However, it was a gigantic pain in the ass to maintain and I wouldn't recommend it. Updating the OS is a nightmare, resulting in me staying with 10.7 while everyone was on 10.9. Things that you would expect to work out of the box with a normal Mac do anything but - there's effort required to make anything perform as expected. And there are some things that just never work as intended - like the sleep mode that I was never able to figure out.

Troubleshooting issues is a nightmare - there's no support, and you have to spend tons of time browsing through threads looking for someone with a similar problem. Then if you get to a situation when you have to ask a question, you sit and pray for someone to answer, because if they don't you're stuck.

Eventually, I bought an iMac, and couldn't be happier.

In general, if you're the kind of a person that enjoys tinkering and troubleshooting, and have plenty of free time, then go for it. But if you want to spend your time on other things, and want your computer to just work, I would definitely not recommend it.

Sleep isn't a problem anymore if you buy the correct hardware, the question is also why you even would want to use sleep when it's booting within some seconds anyways...

In the beginning, like with the first setup, it probably takes some hours, you should probably even calculate a day to set it up like you want it. But in the end I probably saved 2k EUR going the Hackintosh route and don't regret it at all. I don't even notice it's a Hackintosh anymore...

To keep your open programs?

Applications are stateful. Sleeping keeps all that state.

Can be disabled while logging out (untick the checkbox) or holding shift while logging in.

There are still important state details that aren't preserved, like how far down the page I've scrolled in an article I'm reading, a form in progress, or the text that I have highlighted in a tab. How about my active terminal sessions in iTerm? It would be a joy if that state preserved across restarts.

For example, in tab #1, I cd and run a bash script to start a web server process. In tab #2, I split it into two panes, and in #1 run workon to start a virtual environment then start the Python REPL. In pane #2, I run top.

After quitting and restarting, tab #1 returns to the proper directory but with no output. Pane #1 shows previous output and returns the proper directory but without the virtual environment activated. Pane #2 does the same. History seems to be merged across the three which is a bit confusing as well.

- My nested screen sessions with a ton of shells doing things all over the place don't get restored on reboot - My emacs state doesn't get restored on reboot - Chrome reloads all the pages from the network instead of just serializing its entire state and restoring it on reboot

(All of the above are true on linux too.)

Waking the machine from sleep takes seconds; rebooting with stored state takes minutes.

Still, not having to open all the terminals I use for different things and resize and position them is a win. It's the small things. :)

Application state for all three GUI apps I use is pretty much restored on every platform. Thing is, there are only three of them.

It's a nice feature that isn't worth giving up for me personally. Even on my few years old rMBP a cold boot to the desktop takes 2 minutes vs 2 seconds from sleep.

I've only been able to see a purchase option involving the mac app store.

Kernel panics are a bigger issue. They happened to me once every 3 months.

Buy parts recommended on Tony Mac OSX parts guide. Don't deviate and your maintenance should be less than 30 mins per OS update. Should you choose to update.

I'm building another soon. Apple have taken the piss with a lack of update to their Macbook Pro line.

Since upgrading to 10.9 about a year ago, the built-in audio stopped working. Researching fixes takes me to multiple baffling threads that span dozens of pages.

I recently installed Windows 10 as a dual boot on the system, largely to try the Windows subsystem for Linux. That wasn't a trouble-free process either, but in the end it recognizes all the hardware, including a card reader that I thought was broken.

Although I use an iMac at work, and will continue to look first at Mac laptops, I'll probably transition to Windows once 10.9 gets too old.

Personally I'm going to hold out for the new rMBP with the touch bar function keys.

But if you're only looking to do web development, for example, Mini should be fine.

Even most tech people think in terms like "do you NEED it?" and "a laptop should do it", etc., when the reality is still as simple as 4.4GHz > 2.5 GHz.

Of course a fast PCI-connected SSD is also very important. All new mainboards have an M.2 slot for this, it's just that most people completely underestimate how much you will feel this speed gain in everyday usage.

Anyways, money was also the main reason I built one. I absolutely don't regret it.

