Don't underestimate the Hackintosh community --- if they could create an SSSE3 emulator to allow installing macOS on CPUs that didn't even have the required instructions, and completely rebuild kernels too, I don't think getting macOS to run on whatever other non-Apple ARM system happens to become popular is out of the question.
It’s really quite fun. Maddening at times, but fun.
For me, back in the day, it was about power: I wanted a Trash Can Pro for development (I had a fully-specced retina MacBook Pro) but I didn’t want to pay Apple tax; I already had a gaming rig. So I dual booted.
At some point “Because it’s technically possible” is a huge motivator for some reason. I was doing Hackintosh circa 2014-2015 and even then, barely knowledgeable about software, I was able to hack through all sorts of esoteric kernel and kext issues to get my machine running. A decade later as a software engineer I still can’t explain half of the issues I encountered and overcame back then. Mostly due to incredibly intelligent hackers and other enthusiasts like myself sharing issues and how they resolved them on forums.
Can’t speak to others but I at the beginning of all this (late 2000s?), I used to build Hackintoshes and briefly sort of made it my life’s purpose to turn all my friends’s Windows PCs into dual boot.
For myself, I needed a lot of parallel processing, and Mac Pro back then just got you so far.
For friends, it was because I’m a Mac shill. This was my way of getting them to buy a Mac when the future of the platform was still a little uncertain.
I still have a “MacBook Nano” which was an ASUS netbook that dual booted
iOS development has to be performed exclusively under macOS. Effectively, many iOS developers not only do not want to pay for Apple hardware that is usually grossly overpriced for its capabilities, but also strongly desire to use absolutely top-of-the-line non-Apple hardware that is way more powerful than what Apple is offering, to run their daily macOS development workstations.
... And hacking entire operating systems under virtual machines is just fun :).
> do not want to pay for Apple hardware that is usually grossly overpriced for its capabilities
This is the myth that just won't die even though every fair comparison of Mac hardware to available PC hardware, carefully matching feature for feature, reveals prices within $100 of each other. What you don't want to pay for is the features that you're not interested in, such as perhaps Thunderbolt ports.
Apple still makes a 40-50% margin on every iPhone sold. The iPhone could be the cheapest smartphone around, and it would still be generally agreeable that Apple has enormous profit margins.
Try 119% margin. It costs Apple $501 to make an iPhone 14 Pro Max, and the company sells it at a base price of $1099. But that is iPhone, not Mac. Apple's net profit margin as of September 30, 2022 is 25.31%, and that is due to their razor thin margins selling Macintosh hardware.
I don't know about cost effectiveness of Apple laptops, since I never use small-screen devices for daily work, but if you are willing to put together a desktop workstation with your own hands from components you hunt down individually at online sales and install the free Linux, you will not spend even half of the cost of a Mac Pro, which has not even been upgraded by Apple since 2019. The 2023 Mac Pro is to cost from $6K to the insane $10K.
> if you are willing to put together a desktop workstation with your own hands from components you hunt down individually at online sales and install the free Linux, you will not spend even half of the cost of a Mac Pro
Show me this put together beige box, and I will show you a machine with missing features found in the Mac Pro. Then you will say, "I didn't want that stuff, I would never use it," but when added in, the prices will be within a close margin.
> when [all Apple-chosen hardware features] [are] added in, the prices will be within a close margin
I do see your point, but even if that's so, the problem of Apple hardware inaccessibility to an average computer hardware buyer cannot be considered as "resolved" or "unavoidable", but only pivots from the circumstance of "Apple forcing high profit margins on hardware buyers" to "Apple forcing a set of (unwanted, yet costly) hardware features on hardware buyers" (through the lack of appropriately varied hardware models and hardware configuration options).
Which is too bad, because if Apple hardware was appropriately inexpensive while delivering the features that I do care about, I would probably consider switching to their hardware and macOS as my primary O/S. (... But then again, maybe not - I really like the latest Linux KDE/Plasma.)
Then margin on Macintosh hardware is notorious for being slim. Where it seems they make their money is in the options for more RAM and larger storage. But Apple doesn't make much profit on the base configurations of any Mac, and until they started charging a premium for more RAM or storage, Apple didn't make much profit on any Mac configuration. Apple's history bears this out, as Apple only started growing wildly with the introduction of iPod and iTunes Store, and again with the introduction of iPhone and iPad.
To me, because those expensive extra features on a Mac are not optional, I still consider it way overpriced. The only reason many of those little extra boosts are so expensive is because they simply aren't broadly in demand.
And of course the physical characteristics - yes, that ASUS laptop has the same or a slightly better technical spec than the MacBook Pro that I want, but it's also made out of plastic and it's half-an-inch thick!
Shortly after the M1 released, this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25064593