A year and a half ago, we made a video wherein
a $1,000 Intel Hackintosh was bested by—what was then—the first Apple Silicon M1 Mac mini and I
subsequently declared the future of Hack Macs all but dead. That’s certainly still true as we’ll
discuss later, but the video’s title ended in a question mark and Betteridge’s law of headlines
states that any title ending in a question mark can be answered with “no.” So, this is the real
last hackintosh—right? I call it Winter’s Last Whisper: a computer running macOS Ventura and an
impressive one at that. It has 10Gbit Ethernet, DisplayPort passthrough via Thunderbolt enabling
use of an Apple Studio Display or ProDisplay XDR, really, it does everything you’d expect a real
Mac to do—but better—because it outperforms the $4,000 M1 Ultra Mac Studio. Oh, and it does
so at half the cost. [5-8 sec cool intro] Apple’s done releasing Intel-based Macs, but
they're not done supporting them. I mean, they still currently sell an Intel
machine—the Mac Pro. Time will only tell how many future versions of macOS
will support x86, but Apple has set the precedent of maintaining their computers
for 6-7 years. That does not mean, however, that hackintoshes will have that same long-term
support. Starting with 2017 Macs, Apple’s [T2](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/dwslx9/comment/f7lp8fa/) coprocessor acted as a controller for
disks, SMC, audio, and more. As of yet, there's been no way to bypass or emulate it and
so it's possible that as soon as later this year, Hackintoshes will be stuck forever on
the last supported version of macOS. But that day has not yet come and
current-generation processors are supported in Ventura so we elected to use an Intel i7-13700K
cooled by a Noctua DH-15 which I feel hits a great price-to-performance ratio and certainly packs a
punch with 8 performance and 8 efficiency cores. What's not current gen is our GPU. In Winter's
Last Whisper, we're using an AMD 6800XT. Apple added graphics support for Navi 2x in late
2021 upon the release of updated workstation cards for the Mac Pro. Which answers the question: why
no current-gen card? There's still no Radeon Pro variant of the 7000-series—and that’s only variety
Apple uses—but even when AMD *does* roll those cards out, there's no guarantee Apple will sell
or support them. Alas, it's no matter because this card is still an excellent value and superb
performer—particularly considering Apple Silicon's achilles heel has always been GPU performance.
As for our other components, arguably, we went overkill: the motherboard is a Gigabyte Z690
Aero D—an ATX-sized board that's blinged out with on-board Thunderbolt, 2.5Gbit AND 10Gbit
LAN, DisplayPort passthrough, a high-impedance headphone amp and more. There's 64GB of DDR5-5600
memory in addition to an 1TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD that slots into the board. All those guts fit
fabulously in Fractal's handsome Torrent ATX case and an attic-mounted Corsair 1,000W 80+ Gold power
supply gives the build it's first signs of life. The looks befit the price. A price that isn't
cheap, but not outlandishly expensive either. We could have gone a lot more thrifty on several
components, but I really wanted to match the Mac Studio spec for spec as cheaper hackintoshes
often skimp on I/O, disk performance, power supply quality, and more that Apple truly does an
excellent job with but seldom receives credit for. Turning a pile of PC parts into a functioning
Hackintosh has become more nuanced than it used to be. A few years ago, you could download a couple
of tools to auto-compile a thumb drive and using the Clover bootloader be up and running with a new
hackintosh in minutes. OpenCore, the new norm and what I used for this build is *not that.* Creating
a hackintosh in 2023 has a steeper learning curve and is more involved than it used to be, but
it's worth it because OpenCore has a number of huge advantages: it's built with modern UEFI
standards permitting better hardware compatibility (like support for AMD processors) and offering
resilience against future macOS updates —it's rare you can't just update your machine like
any other Mac, there's way fewer crashes and hackintosh "oddities” due to strict adherence to
Apple's bootloader structure and OpenCore supports FileVault and Secure Boot ensuring a safe macOS
experience on a non-Mac. And while it's a little tricker to build an OpenCore installer, the
post-install experience is much better and the incredible documentation doesn't just tell you how
to make a hackintosh, but teaches you how and why things work arming you with knowledge you'll want
should future troubleshooting become necessary. I do hope I haven’t scared you off because it
really isn’t THAT hard. You install macOS onto a USB drive, add the base OpenCore files which is as
easy as dragging and dropping, and then you follow the guide to determine which drivers and kexts
are needed for your given hardware. Also easy. Then, our ACPI configuration. …our what? In short,
ACPI is a standard that helps your computer’s hardware and software communicate with each other
to manage power and system configurations. ACPI is the conductor of an orchestra and macOS, a system
strictly designed for its hardware, freaks out when the conductor deviates from the sheet music
macOS is looking. It’s not a jazz musician. So, we have to use what are called description
table patches to help align our musician and conductor using modified sheet music they can both
understand. Using your target machine, you run a Python script called SSDTTime which dumps your
ACPI information from your PC’s firmware into a file that you can then automatically patch to
ensure there’s no conflicts between your hardware and what macOS expects. Pretty easy. So when
what’s the hard part? Where most people get fouled up is with the config.plist file. This is an XML
document you modify that basically handles the whole boot process by making sure all those files
we added are properly injected in addition to a few other things like spoofing the model of Mac
we’re using and its corresponding serial number. Where people get stuck is through lethargy.