The quintessence is: don't get your teeth too deep into some problems that will arise. Onboard sound doesn't work? Buy a cheap USB-Dongle. iMessages doesn't work. Well, I ended up using iPhone for replying to these and if it's a longer conversation, I'll do it on the MacBook. Bluetooth is unreliable? Try another crappy dongle from Amazon and don't even bother about refunds. Sleep doesn't work? Well, see how little this thing draws in idle and postpone any action for some months.

You might be able to get rid of all the arising issues by fiddling enough, but in the end these are what make the experience unpleasant and the Hackintosh becomes a time-sink.

If you stick to the basics, you get a very fast machine.

If you are willing to pay return shipping you will always get a refund if the product has no defect (within 30 days of purchase). It's automated. You don't need to explain how you tried to use the product with a Hackintosh.

Unless you're on a tight budget and planning to use existing hardware, I strongly recommend going the way of a Mac Mini and spend the time you would have lost to building a Hackintosh on literally anything else.

These days, it feels like people enjoy digging around on their systems less and less, and they just want javascript to run in a browser.

Frankly, if Linux is an option, try that first. It's less work and more fun (IMO). I've been strongly considering actually running Windows with the Linux subsystem turned on. If you think about it, that solves the same kinds of problems that a Mac does: you get nice Unix-y functionality, a wide variety of shells/cli utilities that just work, and you can run commercial applications (Photoshop and the like come to mind, but also games if you're into that). Of course, it's not a Mac and you get all of the nastiness that comes with Windows (viruses, having to reload every 6 months to keep things snappy, etc), but I'm beginning to see it as a more economical option than a Mac and potentially easier to deal with than Linux (as someone that has been using a Mac for a workstation for years + Linux on servers and other workstations).

FWIW, I've found modern Linux to be very easy to deal with, with the exception of some one-time install issues. They are annoying, but nowhere near the annoyance of the ongoing issues one has with Windows or macOS.

> Frankly, if Linux is an option, try that first.

I don't doubt the time sink from hackintosh (I did it some 6-7 years ago and it worked 90% of the way but that was on hardware that I just had and didn't buy the recommendations). That said linux, for me at least, was a huge timesink as a desktop. I love it and will only use it for servers but for a desktop/laptop I'll probably not stray from Mac (or Hackintosh) and MacOS.

Edit: For those downvoting I am only talking about desktops. I work in an environment where nearly all the developers use linux as their desktop OS as it's that or windows (or BYOC) and anytime someone decides to update their distro or switch they will inevitably spend a day messing with graphics card drivers, odd errors/issues, or tweaking an ungodly number of low level configs to get it to work. After all of that they have a semi-stable desktop with a handful of annoyances "Oh it just does that and I haven't have to time to track down the cause". While you might deal with some of that on homebuilt computer with MacOS I'd pick a hackintosh any day of the week due to the higher quality apps.

Mac > Hackintosh > Linux. but....

In the end I found out it was far worse having to deal with the crappy alpha version apps for linux than fixing the hackintosh. If you are used to the quality of mac apps you will certainly miss them once on linux. I did.

This was until the day the Hackintosh died with an unknown freaky kernel issue and I made the best decision I ever made: bought a second-hand quad core mac mini.

I never want to hear about hackintoshes ever since.

Sure, I have a handful of shell aliases and the like, but I'm not going in and tweaking kernel-level stuff or messing with system services (for the most part). Use the stock config and only change things if you really, really need to. Just like you would on a server. Applying that same rule to desktop - for me at least - produces exactly the same stability on my desktop that I expect from my servers.

As has been noted, Apple's current hardware lineup is unimpressive and even a little embarassing. Their 'Pro' level computers haven't been updated in years. Granted, the general performance improvement in that time hasn't been dramatic, but lower power consumption, faster graphics etc. are all factors that stop the current lineup being the cutting-edge it once was. You also run into the problem that none of Apple's current computers are (significantly) upgradeable - even MacBook Pros have soldered RAM and a proprietary SSD interface.

So with these factors in mind, I'd say go for it. I managed to get 10.9 installed and stable, even with the App Store and other features. You can find drivers for almost any hardware, especially when you factor that like Linux, plugging in a device almost always Just Works with Mac. The project has brought USB3.0 and other current-gen drivers to OSX. It's difficult to answer the legal aspect, but if you've legally purchased your copy of OSX, you should have a clean conscience.

