Is Hackintoshing still worth it?

[salligood]

I've made two hackintosh machines over the years. One was running High Sierra until I upgraded components to run Monterey. The upgrade to Monterey was more of challenging than the previous hackintosh. After I upgraded the graphics card, motherboard, processor, wifi, created a new EFI, downloaded all the necessary kexts and spent countless hours on the forums troubleshooting to just get the OS to boot, I found myself wondering if it's all worth it. Did I save a little money, sure, but not as much as you think considering I have yet to find a buyer for my old graphics card, motherboard, and processor. It just seems as Apple continues down the path of not using any third party parts that the future of being able to hackintosh is on a timer with time running out.

I'm interested to hear other people's experiences and thoughts on the practical future of hacking.

 

[Anubis111]

I have started hackintosh advanture since OSX Leopard or Lion long time ago. For me, hacintoshes have become sort of hobby after so many years. So the answer is not simple. It depends on the meaning of a word ”worth”.

 

[scottkendall]

I've made two hackintosh machines over the years. One was running High Sierra until I upgraded components to run Monterey. The upgrade to Monterey was more of challenging than the previous hackintosh. After I upgraded the graphics card, motherboard, processor, wifi, created a new EFI, downloaded all the necessary kexts and spent countless hours on the forums troubleshooting to just get the OS to boot, I found myself wondering if it's all worth it. Did I save a little money, sure, but not as much as you think considering I have yet to find a buyer for my old graphics card, motherboard, and processor. It just seems as Apple continues down the path of not using any third party parts that the future of being able to hackintosh is on a timer with time running out.

I'm interested to hear other people's experiences and thoughts on the practical future of hacking.

There are many posts on this forum discussing this topic however, things to consider:

How much time do you want to spend getting unsupported hardware to work
Do you want to stay on older operating systems
IMO Z370/390 was the sweet spot with virtually the same hardware apple was using
Ventura was the last OS that to support Broadcom Wifi without patching the OS
Sonoma Might be the last year to support Intel CPU we will see in a little over a month

If you ran from High Sierra to Monterey without upgrading it might be worth it to you to stay with Hackintosh... However, it largely comes down to your use case and budget.

With Education Discount:

Mac mini - Start at 499
Mac Book Air - Starts at 899
Mac Book Pro - Starts at 1499
Mac Studio - Starts at 1799

The new iPad Pro with M4 starts at 999 + 279

While these are base numbers and grow quickly with upgrades Apple has something for everyone. Now are you going to get the best of the best without spending a premium no. Can you get something more powerful from Intel and Hackintosh for the same price? Not if you value your time and effort as money.

For $1199 you can get a Mac Mini M2 Pro with 16GB of memory that would roughly as powerful as what you are currently running without any of the worry what will break with the next upgrade.