It’s really tempting to find someone who has the same or close to the same hardware as you, copy
their config.plist file, and boom! You’re done. Don’t do this because there are SO MANY
variables at play and with a little patience, you can build a config.plist file all by yourself
that’s guaranteed to run on your hardware. It’s not hard and the documentation walks you
through the whole process. Don’t cut corners. Once your config.plist is built, you can boot
right into the macOS installer and the OS is none the wiser. You’re on a Mac! But we’re not done.
Once you’ve finished installing the OS, there are a few steps afterwards we need to follow: for one,
we need to move OpenCore to your machine so you can boot it without the USB and speaking of USB,
we need to address that. macOS is limited to 15 USB ports and my board has more than that with
the internal headers on the board and the IO. Additionally, macOS sucks at guessing which
port is what speed and you’ll run into issues if you don’t define that. Yet again, there’s
another great tool that mostly automates this for you and once you’re finished with that, well,
you’re likely to be running a golden Hackintosh! Our build has functioning Bluetooth, WiFi,
2.5Gbit, and 10Gbit LAN. Consequentially, we can use AirDrop, Handoff, and other macOS
niceties. iMessage, the App Store, and Safari all work great. I’ve got functioning Thunderbolt
3 for high throughput devices and I can even pass DisplayPort over Thunderbolt using my
motherboard’s internal header connected to my GPU. System Integrity Protection and FileVault are
both enabled, audio works perfectly, it’s nearly a perfect Mac. Nearly. There are three weird bits
about this computer: #1 I had to disable 3 USB ports at the back of the machine to come in under
my 15-port limit, #2 sidecar doesn’t work because there’s no support for 13th gen iGPU drivers, and
#3 Intel’s big-little core design isn’t respected by macOS and the operating system believes the
performance and efficiency cores to all be the same so that balance of power efficiency and
performance you’d get in Windows by scheduling tasks optimally is lost. Theoretically, it
could even impact our system’s total performance in macOS; theoretically. Practically….