In my mind, Apple have long neglected their professional market and arguably brought this upon themselves. There really ought to be a machine between the iMac and the Mac Pro, one close to a commodity PC that could be easily upgraded. However, Apple are aware that people gladly buy Macs just for the OS, and are more than happy to hold them over a barrel for it.

Xcode runs like shit on my Macbook Pro -- it's very laggy, but my hackintosh has "trashcan" Mac Pro spec'd hardware, Xcode runs like a dream, and it only cost me $600 in parts.

I did spend a good week setting it up and tweaking various Clover settings and kexts (I mistakenly copied them over manually instead of patching them in Clover so next time I upgrade, I'm going to have a fun time).

It took some work to get HDA and Bluetooth 4.0 to work, and the wifi doesn't work so well, but I use ethernet anyways. Finder also runs a little unstable, but I switched to using Pathfinder.

Overall, it's lightning fast, stable, and very responsive -- an equivalent Mac Pro would have been $4k.

Machines:

Dual Xeon | 64GB RAM | GTX960 | 4x4TB HDD, 3x5000GB SSD

(My oldest) Core i5 | 24GB RAM | GTX 680 | 3x4TB HDD, 150/250/500 SSDs

Intel Nuc i3

I'm happy to answer any questions!

Most guides I've seen are very incomplete or don't list specific models of everything -- or if they do, it's only for a specific point release.

At a glance do you think this hardware would be good for now and future versions of El Cap + Sierra when it eventually ships?

I built this back in 2014:

MOBO: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157...

CPU: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JIJUBAS

RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231...

GPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487...

SSD: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFAGCWK

HDD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236...

PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207...

Microphone: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16836431...

(Mic and overall audio performance is very important to me due to recording courses, podcasts, etc.)

For example, if this is your primary work station for completing somewhat time sensitive things (books, courses, weekly podcasts, etc.) would you feel comfy?

What type of worst case scenarios are we looking at if an update fails?

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, just that there is no guaranteed safe path and you'll always be at risk for an update borking your system. The best you can do is make maximally informed decisions and prepare for the worst. And ideally have your hackintosh be a secondary machine that can die at any moment without screwing up your life.

It's a great hobby project but (like others have said here) it's something you do because it's a fun and interesting ongoing challenge. There's really no context for anyone in which building a hackintosh is a rational choice made for purely pragmatic reasons. FWIW, I wouldn't consider saving money a pragmatic reason- the ongoing time and risk involved will always exceed whatever money has been saved, unless your time has little value and you have nothing to lose (which admittedly is the case for some hobbyists or students, but good luck getting anyone to admit that :).

I put together the above for around $750 over 2 years ago. A somewhat equiv. MBP is like $2,750 (and would still be worse in nearly every aspect spec for spec).

I value my time and sanity but some of these stories make it seem like if you have a good combo of hardware it's an hour or 2 per year just to handle some updates and a bit of chaos. I think I'm willing to trade that to save nearly $3,000 since for me it would be buying a MBP vs hackintoshing my current machine.

The problem and cause of hesitation is due to it being my only machine capable of doing my primary work.

The "secret" is to get a hardware that is supported ( http://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/july/2016 ) and wait a few months before upgrading when a new OS X versions comes out so that all upgrade bugs are fixed.

When I started I had a graphic card that didn't worked well. Every 5 or 6 days, the UI would freeze completely. I simply got a graphic card that is supported and the problem went away.

My current uptime is 183 days and I only had to reboot because I decided to add a new SSD. I also have a mac mini but almost never uses it as the Hackintosh hardware is far superior.

I've tried multiple times to switch to Linux (multiple distros) and making it play happy with 24K monitors & 224" was never easy, Windows 7/10 lags when the 24" monitors are running, so I've to keep them off when using Windows (mostly for gaming), OSX has been running the show great and smooth.

I recommend you try it, although again, the secret here is in buying the right hardware, of which there're plenty of guides online.

Good luck.

