A Farewell to Hackintosh

It hardly seems possible that it has been more than 8 years, 5 moves, 4 jobs, 3 cars, 2 states and 1 global pandemic since I first assembled the Hackintosh.

(I’m going to go cry now)

That’s a long time for a system to run. And while we’ve faced a few disasters (a dead SATA port and too damn many Windows 10 EFI partition corruptions), I can’t really see it as having been any bumpier a ride than using a standard model, even though OS updates were a far cry from push-button.

The more things change…

Not much has changed since the original spec. Hard drives were replaced halfway through for a 1TB and a 500 GB model. I swapped out the original graphics card for a RX 580, as NVIDIA had given up on producing new drivers for macOS. I also replaced my bluetooth nub for a newer version that provided better support for a peripheral I only used twice.

I had expected to upgrade the RAM and the processor, but Intel changes their processor socket more often than MCU movies come out, and the 8GB of RAM I started with was enough overhead until only recently.

But while the rest of the rig remained the same, usage patterns changed over time. Out of the gate, I used the Firewire PCI card quite a bit. While it didn’t take long for USB 3.0 to slowly but surely replace all my old Firewire-using accessories, the card was still necessary for making the transition.

The points made in my 1.5-year review remain true 6.5 years later: I still never used the Thunderbolt 1 ports or the swappable hard drive bays. Which is just as well, as it turns out swapping hard drives really confuses the heck out of the motherboard’s UEFI.

Three strikes

But as the title of this post implies, I’m writing this all in review because I am moving on from the Hackintosh and Hackintoshing. Coming to this decision was something of a one-two-three punch.

First, in October, catching COVID-19 and getting quarantined made me realize how much I missed having a laptop.

Then, in November, Apple killed all future hardware compatibility and put a countdown on future software compatability.

And finally, in December, the most recent EFI partition corruption occurred that also caused the delay in finishing the Nutopia stream series.

Since then, I’ve picked up a MacBookPro on sale (16″, Intel), dropped the Rx 580 and the Elgato HD 60 Pro into Thunderbolt 3 enclosures, and cleaned up the Hackintosh in preparation to sell it off as a second-hand PC. Yes, it’ll have the GTX 660 back in it, but with the crypto mining craze devouring the video card supply beggars can’t be choosers.

Rationalizing the end

My feelings over it all are a mixed bag.

Ever since building my first computer, I’ve been itching to do it again. That now won’t actually happen. With USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, PCIe 4.0 and DDR 4 RAM becoming common recently, the old Hackintosh — though still performing admirably — certainly wasn’t going to last me another 8 years. The time was ripe for putting together another long-term workhorse, but the Apple silicon announcement sucked the wind right out of my sail. There wasn’t any sense making a new hackintosh that would outlive Apple’s support for x86 platforms, especially if I was locking into last-gen Intel processors that weren’t yet doing PCIe 4.0. Also of note is the hackintoshing procedures have changed vastly since I began. While there are a lot more pieces of hardware that are well-supported, I’d be learning the software process from scratch, with all the nuances and workarounds I learned not even remotely relevant to current generation installation tools.

Perhaps, when the time comes to actually move on to an Apple Silicon platform (assuming it doesn’t end up a big bust somehow), I’ll also build a new PC solely for streaming. Though if I get my hands on a KFConsole, I’d end up robbing myself of a building experience anyway.

On the other hand, I no longer miss laptops. I’ll have a cleaner desk. I’ll use less electricity. I’ll be able to tinker when I want to instead of when I have to. And the new laptop easily outperforms the 8-year-old big rig, though thermals do become an issue when I start doing crazy things like emulate DirectX 11 compatibility.

But for now, the era of the computer version of spending my weekends under the hood of a Trans Am in my driveway while not wearing a shirt has ended. And while it’s probably best not to leave you visualizing a shirtless me, that’s what you’re getting today.