As a long time lover of hackintoshes (couldn’t afford a real Mac as a youth but tried to make the netbook macOS dream come true), I’m quite sad to read this. The author has a very valid point that drivers are going to become increasingly complicated and difficult.
I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn’t explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes.
As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a unique source of frustration. I’ll spend hours digging through crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7 MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that shouldn’t be possible. The firmware is a version that we never released. Etc etc.
I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I’ve fixed it.
Now I’ve spent hours chasing something and I can’t help.
I had a Hackintosh and felt that any crash was 99% my fault and probably an edge case for MacOS. But in my defense, CrashReporter is way too permissive and will send a report even when the user doesn't want it done. After a app or hard crash I'll get the window that a bug report was sent and I know damn well some engineer is going to look at it and it won't make any sense that a MacBook has this particular GPU.
I've been using a Hackintosh as my daily driver for nearly 15 years and they have always been rock solid, with months of uptime consistently. It's just a matter of starting with the right hardware.
People are free to look to support the hardware they have but 've always though it's stupid not buying well supported hardware in the first place, of which there is plenty.
Nothing, I'll just stick the last usable version, just like I'm stubbornly sticking to 10.14.6. I'll fight moving up each and every version by narrowing the software I use. Already happening and it's fine.
Most days I hope that we (as a planet) get past all those obfuscated vendor lock-ins but over the last decade we’ve watched the, get worse and tighter as they get backed up by lobbied laws. And now I’m worried that you’re 100% right.
But we can still be saved by big ideas. We (modern humans) have done it before. I just hope the seeds of it are already planted.
It’s not as if the OP can’t install a different OS that does support x64 processors. The OP is describing a Hackintosh, so there is no vendor lock in. For that matter, installing alternatives on x64 based Macs is also reasonably trivial and as Apple silicon matures, so does the reverse-engineering knowledge (much like it did with the ‘commodity’ PC components used for Linux today), and the vendor lock in issue disappears.
I’m in a similar position and I’m learning the KVM/QEMU way. So I hope I’ll manage to stay on Linux and add virtualised macOS and Windows apps to my stack. If it would work as I expect, then there’s no real need to even update those virtual systems. Since I need them only for some apps that aren’t on Linux (yet?). In my case those are Adobe After Effects on macOS or Windows and Pixelmator Pro on macOS. Other apps has decent counterparts on Linux for me.
I'll add this to reasons why I'm opposed to always-on telemetry. A hackintosh should know that its crash reports will be unhelpful to Apple and not bother sending them. It's a waste of your time to deal with data coming from unsupported configurations.
I installed Snow Leopard on a 2009 MB for kicks and sent in a crash report when Safari died due to something on the modern web. I would love to know whether these still arrive at the fruit company.
I appreciate the call out that Apple (the engineering) isn’t explicitly trying to kill hackintoshes.
As an Apple engineer who deals with ACPI bugs, hackintoshes are a unique source of frustration. I’ll spend hours digging through crash logs only for things to not add up. It says it is an i7 MacBook pro but it has way too many cores. It way more memory than it should. The kext versions are a weird mismash that shouldn’t be possible. The firmware is a version that we never released. Etc etc.
I do my best to fix these sorts of issues but hackintoshes make it hard to reproduce the crash conditions. Which means being confident about a root cause and hard to verify that I’ve fixed it.
Now I’ve spent hours chasing something and I can’t help.
(Opinions are my own, etc etc).