Several years ago I built a hackinstosh workstation for a family member that is still going strong. Now that Macs are on Intel's architecture setting one up is a fairly straightforward process if you pick out the right hardware. This website single handedly assisted me in the creation of that hackinstosh.

http://www.tonymacx86.com

https://tkware.info/2013/01/27/hypocrisy-thy-name-is-tonymac...

https://tkware.info/2013/01/29/honor-among-thieves-the-tonym...

(tl;dr: DRM in the installer, bogus legal threats when this was called out)

Now, there are some questions as it relates to the DMCA, but generally unless you are misusing the software for something illegal (ex hacking) then you're ok.

IANAL.

You could always hook up a real mouse too and a bigger monitor if that's what you want.

Now all of your problems go away (you have something you can code on, it's OSX which is what you like and you don't have to mess around with a Hackintosh).

I have outfitted all my family members with used Macbook Airs (average price $499) except for my son who is holding out because he believes he needs nothing but top end Graphics Cards to run games.

I know this doesn't directly address the Hackintosh question, but provides an affordable alternative to splurging on brand new latest and greatest Macs or hacking together an unsupported system.

Pros:

* It's a mac, with decent specs, on a budget. Considering I was running dual boot on a machine I already owned, it was free!

Really, that's the biggest and only one.

Cons:

* PITA to set up and make everything work, and this on a hardware configuration that is explicitly supported. In my case, to get everything working, I had to wipe my OS (since a GPT partition table is required), install, bail out and reinstall after finding the right combination of kernel flags, and then after I got it running, I had to hex edit my graphics driver (!!!) to get the second display to work.

* Updates are scary, and will ~%50 of the time lead to a broken system. Unbreaking it is easy (usually just updating and rerunning the prep tool), but still annoying.

* Never was able to get sleep mode to work. I had to disable it, since if I used it, my CMOS was wiped!

-

That sounds bad, but this was also years ago. The tools have gotten better, and I had a working system in an hour or two with a lot less screwing around just a month or so ago. Everything but sleep mode Just Worked too, though updates were still scary.

Even if it is a learning curve, it's probably one that will be at least somehow useful professionally.

For storage: Why don't you get an external SSD with a fast connection (eg Thunderbolt)? Depending on your budget, data rates can be 450 MB/sec on up to 20GB/s if I recall correctly. I am running a Samsung SSD at 450, and it does fine (a bit laggy sometimes, but it was under $100).

For GPUs: You can buy an nvidia card and mount externally. Here is a good link (though I haven't gone that route yet) : http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-build-an-external...

Hunt around on the Hackintosh forums, find a hardware list that works, get the bootloaders or kexts you may need, and give it a go. I won't say it's not worth it, because I do know people who run Hackintoshes on a daily basis without issue. However, you will not be able to upgrade easily. Every major macOS upgrade will require a rebuild.

As I own no other Apple products, it helps having an Mac in house to run the occasional Mac only software.

Here's a guide [1] with a matrix on how to install it on other NUC models.

[1] http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-el-capitan-on-the-in...

I installed a SSD not too long ago and the computer runs both VM's, no problem. One of the best decisions I have ever made.

Im running these on a Core2 Duo E8400...

FOR EXAMPLE :

"Building My $1,200 Hackintosh"

https://medium.com/swlh/building-my-1-200-hackintosh-49a1a18...

hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12024949

I spent several days playing with various settings to get everything working--would have been easier if I had chosen a motherboard that's mainstream in the hackintosh community--didn't buy the machine with this in mind. Once up and running I thought I was home free, then 10.10.2 came out, thought I'd just apply the update, took me 4 hours to get my machine back. Since I've learned more about it I can now update my machine in about 10 minutes but it's taken much trial and error to get here. I've had to read a lot of forums with conflicting advice and try to debug with endless reboots.

Since then most updates have gone smoothly, though rarely an update will bork the video drivers or the Ethernet due to changes on apple's side. I spent 2 hours one time getting sound to work. I'm glad for the learning experience but at this stage I often debate if I've spent more time on maintenance than the cost of just paying Apple their ransom for a nice machine.

If you're game for the time investment I'd say go for it. Definitely research which motherboard to use, I think that's been a big part of my struggles is having one nobody else uses I'm having to invest a lot of time in debugging my particular setup. The drivers have been the big deal, I've at various times had trouble with video, sound, Ethernet, and usb 3.0. Today I have everything but sleep working and am on the latest El Capitan release. YMMV.

