Snazzy Labs builds a $70 hackintosh computer for those who want a super tight budget PC build.
Can a $70 hackintosh be any good? Can a cheap hackintosh out-benchmark Apple’s MacBook Pro?
Can Apple’s iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro blow this 5-year-old computer into outer space or does the hackintosh give it a run for its money?
Wanna build one? Get your HP 6300 here.
Follow the HP 5300 Hackintosh build guide here.
Direct link to video here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, Apple, take your sweet time on that new Mac Pro, m’kay?
SEE ALSO:
What pros want from Apple’s new modular Mac Pro and display – May 11, 201
Apple’s Mac Pro debacle: Failure and future – May 8, 2017
Grasping for straws about Apple’s next-gen Mac Pro – April 28, 2017
Apple may be converting Mac Pro from a dead-end vanity project to a serious powerhouse – April 28, 2017
Apple updates ‘Mac Pro’ trademark to cover augmented reality displays, smartglasses and more – April 26, 2017
It’s not that hard for Apple to design a new Mac Pro – April 20, 2017
Why is Apple’s next-gen Mac Pro taking so long? – April 18, 2017
Apple’s Mac Pro rethink is a good idea, but will it be good enough? – April 14, 2017
Laggard, trailing Apple needs to catch up HP’s workstation designs – April 7, 2017
Why Apple’s promise of a new ‘modular’ Mac Pro matters so much – April 6, 2017
Apple’s cheese grater Mac Pro was flexible, expandable, and powerful – imagine that – April 6, 2017
More about Apple’s Mac Pro – April 6, 2017
Apple’s desperate Mac Pro damage control message hints at a confused, divided company – April 6, 2017
Who has taken over at Apple? – April 5, 2017
Apple’s embarrassing Mac Pro mea culpa – April 4, 2017
Who’s going to buy a Mac Pro now? – April 4, 2017
Mac Pro: Why did it take Apple so long to wake up? – April 4, 2017
Apple sorry for what happened with the Mac Pro over the last 3+ years – namely, nothing – April 4, 2017
Apple to unveil ‘iMac Pro’ later this year; rethought, modular Mac Pro and Apple pro displays in the pipeline – April 4, 2017
Apple’s apparent antipathy towards the Mac prompts calls for macOS licensing – March 27, 2017
Why Apple’s new Mac Pro might never arrive – March 10, 2017
Dare we hold out hope for the Mac Pro? – March 1, 2017
Apple CEO Cook pledges support to pro users, says ‘we don’t like politics’ at Apple’s annual shareholders meeting – February 28, 2017
Attention, Tim Cook! Apple isn’t firing on all cylinders and you need to fix it – January 4, 2017
This guy proves my point I’ve been saying. My next desktop is going to be a hackintosh since Apple just doesn’t focus on the Mac like they used to….(yes, I know Apple likes iOS more for money reasons)
The fact that Apple won’t release a new Mac Pro for a while shows that they weren’t even really bothering with it in the beginning.
It certainly shows a level of apathy, indifference and neglect someone should’ve been fired for. People are making a living with these things Apple!! What about that did you not understand???
“Hello Puget Systems…?”
I wonder if after the next misguided and wrongheaded designed Mac Pro in 2018 or 2019 is pretty much totally shunned their attitude will be “Oh well, 3rd times the charm” and THEN go back to a Cheese Grater? Problem is no one will be there to sell it to with all their banked goodwill pro-dollars gone and left the building for good. I hope they know how high the stakes are now, assuming they truly care.
But what software will you run on it?
Apple don’t have a single “must have” software product on any platform now.
Might as well just buy a windows machine and put office and a decent backup suite on it.
Final Cut Pro X is my daily bread and butter. A few weeks ago, I had to help re-edit a project on some colleague’s Windows PC on Premiere Pro. For almost every single action I had to do, from most simple stuff (trimming clips) to more complex (chroma-key, colour correction, etc), it took several more mouse clicks to execute them than on FCP X.
There is nothing in the world that has the efficiency and simplicity of interface as Apple software does. FCP X and Logic X are prime examples.
I can’t speak for FCPX because I am not a video editor, but Logic is pretty piss poor these days. Unless you are just piecing together quick blocks of jingles with all the Pre-Fab apple loops and pre-programmed chord/melody/percussion machines. I supposed thats all a wedding video composer needs though.
I very much like Logic’s sonic quality, as well as its built-in music engraving features. While I do use Sibelius very much, Logic allows the music to actually sound human, AND still be written in a way that human can easily read and play.
I’ve been using Logic on a Mac since 1995 and the current version of Logic Pro X is incredible value for money and more than eminently capable of doing WAY more than the piss-poor tasks that Predrag mentioned above.
Illogic… I’m a certified Logic Pro user, studio owner, and work in Logic every day from band production, songwriter demos, commercials, adr, etc. So, you obviously are clueless on its capabilities. I say let’s have you write the exam and see if you even come close to passing. Otherwise, you’re sounding like an idiot. There’s a reason the manual is 1500 pages and still only scratches the surface.
I’ll stick with cross platform tools thanks. Now way I will ever tie myself into 1 vendor. Thats commercial Suicide.
