As another data point - Building a hackintosh is so much simpler now than it was 5 years ago.
The reddit forum at r/hackintosh is pretty helpful for getting started and has a nice repository of builds.
AMD Ryzen CPUs are fairly well supported now. My current system is a 3700x with radeon 5700xt gpu. I use OSX for my daily work, and Windows 10 for gaming. It's a great setup for $1000. My OSX geekbench specs beat out the latest standard 16" Macbook Pros.
For developers - One thing to note is that Docker is not supported with AMD hackintoshes. There are some workarounds but they seem fragile. Otherwise, everything else works great for me. I am mostly on cloud based apps/tools. Others also pointed out that Adobe, and vmware has issues. virtual box works.
I did run into some stability issues with the latest 10.15.4 release. But I was not running this latest version of OpenCore (0.5.7) that supposedly works better with 10.15.4. I upgraded before 0.5.7 was released. I have a backup that I can test with before fully committing.
That being said - I had to rebuild my machine to downgrade to 10.15.3. Luckily, I had a spare backup to work off of and things are great again.
Stability and other misc notes for 10.15.3 and below:
* Stable system, no kernel panics
* Sleep does not work (it's a desktop anyway, so not an issue for me).
I don't have USB-C or TB-3 on this system. There are expansion boards for this, but since they aren't common on hackintoshes yet, you're likely going into untested waters. For example, to run the LG 5K display (TB3 only), you need a specific motherboard with a TB3 connector, a usb-c pci-e card, and a lot of frustration to get up and running. I'm sure it's a huge PITA.
> Is the experience better?
I mainly did this because I wanted to have an all-in-one machine to play the latest games with on Win10 and do work in OSX. For my daily work and coding (mostly JS/Python these days), I haven't had any issues. For the price, it can't be beat!
> I mainly did this because I wanted to have an all-in-one machine to play the latest games with on Win10 and do work in OSX. For my daily work and coding (mostly JS/Python these days), I haven't had any issues. For the price, it can't be beat!
So it’s stable enough for pro-dev work and gaming. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.
How are Xcode build times? (Or whatever IDE you use)
To be honest quite a few apps don't seem to play nicely without the Intel-specific instructions present. REAPER won't run at all, Cubase crashes unless you remove the surround panner VST, Pro Tools would crash on launch last time I tried it (but this may have been fixed since)...
Unity wont bake lights on Ryzen Hackintosh too using Progressive GPU/CPU. Also VMWare won't run because of lack of Intel specific VT-x support, same with Docker for mac, Virtualbox runs fine though (it finds amd-v).
There aren't any inherent problems with Docker, VMWare, Unity games, or Adobe apps on Intel Hackintosh machines, if that's what you mean. Apps just work, and when you do encounter a bug in some app, you can be quite confident it isn't because you're using Hackintosh.
I expect AMD is always going to have some oddities because no AMD CPU has ever been used in a real Mac.
How is it even possible to make AMD hackintoshes? It seems a bit like magic to me because I'd expect that while the basic instruction set may be the same, there must be so many intel-specific extensions and differences in the details. Apparently I'm wrong about that, which is cool!
... But then again AMD laptops are almost impossible to hackintosh because of the integrated GPU not being supported, apparently.
Similar differences exist between Intel generations too. They write code to handle missing features because of that. It may not take advantage of AMD-specific features though.
Notably, Hackintosh also doesn’t work between Intel generations. I wanted to downgrade to 10.9, but my Skylake machine couldn’t run anything below 10.11. I had to build a new machine around a Haswell cpu and motherboard.
Now, the Skylake machine was able to run 10.9 in VM. (And much older than 10.9—-I got Tiger to boot in VMWare, although it liked to randomly kernel panic. I don’t quite understand why VM’s are different in this regard.
Thanks for the information. I'm a SW developer but I also do semi-professional photo editing sometimes (so Docker, VMs and Adobe products needs to work for me). Now I know in which direction I need to look for!
The reddit forum at r/hackintosh is pretty helpful for getting started and has a nice repository of builds.
AMD Ryzen CPUs are fairly well supported now. My current system is a 3700x with radeon 5700xt gpu. I use OSX for my daily work, and Windows 10 for gaming. It's a great setup for $1000. My OSX geekbench specs beat out the latest standard 16" Macbook Pros.
For developers - One thing to note is that Docker is not supported with AMD hackintoshes. There are some workarounds but they seem fragile. Otherwise, everything else works great for me. I am mostly on cloud based apps/tools. Others also pointed out that Adobe, and vmware has issues. virtual box works.