I'm glad with my Macbook. It's expensive, but it works. I've thought about moving to Ubuntu, which I use at work since five years, but still lacks in some points compared to the Mac. And finding a modern laptop that just works with Ubuntu, while being significantly cheaper than the Macbook is not easy.

So, back to your question. Yes. I tried it, and hated it. It was fun at first, but like everyone says, anytime there is a problem (And oh, there will be problems) You're sorta screwed. If it is a Hobbiest machine, and not a primary work machine, then sure give it a whirl.. Just don't over invest in hardware that you can't return or reuse on something else.

What I ultimately ended up going with was a MacMini. I got a late 2012 Core i7, which is one of the last Mini's that you can upgrade ram and HDD. Maxxed out the ram, and put in a speedy SSD and it ran me about $700. This lil guy is still a beast -- with it's biggest limitation is the shitty video card.

What sucks now, is this same Mac Mini setup will run you $1400. That is bonkers.

Honestly, If you can, try waiting to see what Apple releases in the next few months. The Mini is due to be refreshed or Killed. My guess is it'll be refreshed and be given beefier video options, especially if apple releases a new cinema display.

Good luck!

This said, I still don't understand why Apple doesn't release a Mac Pro lite. A screenless laptop (Mac Mini) isn't good enough and a big screen with a laptop embedded doesn't cut it either. Personally I got a last gen Mac Pro on Ebay for a quarter of the price of a new Mac Pro. The problem is that now the upcoming MacOS update isn't compatible with it...

I've also gone the Ubuntu route and I've found that it's really only good for development and some Steam games; not to mention that with every small official update from Canonical, I'm wondering what part of my UI will break next?

- http://osxdaily.com/2016/06/14/macos-sierra-compatibility-li...

- http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/will-my-mac-r...

I started off with free parts from friends and bought a semi-supported motherboard. Since then I've upgraded a GTX, added ram, switched PSU, added TB drives and bluetooth. My advice is to get supported parts as far as possible.

I get a huge productivity boost when I can use it because I can plug in several huge displays and my best keyboards/ mice. It's exactly like having a Mac Pro except slightly more fragile.

I can foresee still using my Hackintosh for the next few years because it's performance hasn't degraded. I will just keep swapping parts and upgrading as needed.

Plan for it to fail during crunchtime, and make sure you keep your Macbook handy. My Macbook Pro and Hackintosh work synergistically to repair and update each other :)

There was one bug I couldn't get past... I don't remember exactly what it was now, but it had to do with audio out and the Sound preference pane forgetting about your speakers and having to be opened after every restart. Perhaps someone who's been working on them for a few years can describe it more precisely.

I also remember inexplicable kernel panics. And updating the OS was tricky.

I ended up using it just a few dozen times, then it mostly collected dust (I still have it today). A lot of that probably had to do with needing a portable computer every day. It was just more convenient to keep everything on a MacBook and dock it to a keyboard and monitor on my desk at home.

I used the TonyMac recommended set up, of which there are a ton of permutations, picking the i5 6600K CPU and a fairly middling ASUS Z170 motherboard. The onboard graphics is a huge step up from my mid-2011 i7 Mac Mini Server. Popped in a 960 gb SSD and it runs like a charm. I also have a MacBook Pro in hand in case things go really bad but so far no issues at all. (Except Messages, but I didn't use that on the Mac Mini so no loss there.)

Can't recommend it enough. Great rig for about $600 including case and power supply, and when I'm ready to upgrade most of that investment will carry over (SSD, case, PSU, keyboard, monitor, etc). Far more sane and cost effective than the 5K iMac I was considering.

I've been using it for 2 years and a half now. I was on mavericks for a while, skipped yosemite, and did the clover setup for El capitan. Now I have regular updates that don't break everything, and this works pretty much as well as my MBP. I'm on android, so I don't worry about iMessage, but everything else works just fine.

It might save you some bucks if you get some deals on parts, but I'd say it's almost as efficient to get a mac mini. I'd say that the only advantage, is that you can easily upgrade parts if you come across the money since you have your own case and build.

