Building a Hackintosh in 2023 - Is it still worth It? The answer may surprise you.

is it still worth building a Hackintosh in 2023 in the past there have been two main reasons why people have chosen to build a Hackintosh first is price to Performance and second the ability to upgrade or repair but now that apple have almost completed their transition from Intel to arm all these reasons still valid those building a Hackintosh in 2023 still makes sense first let's take a look at Price the performance at the low end in the 200 to 400 euros or dollars price range it's pointless comparing Hackintosh to Apple silicon Max since there isn't an apple silicon Mark anywhere close to that price to compare it to instead a 300 Euros Hackintosh is competing with used Intel Max in the same price range for example on the max side 300 Euros can get you a 2018 Mac Mini with a core i380-100 a 2014 Mac Mini with the core i7 a 2013-2016 13-inch MacBook Pro or a 2015-2017 12-inch MacBook comparing the performance of those machines to my 300 Euro Hackintosh build from previous video the Hackintosh is around 50 faster than the 2018 Mac Mini and almost three times faster than the 2014 Mac Mini and the two MacBooks so at this price point a Hackintosh wins easily in terms of price to Performance where it gets a little more murky is when we step up to the 500 to 700 price bracket because now we've got the M2 Mac Mini to compare to for the price which here in Europe is 729 Euros the M2 Mac Mini is Simply the Best Value mac Apple have produced in over a decade provided that you go for the base model with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gigabyte SSD for comparison you could build a Hackintosh for around the same price based on the core i5 13400 and a used RX 570 GPU on paper this build would comfortably beat the M2 Mac Mini in both multi-core performance and in GPU performance for less money but these numbers don't tell the whole story the M2 also has the neural engine which can accelerate tasks like video analysis and image processing and it has Hardware prores acceleration meaning that editing and exporting prores videos in Final Cut Pro is going to be much smoother on the M2 Mac Mini compared to the Hackintosh despite the difference in performance on paper so given a choice between a base M2 Mac Mini and a Hackintosh of similar cost then personally I choose the Mac Mini for the support the build quality and because Macs tend to hold their resale value better than PCS of a similar age however once you start adding additional RAM or upgrading the SSD that Advantage very quickly evaporates to increase the Ram from 8 to 16 gigabytes on a Hackintosh would cost around 32 Euros that's the price difference between an 8 gigabyte and a 16 gigabyte ddr5 module to do the same on the M2 Mac Mini costs 230 euros throw one terabyte SSD on the hack and tour should be paying an extra 36 Euros that's the price difference between 256 gigabyte and one terabyte nvme drive to do the same on the M2 Mac Mini costs 463 euros so once we take the base M2 Mac Mini and upgrade the RAM to 16 gigabytes and the SSD to one terabyte that's 729 Euros computer has become a 1422 Euros computer while the Hackintosh has only gone up to 749 where suddenly it almost doubled the price and now the Hackintosh makes a lot more sense for me if it's a choice between paying 750 Euros for a Hackintosh or 1422 Euros for a Mac Mini with less performance then I'm choosing the Hackintosh even if my prores exports are going to be taking a little longer this price difference between a Mac and the equivalent PC Hardware gets even wider the higher up we go for example just to upgrade the GPU in the M1 Ultra Max studio from 48 cores to 64 cores costs 1150 euros that's 64 core M1 Ultra GPU is beaten in the geekbench 5 metal and opencl tests by a 570 euros RX 6800 in fact you could build an entire working Hackintosh computer with an RX 6800 inside it for less than it costs just to get an extra 16 GPU cores on the Mac Studio now let's talk about upgradability the M1 and M2 Mac computers of today are on upgradable the GPU is integrated into the Apple SOC and the RAM and SSD are soldered to the logic board so whatever specification you choose at the time of purchase is going to be the spec you're left with for the entire life of the machine in today's Apple silicon marks you can add external storage and that's it with the Hackintosh you can upgrade whatever and whatever you like if you have a core i5 and feel that you need a more powerful CPU you can replace it with a core i7 or a core I9 if you need more RAM you can add more modules or replace it with higher capacity modules if you want better graphics performance you can add a GPU or replace your existing GPU with a faster one and if you want more storage you can add as many internal drives as you like only limited by the number of M2 and SATA ports on your motherboard and all of these points are equally is true when it comes to repairability being modular if your hackintosh's GPU motherboard processor or Ram stop working you can just replace that part if anything dies on a real Mac because everything is now integrated you're looking at buying an entire new computer or at the very least replacing the logic board which is often almost as expensive as a new computer anyway even if the only issue is a faulty Ram chip that would have cost thirty dollars to replace if it were possible finally to get the most obvious downside out of the way Apple have switched from Intel to using their own silicon finale all current MAC models so any Hackintosh you build now will have a finite compatibility with future versions of Mac OS typically in previous CPU architecture changes Apple has dropped support between three to six years after the last Mark using that CPU family was discontinued they dropped support for Motorola 68 000 in 1998. that was six years after the last 68k machine was discontinued and when Apple switched from Power PC to Intel powerpc support was dropped three years after the last PPC Mac had been discontinued since Apple are still selling the Intel based Mac Pro and only discontinued the Intel Mac Mini a few weeks ago we can safely expect Apple to support Intel Max with future OS versions until around 2026 to 2027 at least in this respect the Hackintosh is really no different to the first generation M1 Maps the M1 Max is already two years old now and since Apple generally drops OS support for older machines after around five to six years it's likely that we'll see them dropped around the same time or soon after the Intel support is dropped even when the first version of Mac OS is released the drop support for Intel those old machines will likely still get security updates and will still be able to run the latest versions of software for three to four years after that for example the most recent version of Final Cut Pro still works on Max running Big Sur released back in 2020 so to summarize does it still make sense to build a Hackintosh in 2023 yes the reasons that people have built hackintoshes are still true better price to Performance and the ability to upgrade or repair even with apple switching to arm right now in almost every scenario building a Hackintosh will get you a computer that's faster cheaper easier to upgrade and easier to repair than a real Mac at least on desktop laptops though are a different story Hackintosh laptops are limited to integrated Graphics when running Mac OS and because of that you can't use a CPU more recent than 10th gen since the newer Intel igpus aren't supported in Mac OS if you already have a laptop with an 8th 9th or 10th gen Intel CPU and you want to install Mac OS Venture as a second operating system that's one thing but buying a new laptop now specifically to use as a Hackintosh would be a really bad idea if it's a laptop you need then I would definitely go with a MacBook but just as with the desktop Max Apple's upgrade prices are crazy expensive so for Best Value stick with the base models that's it for this video thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: BarTech TV

Views: 134,691

Keywords: apple, hackintosh, m1, m2, macs, macos, ventura, 2023, worth it

Id: 4m5iUiRN4YQ

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023