I don't understand. Do you imagine there isn't a young generation of time rich cash poor tinkerers now? Why would the idea of a hackintosh suddenly become obsolete because you can afford one now and don't have time? Nothing about your statement logically follows.
He’s just parroting a usual HN-ism of ignoring the topic and talking about themselves. I’ve seen the “I used to tinker but now I don’t” line a hundred times as well as the “this doesn’t apply to me so I don’t care - let me tell you how”.
Isn't that the truth. For a site with the word "hacker" in it there seem to be so few of them. I can't imagine letting all that curiosity die out of me like the parent comment implies.
I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had more time I'd still do it.
If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.
The funny thing about growing older is that we change, and the things that were once "I'd rather be dead than not do this" just naturally fade away, and other new exciting things take their place.
I say thus not to dampen your enthusiasm, but rather to encourage you to enjoy it to the maximum while it lasts.
Everything has a season and in that season it can seem terribly important. Perhaps an activity, or a favorite sports team, or a group of friends.
Some of that remains forever, some of it gets deferred as other things happen. It's part of life, we grow, we change, the world around us changes.
It's not that the drive is lost, it's just that it manifests in different ways, different activities, different challenges.
When you see a post like yours in 30 years time, remember this moment, and raise a glass :)
I’m going to gently pile on to the sibling comment here, and note that the “hacking” we find interesting should and does change over time. I used to spend time hacking PDP-11 assembly code to make games. That got old, and if I play a game now it’s purchased. The stuff I hack on now is more like applied math.
This is all good and natural, if it’s organic and not growing it’s probably not alive.
Ever since blogs have had comments sections, the set of people who are too lazy to make their own blogs, have been holding forth (writing, essentially, their own blog posts) in other people's blogs' comment sections.
Heck, I'm sure people were doing it on Usenet and all-subscribers-can-post mailing lists, too — using the "Reply" button on a message to mean "I want to create a new top-level discussion that quotes/references this existing discussion" rather than "I want to post something that the people already participating in this existing discussion will understand as contributing to that discussion."
In all these cases, the person doing this thinks that a comment/reply is better than a new top-level post, because
the statement they're making requires context, and that context is only provided by reading the posts the statement is replying to / commenting on.
Of course, this being the internet, there is a thing called a hyperlink that could be used to add context just as well... but what there is not, is any kind of established etiquette that encourages people to do that. (Remember at some point in elementary school, learning the etiquette around writing a letter? Why don't schools teach the equivalent for writing a blog post/comment? It'd be far more relevant these days...)
Also, for some reason, social networks all have "reply" / "quote" actions (intended for engaging with the post/comment, and so showing up as "reactions" to the post/comment, or with your reply nested under the post/comment, etc); but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) Instead, you always have to manually dig out the URL of the thing you want to cite, and manually cite it in your new post. I wonder why...
"...but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) ... "
On Usenet, if you were altering the general SUBJECT of a post, you'd reply to a comment BY PREPENDING the NEW TITLE/SUMMARY of your post to the PREVIOUS TITLE of the post to indicate that you HAD changed the GENERAL SUBJECT of the post to something else AND end your NEW TITLE with "Was..." to prefix the previous title, e.g. "Hackintosh is Almost Dead" => "My Changing Hobby Habits Was: Hackintosh is Almost Dead"
On the contrary, I was relating the article to my own experience. The thrust of the article was explaining the end of an age.
I was merely saying that we shouldn't see this as bad, it is the natural way of things. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Raise a glass to remember hackintosh, but don't mourn it.
People are asking how the fact that you make more money now is evidence of that. That's your natural ending, but it's not evidence of a natural ending.
HN community selects for these kinds of posts, in the same way that subreddits like /r/amitheasshole love overwrought girlfriend-is-evil stories.
Most often the highest rated posts on HN are from 40+ year olds who don't discuss the post at hand, they'll post a hyper-specific nostalgic story from their youth on something that is tangentially related to the post.
In fact, the older the better. If your childhood anecdote is from the 70s or 80s you're a god.
There are other things that are more interesting to build and make now than a hackintosh (with the added difficulty that trying to make a silicon compatible device may not be feasible).
Combine this with that a Mac mini that might be at the target for a hackintosh device is $600 USD ... and has the advantage that it isn't hacked together and so has better support.
The part of me that wanted to tinker with a hackintosh in my younger days is more satisfied by Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. I've even got an Onion IO over there that could use some love.
Its not that people don't want to tinker, but rather the utility that one gets for hacking together a Mac (again, note the silicon transition) is less than one gets for hacking on single board computers.
As I said in my post, the next generation will find something new to tinker on.
The idea of a hackintosh is obsolete because there are new worlds to conquer, the time of hackintoshes has come and gone. The new generation will find their own challenges, not re-hash challenges of the past.
I guess the commercial success of the platform has increased the offering in the second hand market.
Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the purchase of a mac.