At one point i needed to port a game to iPhone, which, for context, requires MacOS and their whole stack of locked-up tools.

At first i tried to run MacOS in a VM (VmWare), which kinda worked, but moving files in and out of it caused all sorts of crashes (more like the files got stuck and couldn't be read or deleted, the system itself almost never crashed).

Then, i tried to install MacOS on a laptop (high-ish end Lenovo), with similar sort of success - it would just crash at random and WiFi wasn't working.

Finally, i went and bought a second-hand MacBook. Worked beautifully ever since.

Going back to the first sentence, i found MacOS barely usable compared to both Windows and Linux, so if all you want is to code (not for mac/iphone), torrent and watch movies, then Linux does all that with none of the Mac's problems.

So far (and I'm using it for a last two years) I'm very happy. Yosemite upgrades were somewhat painful as it took me couple of hours to upgrade each time but I couldn't be happier with El Capitan - since tonymacx86 switched over to Clover bootloader every update goes like this:

1. upgrade through AppStore to the latest OX X version

2. install new version of Nvidia drivers (OS X must be booted with disabled Nvidia GPU nv_disable=1)

I also had to apply fix for sound card but that was one-time endeavor.

So, excluding time needed for a regular OS X update, in a last year I spent maybe 3-4 hours extra on keeping Hackintosh in working state.

This meant putting off updates longer, which would lead to bigger updates, which only raised the chances of things going wrong. By the time OS X had gone up two major versions I just stopped using it and got a Mac mini and dumped more RAM in it instead.

I've got some issues with updates as many other people commented, but having a HDD specifically for timemachine backups was key for not stressing too much about it. I can try updating and risk breaking everything, and I know my stuff is going to be there even if I roll back to a previous version.

I'd definitely recommend it, but it's not as easy as buying a MBP. But the results are really good.

So you can get exactly the hardware you want and a stable experience.

I should add that due to my experiences with OSX my next desktop purchase will definitely be a mac.

This isn't the most budget-conscious setup, but it's the best of both worlds. I looked at building a Hackintosh as a single machine solution before I built my Windows machine, but decided that it wasn't worth the hassle. As best as I can tell, it's a constant uphill battle of keeping things configured correctly.

Keep in mind this was a few years ago, but I wouldn't recommend even trying wasting the time to try installing it.

Good luck!

Check out: http://www.tonymacx86.com - It is the one that I used and it was perfect.

It was super fun to build one. Buying the parts, assembling it, install the software was a little challenging but fun! Mine still works, I think about keeping it.

Once you have it setup, the biggest drag is that you have to be ready to fix the potential damage after each update.

Titan X, 32GB Ram, 6-core i7-5820, hot-swap SATA bays, water-cooled CPU/GPU.

Would definitely build another in the future, especially given the status of Mac Pros.

In my case - I tried a lot, albeit back in 2008 and 2009, but wasn't able to get it to work reliably on different machines. I ended up in a quagmire of undocumented problems and errors, forum-hunting, loading kernel modules by hand - kext hell. Do you really want to?

I would like one that can support multiple 4k monitors, but we shall see. They are due for a refresh since the current offerings are a few years old.

an iMac will do things fine, possibly with extra storage.

A hackintosh is cheaper and more flexible, but an iMac will do what you are describing.

So yes, it's totally stable and will work for you. Just be sure you get the right hardware.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/11/mini-review-test-drivin...

Going the Linux route would mean misssing out on a lot of nice software.

I personally think the IMacs have great value. Have a 2011 model, maxed out ram, running El capitan smooth as hell.

I'd still consider my MacBook my main machine even though my storage and faster processing is remote.

I was really happy with the outcome. Before I was a linux user for about 4 years so the transition was easy for me.

Maybe buying a whole PC of any kind is the wrong approach. Get a cooling tray, mouse, keyboard, monitor, and some USB3 storage.

Mac laptop, Linux desktop. Maybe someday.

You should definitely look at if an upgraded MacPro with bumped up RAM and CPU would cut it for you. If you need an upgraded GPU or you want the latest CPU (i.e. you have workloads that you know are single-threaded on the CPU and just need the fastest single core possible and 3 year old cores won't cut it for you) then a hackintosh may make sense.

