Abyssinia, Hackintosh
After two years of service, my Hackintosh has been retired. Well, the Mac half has. The Windows half is still in the middle of in the middle of Jedi: Fallen Order.
The story, for those unfamiliar (aka everybody): two years ago, the iMac that took me through film school and my first years in Los Angeles finally kicked the bucket. While I have no doubt that I killed it through a combination of multicam video editing, YouTube, and Overwatch, it doesn't change the fact that my iMac was how I looked for work, wrote my stuff, and edited the then-still-alive Blue Post Podcast.
I nabbed the first appointment I could get at a nearby Apple Store and had them take a peek inside. By the time they finished their tests, they determined that the logic board (Applespeak for motherboard) had failed. The cost to repair my six-year-old machine: $800 (almost).
So there I was, mostly broke, unemployed, and still in need of a computer. These were also the dog days of Apple's updates for the Mac, so machines on the low-end weren't great — the Mac mini of the time was basically an expensive paperweight with an HDMI port — and a full-on replacement was more than I could rationally spend on a new computer. After all, I still needed money for groceries.
While my roommate was at work, he would let me borrow his laptop so I could research my options. Since Los Angeles is a land of entertainment professionals who swear by the Mac, I discovered a few local retailers who sold used devices. I could get an iMac that was only a few years older than the dead one on my desk. For $800.
Unless I sacrificed video editing and limited my video games to text-based adventures, I was going to spend $800 on an old machine¹. And buying an old computer that I would need to replace soon thereafer felt like literally throwing money away. And then I remembered hackintoshing.
Months earlier, while still gainfully employed, I had started planning to build my own gaming computer. Bootcamp on my iMac was fine, but the graphics card was getting old. And while my iMac could run circles around the average PC when I bought it, the fact I couldn't upgrade my graphics card put games like Grand Theft Auto V or The Witcher 3 out of reach². Having a dedicated gaming machine that I could update over time would alleviate that problem, and would enable me to spend less money on a replacement for my iMac³.
I realized that with a bit of tweaking (and a few sacrifices around the CPU, memory, and hard drive), my planned gaming system could work as a hackintosh, and it would only cost me — wait for it! — $800.
I thought about it for a few days. There are some functions of MacOS that won’t work on a hackintosh, and spending $800 to build a new machine that should run MacOS is a tad riskier than buying an old machine that will run MacOS. But my financial sense won out. I had been planning to build a gaming computer and on replacing my iMac with a new one at some point in the future. As much as it may have seemed foolish in the short term, in the long term I would end up spending less money overall — buying an old machine would have also cost me hundreds, and wouldn’t change either long term goal. By building the machine, I would be spending money I was going to spend anyway, only earlier than intended and during a period of strained personal finances.
I loved it. I loved building my computer. I loved tinkering with my computer. I can’t wait until I can build another computer⁴.
I will never use a hackintosh as my primary system ever again.
Yes, the Hackintosh was sometimes fun to tinker with⁵ — especially when I was in-between jobs and had the time — this past year was like watching the slow gradual death of my love affair with my machine. After so many Final Cut crashes and Nvidia driver glitches, I knew that the death of the Hackintosh was inevitable. It's untenable to have work come to a standstill because your machine is, well, hacked. It was simply a matter of having the money on hand to buy a new iMac.
Which I did back in December.
As much as I enjoyed building my own computer.there is something rather pleasant about buying a computer, only having to worry about changing a few options — if any — and knowing that the machine will work⁶.
I could've bought a piece-of-shit Windows machine, but unemployment was miserable enough on its own.
Yes, my machine could run the games, but even with my shitty eyesight, 20fps at low settings isn't playable.
While Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere will take advantage of a graphics card, since video editing has ended up being more hobby than career, spending the hundreds of dollars Apple would charge to upgrade the graphics card wouldn't be worth it if the computer wasn't being used for gaming.
My current thought is to update the graphics card every 3rd generation, and to build a new computer every six years. With the slowdown in CPU innovation we saw this past decade (looking at you, Intel), I could probably use this system for more than six years. But, if part of the fun is building the machine, why not build a new one if I can afford it?
I won’t say that I’ll never build another hackintosh (hello, media server!), but one will never again be my primary machine.
To provide even more context in how replacing the Hackintosh with an iMac made my work easier: The Geekbench scores between the two machines were close. The Hackintosh won both graphics and single-core, and the iMac won multicore. You’d think that’d mean I’d see little improvement, but Final Cut imports and exports of Hashtag General broadcasts went from being measured in hours to minutes. The advantage of running MacOS on a machine built to run it makes a difference.