall
what it was now).

Specs off hand: Asus Z170-A, Intel 6700K (Overclocked to 4.2), 32 gigs ram,
1tb ssd, nvidia 1060 powering dual 4k screens

What amazed me was how easy it was compared to years ago the last time I
tried.

~~~
ikurei
Did you use those new drivers nVidia just released for 10xx GPUs? I'll be
building my first hackintosh soon and that's got me worried.

~~~
intoverflow2
They will be, the 10XX series literally doesn't work on OS X otherwise.

~~~
bawana
what kind of power supply would you use w 1080Ti in the box?

------
dchuk
If this Hackintosh was originally built in 2014 (with 2014 parts), I would
assume the price is significantly lower to build this today. Also, seems like
that monitor makes up more than half of the price of $3000 for parts.

Can this be done now for under $1000? If so, this is a pretty attractive
machine.

~~~
eugenekolo2
Doubtful. Maybe around $1500. Computer parts really don't get that much
cheaper year to year. In fact, they go up sometimes.

CPU + Mobo + GPU + RAM + SSD is going to run you around $500 + $200 + $300 +
$200 + $300 = $1500. Rest of the components probably run you another $500. So
for those exact specs, it's at least $2000 in parts today. You can probably
get slightly worse stuff and do this for ~$1500.

------
ap46
Tonymacx86 & the new Pascal drivers will let you use the greatest GPUs now for
all creative work not fulfilled by linux & if you want to avoid the spyware
plague of Windoze 10.

------
leonroy
Hackintoshes are a fun hobby and in my youth I burnt a _lot_ of time messing
around with editing kexts, boot loaders, and fixing it after every other
update. Soon as I got my first paying job I plowed my first two pay cheques
into a Mac Pro and never looked back. The headache of relying on a Hackintosh
which could break between updates was just not worth it at all when I had work
to do on it.

Are Hackintoshes much more reliable today than they used to be?

~~~
taude
The answer is yes, I ran one for two years buy purchasing well-known
compatible hardware. But you're still at the mercy of OS X upgrades, which
require fiddling and downloading of newer NVidia drivers, etc... So, still not
worth it, IMHO.

------
nottorp
Hmm the bt/wifi module is interesting, though expensive. If you go for a
random off the shelf bt it's going to be a lot of trouble, if this is the
original it will save a lot of hassle.

The striped sata ssds are overkill though. Same for the mirrored spinny disks,
raid is not backup and you're better off with time machine to an external disk
or one of the online backup services.

~~~
jawngee
I use an orico BT-104 dongle and have working handoff, iMessage, etc. Wasn't a
hassle at all, just plugged it in.

iMessage was actually a bit more work because you need to generate a "serial"
for your clover config, otherwise it'll generate a new one on every boot.

~~~
nottorp
Yeah but if i manage to find your dongle anywhere, are you sure it hasn't been
updated to have a different chip inside? That's the common problem with usb
dongles for bt or wifi.

------
MJR
If anyone is considering building their own, this is a good reference. Dan
Benjamin's site detailing his recommendations:
[http://hackintoshmethod.com/](http://hackintoshmethod.com/)

------
quantum_state
Very nice write up n thx for sharing ... I had done similar but at the end ...
Linux took over ...

------
robotjosh
What I really need is windows 10. Can a hackintosh run parallels with windows
10 ok?

~~~
knd775
Generally, yes. But I'd just dual boot unless you need them at the same time.

------
xaduha
Using VFIO is a better solution.

~~~
radimm
what's the day to day experience compared to 'native' hackintosh?

~~~
xaduha
I've been using Hackintosh since Snow Leopard I think, but I never used a real
Mac.

To me running it in a VM feels as real as it ever was, apart from a bootloader
and an installer there's nothing that needs to be done to the system post
installation.

Granted it wouldn't work this way for everyone, since I pass several pieces of
real hardware, so it's still partially Hackintosh-y, you still need to pick
and choose, but not nearly as much.

I pass a USB3 hub that is built-in (USB soundcard, M/KB obviously) and AMD
videocard. To not use any kexts you'd have to pass OOB supported networking
card also.

Some report performance issues, but I never noticed anything of the sort, I
suspect they are doing something wrong like passing just one processor core.