My experience is that roughly every three months you can expect to burn most of a day (call it 4 solid hours) yak shaving on something. This happened to me this week where my machine wouldn't boot and just black screened. I had to boot into safe mode with the graphics card disabled + yanked and apply the O/S upgrade. That got me far enough that after a very slow boot up I could start without safe mode, which let me reinstall the bootloader. I also upgraded the graphics driver and did a few other settings tweaks and now its back and happy again and the graphics card is back in it. But there was a lot of rebooting and using my laptop to surf the web to figure out possible solutions and trying multiple different dead ends before I started to make progress in making it more bootable.

I'm pretty comfortable messing around with this stuff having started my career as a PC tech 25 years ago, and first started building my own patched linux kernels sometime in the late 90s.

I've got a friend of mine that uses macs professionally to do video editing and if she had to go through this she'd be even more dead in the water than me and would probably take her longer to recover and my advice to her has been that I don't know how to build a hackintosh that she could rely on day-to-day without suffering interruptions like this.

I'm actually happy enough with it that I'm not going back to windows and not interested in buying a MacPro, but its not for everyone.

One thing that was a showstopper for me with my Linux desktop (and I do miss my il3 tiling window manager) is that when I bought a 4k display so that I had mixed 4k + 2x 2.7k displays xorg just became a total clusterfuck. They pin all the displays to 96dpi and you can't change it and have to set font-sizes per-application -- and then AFAIK nobody has any solution to having different resolution displays that you drag windows between. I found an open issue which just had some xorg dev explaining down to everyone how they didn't really need resolutions that small other than on phone screens. On the other hand Mac + Windows Just Works(tm) and I can setup the scaling and drag windows between monitors and they don't change size. Way easier to deal with Hackintosh occasionally acting up than wading into that nightmare...

I have a GTX 980 Ti OC hooked up to a Dell 5k monitor. Performance is great for general usage and gaming.

One annoyance, which I still have to deal with to this day, I can not boot the OS with the monitor on or the kernel will panic and reboot. I have to turn the computer on, wait for the boot loader, hit enter and quickly turn the monitor off, then after about 40 seconds I turn the monitor back on and OS X is working.

For some reason, when I full frame a video that is playing in the browser the frame rate drops to like 10 fps. It's kind of annoying. It has something to do with the type of video encoding. I suspect one of them is hardware decoded and other entirely in software. Not sure the specifics. When that happens I usually just zoom in (Ctrl + scroll wheel). If I download the video and then play it in VLC it plays full screen at the full frame rate no problem. Not sure what is going on.

Gaming was completely fluid. I was playing Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft 2 fine. There are some minor issues with the gamma and mouse not working right but there are easy workarounds. Problem was just limited to HoTS. I never saw the display / mouse problems in any other program.

One other thing that annoyed me was that FCP X and Adobe Premiere would not use the GPU for anything. My MacBook Pro is much faster for 4k video work than my super beefy Hackintosh. I think it has something to do with Intel QuickSync not being recognized on the Hackintosh even though my CPU supports it. Couldn't find a way to make it work. Supposedly very little of video encoding uses the GPU for some reason.

RAW photo converters like Capture One Pro takes advantage of the GPU just fine. Processing RAW photos is about 10x faster on my Hackintosh than my MBP.

Coding works great, torrents work fine, watching movies work perfectly fine with VLC. No issues whatsoever with those things.

I also had some issues with video conferencing solutions like WebEx and Blue Jeans. I had to use my MBP for those.

Be careful of updating on a Hackintosh. Wait for the community to vet an upgrade. Sometimes you need to reinstall things after an update. I had 3 days where my graphics driver didn't work after a security update. Luckily nVidia released a driver fairly quickly.

If Apple ever comes out with a MBP I'm going to switch to that for a desktop. I'm thinking I can use an external GPU enclosure over USB-C / Thunderbolt for when I need the extra power. The fan noise is pretty loud, it sucks up a lot of power, and creates a lot of heat. That's fine when I'm gaming, but it's an annoyance when I'm just in vim coding.

Also you'll probably get lower performance, especially from your GPU, and also from your CPU if your ACPI tables aren't properly configured.