There’s been a long time since I last thought about, or even heard about a Hackintosh. But according to Mike Rundle, they’re a lot easier to build, and his results were very impressive.
Here’s his reasoning:
A few weeks back, I was at a baseball game with a bunch of my wife’s coworkers when I started talking to a developer named Ian who said he just got done building a Hackintosh and it was amazing. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the Hackintosh community in years, I actually forgot it was still a thing. Ian said the community was now organized around a website called TonyMacx86.com and it had hardware guides, build tutorials, forums, lots of updates, and had been extremely lively in the past 18 months or so as it’s now easier than ever to build a Hackintosh. When he told me how fast his custom Mac was (faster than any iMac and most Mac Pros), and how little it cost (around $1,200–1,300) it struck me as impossible. I know that Apple hasn’t updated their MacBook Pros or Mac Pros in a long time, and I know there’s an “Apple Tax” you pay when parts like RAM or a processor are included in an Apple-designed computer, but the more we talked about his build the more excited I became. It was as if someone told me, yeah, duh, of course there are flying cars, check out my flying car over in the parking lot. You want a flying car, too?
He goes into extreme detail about the process, what exact hardware he used (powerful stuff!), and also a few pointers. If you’re interesting in building a Hackintosh, or just curious what it’s like, then his post "Building My $1,200 Hackintosh" is a whopping 11 minute read.