Yeah that's a great point. I thought about it initially, but I got a little nervous (perhaps unjustifiably) about the Hackintosh universe being a little slapdash and then about Apple maybe issuing some under the radar OS update that bricks my machine. I'm catastrophizing, maybe, but I never pulled the trigger. That said, I never actually put in the 3-4hrs of reading I'd need to do, so I definitely wouldn't rule it out.
Do you have experience with doing the Hackintosh thing at all?
I did the Hackintosh thing for a friend on one of those 10” HP mini-laptop 5 years ago. It was delightful when it worked, however every macOS update (or OS-X back then) was a toothache—usually culminating in 2-7 hrs of googling/re-configuring etc. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the machine wasn’t this person’s main machine, or if I had waited longer before updating (so known procedures to make things work were available and not still being understood and developed by the community).
Might be a very different experience on a desktop, but definitely read up on the update experience and time-cost if you go this route.
I am currently in the middle of my own Hackintosh build on a fairly compatible laptop. If you are not prepared to blindly execute commands and run applications listed in a few different guides and then hope for the best, and you wish to grok what you're doing to your computer (so that you could, say, debug inevitable problems), I'm sorry to report that you are looking at many, many more than 3-4 hours of reading. Let me just say here that I have many, many years of experience in helpful fields (software, hardware, firmware, -nix), and I don't hesitate to say the process of building a Hackintosh is difficult and involved. That is, if you don't intend to buy specific compatible desktop hardware and then use specific software tools to do the install. For example I am installing on a laptop using the new bootloader OpenCore (versus the long default Clover) and I do not already have a Mac or Windows system handy, so I'm doing the install from Linux. This makes everything more complicated, but this is probably more similar to the "average" use case for most users than building a desktop Hackintosh using Clover.
That being said, the good thing is that the situation is improving: The documentation is being constantly updated and consolidated (which can be its own evil as you know, since there is frankly too much documentation out there, most of it outdated), the tools are getting easier to use and performing their functions in less hacky ways, and the community of Hackintosh builders is growing. But just be advised that the vast majority of the community of Hackintosh users really have no idea what they've done to their systems beyond being able to regurgitate the instructions they followed in whatever guide they used. And so most of the posts and replies on the forums and subreddit will not be helpful for solving any of the inevitable issues you'll run into. Probably 95% of thread replies are other users flailing around with their own similar-sounding problems, suggesting essentially random switches to flip in the configuration files (further complicated by completely new issues introduced between version updates, as the sibling comment mentions). This is problematic because in actuality, everyone's using completely different hardware and so none of the ubiquitous suggestions of "You need to enable this setting since it worked for me" are applicable. Successfully building a Hackintosh essentially comes down to loading the proper firmware settings and hardware drivers which just so happen to work for your particular set of devices. So just go into it with eyes wide open to the fact that this is a large community standing firmly on the shoulders of a very few giants, and be mindful that you can physically damage your machine if you take the wrong suggestion from a random forum user for a problem you're having. The most helpful external (non-Hackintosh) documentation I've often referred to during this process are the current UEFI and ACPI specifications, just to give you a heads up on something useful to have handy. Good luck!
This is really helpful, thank you. What you say puts some form and empirical evidence to my concerns about Hackintosh. I guess my gut had it right this time, which is unusual. So you can brick your fancy new homemade, warranty-less PC!
Anyway maybe one day I'll do it for fun on a crappy laptop I get off Craigslist. Sounds like this pays off most when it's a low-risk effort.
That's probably for the best. I bought a laptop with a known-compatible processor, and confidence in my past experience in hardware that I'm not too worried about frying my machine. For someone technical who knows in advance about possible hardware damage, I'd just say that while damage is possible, this is mostly a danger for when you'll be "patching" the ACPI configuration files that define to OSX how it should interface with your processor. So if you aren't careful, you could be telling OSX to send voltage down a line that shouldn't have voltage on the line. I mean you're not gonna smell your mistake, but you won't be using that CPU ever again. And of course as you know, essentially pounding a square peg into a round hole like you are doing when trying to fit Apple's device drivers to your particular hardware, the possibility for damage is there, too. That all being said, if you enjoy a technical challenge and learning a lot about how OSX works, it's a great opportunity to work up a sweat, with relatively little risk to your hardware if you approach the problem the right way, prepared to grok what the guides and documentation is really saying.