haha…. practically this machine is insane. How insane? Well why don’t we let the numbers
speak for themselves? Starting with everyone’s favorite heavily Mac-biased benchmark,
Geekbench 6, Winter’s Last Whisper hangs really closely to the multi-core
performance of the M1 Ultra but—much to my surprise—obliterates its single-core
performance with nearly 15% faster results. In the GPU department, Geekbench’s Metal Compute
test also gives the hackintosh the upper-hand by more than 30%. Moving to media tests because
YouTuber, we see that in another synthetic load, Cinebench, our Hack Mac silences the M1 Studio
yet again. That trend continues as we move into actual video editing applications
like DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro. Hilariously, we had a number of effects errors
causing Final Cut to crash on Apple Silicon—bugs that haven’t been fixed in almost a year—the
Intel hackintosh never crashed running Final Cut even once. Furthermore, we did notice general
performance to be improved on the hackintosh over our M1 Max Mac Studio when scrubbing through RAW
footage in all NLEs. This behavior didn’t exhibit itself of course with H.265 nor ProRes footage due
to the M1’s native media engines, but that extra computing oomph does come in handy for formats
like RED RAW. On the other hand, when running PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro, the hackintosh
finished behind both Apple Silicon machines. Why? Well, Apple Silicon’s video engines are designed
to encode and decode a myriad of file formats insanely quickly and clever memory swap helps
write stuff to disk with incredible speed. What it lacks in raw compute—needed for, say, applying
effects—is more than made up for elsewhere. Moving on from video, benchmarks in both
creative and development environments give our Ventura-veneered PC the dub time and
time again. But where we notice the greatest performance disparity is in a category that
should be no surprise to anyone that’s been paying attention to Apple Silicon: GPU
performance. Running Unigine Heaven, our PC does spin its fans up a tiny bit (even
with our modified fan curve), though the sound it creates a much more pleasing whooshing sound when
compared to the Mac Studio’s shrill screams. At nearly double the performance and half the cost,
things are starting to look a bit embarrassing. Moving to real-world gaming performance playing
Tomb Raider on both machines, it gets worse—or better, I guess, dependent on which side you find
yourself. Boot that same hackintosh into Windows, load up the same title, and the machine pulls
away yet again. And that really is the benefit to a hackintosh—it’s an equally performant
Windows computer with a huge catalog of games if that’s your thing. Another thing that
can be done super well in macOS Hacktura, Windows 11 virtualization. No need
to rely on a crappy ARM variant of Windows—this is full-hog x86 Windows if you
don’t want to dual-boot in between systems. I love Apple Silicon and think Apple’s
currently making the best computers it has ever made. But I also think that there’s
been this weird idolization of Apple Silicon chips—this perception that Apple is ahead in
every department. Make no mistake, Apple’s chip design is leading the consumer industry in a
lot of areas as I talked about in my recent video concerning software-defined hardware—definitely
go check that out if you haven’t seen it—but Apple’s chips are not market leaders in raw
performance and they never have been. Frankly, save for the M1 Ultra, Apple has yet to make a
chip that even gets hot enough to not work in a thin-and-light laptop. Running at full tilt—with
absolutely everything maxed out—including power delivered over every single port on the M1 Ultra
Mac Studio—a wattage you’ll never even get close to in the real world, the machine pulls 215W
from the wall. Compare that to our hackintosh, the CPU can draw up to 350W just by itself. When
surfing the web, our hackintosh pulls more than 7X as much power from the wall as our M1 Max
Mac Studio and under load, say when gaming, it’s more than 5.5X. In fairness, our M1 Max
vastly underperforms the Hackintosh when gaming but even adjusting for watts per frame, Apple
Silicon still finds itself 2.2X more efficient. But, in a home environment, what does that really
matter? Because even as a heavy computer user, you’re likely only to find a cost savings of
$50-100 in energy annually. It’d take you nearly 30 years to pay for—in energy—the $2,000 premium
the Mac Studio would cost you over our Hackintosh today. So then why would you ever buy a real
Mac? First, smaller power draw means a smaller thermal footprint which results in a smaller
computer—significantly smaller. The Mac Studio is insanely powerful for how tiny it is. Second, you
don’t want the hassle of building and maintaining a Hack Mac. The trope “it just works” isn’t
a trope; a real Mac just works… all the time. Third, you identify a moral issue when
willfully violating the macOS EULA you agreed to—that you wouldn’t install the
operating system on unauthorized hardware. But last, and perhaps most importantly, Apple
Silicon is a clear path forward. Applications will only continue to be more and more optimized
for the co-processors and specialized hardware blocks that have been designed to handle specific
workloads better than general-purpose compute cores found on our Hackintosh. And when Apple
does finally get around to releasing a chip that isn’t designed to be hyper-efficient, or
thermally constrained, no, a chip designed to scream… scream it will! But until then,
we’ve got this… and this is pretty great. Let me know in the comments down below if you’ve
recently built a hackintosh—or if you plan to in the near future. Please subscribe, leave this
video a like, but most importantly, stay snazzy.
