2 years ago, while I still had just a Macbook Air, I built a gaming PC, but choose all the hardware from the tonymacx86 guide so I could use it also for iOS development.
Last year I bought a Broadwell rMBP and relegated the Gaming PC to just gaming.
Imho, too much work to mantain it updated and properly working. If I was still in high school, I could live with all the cons, but as a working freelancer, I won't.
I did this for about 7 years (although with a Hackintosh, not a Mac). These days I have my Hackintosh, a gaming PC and a console, but that's obviously only a thing that you can do with a good amount of disposable income.
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.
Too much work. Had my fair share of building PCs or flashing ROMs on Android. When I buy an iMac Pro I will be 100% Apple-invested. I got tired of tinkering on minor stuff, I want to build things and have small logistical resistance while doing so.
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.
I built a crazy fast Hackintosh using the intel 8 core 5960x CPU. 17000 on Cinebench. However I sold it a week ago.
Being iOS developer really sucked, as I needed to upgrade OS X for Xcode but the CPU wasn't supported with Sierra for 6 months.
Also I spent at least 2 weeks of work on it during the year I had it. So not worth it. But there are slower cpus that are better supported. It was fun the days it worked though:)
At the time, I wanted a gaming pc, 2-3 years later I wanted something to work with and Hackintosh worked surprisingly well. Besides some caveats, I am more than impressed.
My system has an i5 4590,16GB ram and an r9 380. At the time, something along these lines would have cost me double. Plus, this PC was a wip.
During the pandemic I switched jobs and got a new MacBook Pro... it failed, then it failed again, and again. I sent it back a few times and each turn-around took a couple of weeks.
Whilst that happened I still had to do some work and fell back on my gaming PC. It wasn't a good PC, just an entry level gaming PC. Yet I found it out-performed my MBP for a load of things I cared about: Running Google Meet without fans spinning to full speed, reactivating a Google Doc tab almost instantly rather than it appearing to be blank for 30 seconds. Things like that.
The MBP finally got repaired, but I've owned that for barely 2 years now (it was new at the time) and it's been out of action about 10% of the time. In the meantime my desktop has been rock solid and reliable.
Recently I figured I'd do something different... sell the entry level gaming machine and build a desktop with work in mind. The result has been really great, with a silent and powerful desktop based on components I like and that work together. It runs Linux, and a surprise to me I'm also running Windows. Everything just works, and it all works well and the computer is fantastic at every task I throw at it. This includes local dev, compiling things, lots of meetings, webinar editing, and some occasional gaming post-work.
I still have the MBP... it's not a primary work device, my experience with Apple means I don't trust the machine at all, but for a travel device it feels fine and it's that which gave me confidence to go all-in on a desktop.
Yeah I do build $1500-2500ish gaming PCs every few years. I game a lot less than I did a decade ago, maybe a few times a month, so I wanted OSX around when I wasn't. But I'm done building hackintoshes. I had a really nice one the last 3 years waiting on the Mini to ever (because we gave up) update and it did. I was really excited to use that with OSX as my daily and flip to Windows + egpu when I gamed. I'm glad I looked into it to verify it ran egpus horribly (if at all). I didn't expect there to be any issues with that. Figured it'd be perfect.
So now instead I've got a "gaming" desktop that sits pretty idle and a MBP again.. like usual.
yes I found myself exactly in that situation.
Got a MacBook Pro 15'' mid-2015 which was falling apart.
I did not trust Apple with the whole M2 and abandoning support for Windows Bootcamp.
I made myself an hackintosh. Paid pretty much like an iMac but with everything maxed out.
Still missing the GPU because of the crypto shortage but that's all another story.
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.
I've done this to build for MacOS, and it still becomes like a tax as the hardware ages out and Apple insists you have the latest OS to publish to their stores.
I built a high end machine a few years ago. Quad core. 6gb RAM, fastest gpu available at the time. All quality parts, in excess of $1500. Installed Win 7.
I barely ever used it. I have a late 2009 MacBook that I use daily. About 6 months ago, I decided to turn my desktop into a Hackintosh. Put OS X on it.
Ever since, I use the desktop at least as much as my laptop now. I've determined it's the OS that's more important than hardware. Even with high end hardware, I can't work with Windows. Put Mac OS on the very same hardware and it becomes a powerhouse.
In late 2013, I decided I really wanted a new computer. And after looking at my bank account, I decided that a good way to treat myself without going totally overboard financially would be be the 2012 Mac Mini with the quad-core i7. I liked the machine very much, I eventually upgraded the RAM, but by late 2016, I was no longer happy with the machine's performance.
At that point, I took a look at Apple's lineup and found their machines underpowered, overpriced (at least compared to my budget), and some part of me no longer liked OS X as much as I had initially.
I waited for Ryzen to become available and for the first time in more than a decade, I built my own PC and am now back to using GNU/Linux. About 20 months later, I am very happy with my decision. But I might very well have chosen another Apple machine if they had one with reasonably current hardware, at a reasonable price, which I could have upgraded later on. It is sad, because they sure know how to build a sweet computer.
Note: AFAIK, Apple computers are significantly more expensive in Europe, so the price-performance ratio might be more favorable in the US.
I've had a Hacktintosh from 2016 until end of last year.
Initially I just did it because I assembled a pretty good PC for gaming, but for work stuff I liked macOS more, so dual booting was a nice option!
This was also before the M-series chips, where you had to pay a hefty premium to get better Intel processors, and also (imo) Apple increasingly struggled with the heat produced by the chips.
Things got a bit more annoying a couple years later, when Apple had their fallout with NVIDIA and would not sign their drivers anymore, which meant I had to buy a cheap AMD GPU to use for macOS.
End of last year I changed a couple of components, including the GPU, in my PC and then decided the hassle with two GPUs was just not worth it for me anymore; so I bought a Mac studio.
I gained some and lost some with this transition. I'm no longer worried about major software updates, it's nice that I don't have to deal with complicated config files for the bootloader every once in a while, and of course there were some minor bugs too.
But I kind of miss the convenience of dual booting, with shared IO and drives. Now I need a network switch, USB-hub and have to toggle between monitor inputs. So yeah! Wasn't all bad!
Anyways, I think it's very cool that there is this community of people that write and maintain special bootloaders and drivers to make it all possible!
Last year I bought a Broadwell rMBP and relegated the Gaming PC to just gaming.
Imho, too much work to mantain it updated and properly working. If I was still in high school, I could live with all the cons, but as a working freelancer, I won't.
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