Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) continues to pursue his goal of building the fastest Mac in the world. He thought he had it, releasing his mega-Hackintosh on the very day Apple announced the new Mac Pro. Unlucky that.
But he perseveres, bringing on a friend to help up the technology. Entertaining and ubergeeky.
Faster than a maxed out Mac Pro? Good luck fool.
Linus and Anthony are great (and unbiased), so this will be fun to watch as it develops. I doubt they’ll have much trouble beating the new Mac Pro as new Ryzen CPU’s and AMD GPU’s become available in the fall. Apple seems to equate “pro” with “xeon” which isn’t necessarily the case in the real world.
Their main advantage is that they’re not limited to Intel CPU’s and AMD GPU’s or any hardware for that matter. Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, and it will be interesting to see how much of a savings there is with the hackintosh compared to the insane upgrade pricing Apple will inevitably charge for storage, etc.
As always, DIY pricing is not an apples to apples comparison. When buying retail you are paying for service and support and one stop to deal with issues. I’ve built gaming rigs for decades and whenever there is a problem the vendors blame it on other hardware and it’s very difficult to nail down support for an unreliable system.
As always, DIY pricing is not an apples to apples comparison. When buying retail you are paying for service and support and one stop to deal with issues. I’ve built gaming rigs for decades and whenever there is a problem the vendors blame it on other hardware and it’s very difficult to nail down support for an unreliable system.
Hackintoshes are never 1:1 with Macs and often people trumpet their pricing as being cheaper… but then you look at the components and they’re consumer level.
PS: watched it and they’re using a 28 core Xeon. Interesting. Results looked pretty cool too.
Of course, that’s fine for 99% of the people who will use one. But the Mac Pro is meant to be used by people who don’t want to make those compromises. They need ECC RAM because of the guaranteed precision or 28 cores because of the volume of work.
It’s not news that you can build a very fast hackintosh… but it’s still fun to watch.
They’re actually saying that (along with “this is not a tutorial”) for legal reasons.
100% agree but it will still be interesting to see where they net out (and if they can get Handoff or Messages to work).
That’s enough for me. Whatever the reasons, I’m glad it’s there. I’m well acquainted with the dissociative posturing of some hobbyists who like to make blanket assertions about all computer users. As though each of us has buckets of spare time or any interest in pursuing their hobbies.
The software side is more finicky from what reading I’ve done. Even then, while you usually can’t just blindly update, a lot of builds seem to run relatively recent MacOS stuff juts fine.
I *will* note that as they booted Anthony noted a few weird things he needed to do in order to install the OS – but things like that usually get documented well at tonyMac etc.
Me, I’m glad Apple doesn’t care about these and lets them exist. For people who really want to have a box they can tweak out, this is a great outlet.
Oh, agreed. I’m glad they have it. Who knows what they’d turn their attentions to without it? 😉
I’m glad they prefaced this with a “don’t use this as a professional machine.”
While I’ve always admired the skill it takes to build a PC from DIY parts, there are two hobbies on display here. The second is the continuing, patient nursemaiding of OS and driver updates.
Checkout the current tonymacx86 post that starts “[SUCCESS] blouse’s “Hack Pro” build…” (on the home page). Pretty sweet build.
That single core Geekbench score tops the chart (literally the very top spot)! Most 3D modeling is still stuck in single core, so base clock speed, and getting as close to a sustained turbo speed as possible, are huge.
I love that the Hackintosh and
“enthusiast”nerd communities are out there playing with this stuff, taking chances, and showing us what’s possible.Linus can be snarky but Anthony’s a refreshingly unbiased Mac fan (read all the love in the YouTube comments). They’re also a great reference for when you’re on the lookout for a new monitor, mouse or whatever…
Very few professionals need or even want a Xeon or ECC. There’s a big difference between “professional grade” and “server grade”. In my line of work which is mostly 3D modeling (Cinema, Rhino, Maya, Unreal, TwinMotion, etc.), 99% of machines are custom built Windows boxes with an overclocked i9 or Threadripper and NVIDIA GPU’s in SLI mode.
ECC is useless to us (the apps don’t even use it), and the only reasons for Xeons used to be:
1) They were the only processors available that were compatible with a ton of memory (which is no longer the case)
2) they were the only processors available with a ton of cores (which is no longer the case). Plus 3D rendering is moving away from multiicore (Cinema) that take hours to render a single static image to GPU-based which render animation in real time.
I can assure you that, in spite of the marketing hype around certain buzzwords, there are no professional 3D visual artists working in the entertainment industry saying to themselves, “I wish I had a Xeon with ECC to speed up this render that’s taking hours.” But it sure would be nice to have the option to build a Hackintosh machine dedicated to modeling and rendering… and guys like Linus and Anthony are leading the way.
Of course… they’re using a Xeon in this one 🙂
Would you really trust a professional, high stakes project to a Hackintosh? I’m always curious about these because I mostly code etc and a well specced i7 with a nice video card would be plenty for me. But I’d be really hesitant to put one at the center of my workflow where if it breaks etc my project screams to a halt.
My MacBook Pro is my daily driver. However, laptops have their limitations. So when it comes to heavy duty modeling and rendering my options are:
1) New Mac Pro for 10-20k with a slower Xeon processor and a GPU that can’t ray trace
2) Hackintosh for 5-10k that I would have to tinker with but the GPU can ray trace
3) Windows machined for 5-10k that I would have to tinker with but the GPU can ray trace
None of those options are great but the tradeoff is that I always prefer to use macOS. If it’s between the stability of a Windows 10 machine vs the stability of a Hackintosh, I’ll take my chances with the one running macOS (if for no other reason than I’d rather be using macOS when it borks). All of these 3D apps are prone to crashing, so we all autosave and back up obsessively.
It’s funny you say that. At my company we have around 300 Macs book pros a mix of 2015-2019 none are older then 4 years. About 30% are a year old.
Starting 3 years ago I’ve started building developer boxes. So far I’ve built around 100 for under $1500 a pop. These contain 32GB Ram, 16 cores, 512 NVME, 1060 or 1660.
Just today I ran a mantaince report. In the last year we have had to warranty 40% of our 2015 lineup. The battery issue helped this. Out of the other models we are about 15% warranty issues.
Each warranty takes around 1-2 weeks where we don’t have a device. Also Macs come with 1 year, extra warranty costs a good % more so we don’t do it.
Out of my builds over 3 years… I’ve had one issue where we had a power supply falure. I purchased a new one for $80 got it the next day and RMA the other. Every component has at min a 3 year warranty many others a 5 year. Longer then our hardware life cycles.
Macs have TUNS of issues the newer ones have more then the older. We see tempature issues causing failed chips, warped mainboards lots of keyboard issues.
Their RMA process is total garbage! Having to stock multiple $2400-$3500 loaner laptops just so very expensive employees can keep working.
We also have about 60 Dell laptops.All of them are 2 years old. We have had to warranty 2 of them. Both where screen isuess. Both cases a Dell rep came to our office the very next day and replaced the screen. They came with this 4 year warranty that had this service agreement at no extra cost. They are also ALOT faster than the Macs and we run Linux of them for developers.
They also cost us $1k less per a device.
So tell me… For all the hundreds of thousands we spent on Macs… What did I get?
I build my own home gaming/work PCs. No big deal.
I refuse to run OSX86 for anything other than the occasional lark every few years, because it’s useless for anything else, huge hassles.
(I have it on an Mini-ITX board in an old SE/30 case with an LCD screen, bcause I thought it’d be fun to make a “Fast Modern Mac” in a Classic Mac enclosure.
But it’s just a toy.)