I’m a Mainstage guy myself since Windows doesn’t have anything that would do that (or at least that I would trust in a liver performance lol)
You need a Mac to run it. I love the way Logic X Pro works along side of mainstage too (Even though the latest version of mainstage is buggy – apparently the quality control unit didn’t fully test mainstage either. I had to downgrade a version because of the bugs)
I wasted $50 last night on a blind date with someone I will never see again.
So risking $70 on a hackintosh? No big deal.
$70 for a Crapintosh? Good luck.
This guy rolled 5 d20s in a row, making that beast.
One, being able to buy surplus for $30, and having it include a Quad Core i5 and 4GB of RAM. Second, finding the $35 GTX 750, and finally a $5 scrap SDD drive. The other rolls were on the items working at all, let alone finding them at those prices. So let’s double the cost and double it again in case they don’t work.
Still a good price, but I think the expectation of jackpot is a little misrepresented.
At the core, what’s makes a hackintosh work at all? Untrusted, unsigned code. So it’s not the same as a real Macintosh, because it’s on par with a jailbroken iPhone.
This shows the need/usefulness of a mid range, headless desktop.
Apple is obsessed with mid range capabilities being filled by its laptops or the iMac. They ignore the mid range on the desktop if it’s not an iMac. For every IIfx sold back in the day there were likely a dozen Iici or Iicx machines sold.
Further, I’m not sure the Mac mini fills that bill. The mini may be great for those who need a low end machine or for those who want to hook up a Mac to their TV, but there is likely to still be a need for a mid range Mac.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the “half tower” Mac. I know people have been pushing for one for over a dozen years. But regardless of whether I’m a fan of that version or not, there is clearly a market for a headless, mid range Mac. The question is whether there is a big enough market for Apple to pursue.
This guy got away with a lot of shortcuts and cost cutting. He spent a LOT (heavy emphasis on that word) of his own time to build that machine. We need to note that even though he mentions he spent a lot of time doing things like combing through his university’s cast off hardware and resurrecting the SSD, he does not give a hint of how much total time he spent. The vast majority of users are not going to spend anywhere near that much time.
And, for those still complaining about there being no new Mac Pro until 2018 at the earliest (and likely not until mid 2018 or later) (AND I will freely admit I’m one of those people) — we need to either be patient and keep reminding Apple that there is a real need or move on to Hackintoshes or (dare I even think it?) Windows or Linux machines. (My gut reaction on the latest version of Windows 10? It’s basically equivalent to Snow Leopard with a few more modern bells and whistles thrown in.)
Apple is not going to move any faster delivering the new Mac Pro because we are constantly reminding them that the only reason it’s going to take another 12 or more months from now to deliver that new machine is because some idiot (or group of idiots) decided to let the Mac Pro die. They’ve reversed that decision, but not fast enough to not have to resurrect the whole team from scratch.
once all the parts i ordered via amazon.ca i spent a total 2 or 3 hours setting up a hackintosh..
the longest task was waiting for the USB booter to get imaged… putting the few parts together was the easiest part.
and it all just worked (after installing the nvidia web driver)
i spent more then 70 dollars.. but less then half the cost of the mac pro that was closest in spec to my hardware (which was no where near as powerful in reality)… apple’s pro hardware is a joke.
Pics of the process or not true
it is true, rocking a quad unlocked skylake i7 4.0Ghz, 32GB of 2400Mhz DDR4 Ram, a samsung 950 PCIe m.2 drive for the boot and an 850 EVO SSD from data. in a Bitfenix Prodigy M Case (looks like a smaller Cheese grater. Gigabyte Gaming-5 with USB 3.1 C connectors (long before Apple had them) and then a NVidia 960 with 4GB. I wanted to go 1070/80 but the drivers were no ready at the time of build. I’ll be updating soon though. total came in at under 2000$ canadian and it runs circles around the 6 core Trashcan at the Office.. circles and circles and circles and circles.
Nice list.
People who build Hackintosh don’t really do pro work on it. They are hobbyist. You need a lot of time to make it right. So yes great if you still live in your moms basement. Cant update the thing unless every drivers are all set. Constant maintenance means downtime which real pros cant really afford but, in mom’s basement, that will be fine. Specific hackintosh based on specific pc hardware is not a piece of cake.
I’ve done it when I was in my mom’s basement.
The community is great, they are mac core, and dedicated.
But now, I want to work on my mac not debugging it.
There is a lot of loud mouth here. I wonder if they can back their shit.
So again, no pics, not true.
Peace!
our studio is doing quite nicely producing pro work on our Hackintosh. Maybe your just a jealous lazy man baby?
Yes, this is my Fave case for doing builds it because its like a little Mac Pro the way it should have been done.
Mac Mini Pro baby.
A gorgeous but bad and dead-end design is not anything new for Apple. The Power Mac G4 Cube was the 90s version of the trashcan Mac Pro, the difference being that Apple and their clients still had the full sized Power Macs to turn to. The trashcan Mac Pro would have been fine it they still had a full featured Pro tower that was still available.
For those hoping for a groundbreaking Mac Pro tower, don’t get your hopes up. All you need do is look at the Mac “Accessories” page to see an ominous progression – there are no Pro accessories anymore, just dongles, a 4-port USB hub, and Airports. No RAID arrays, servers, external drives, rack mount switches, Apple Displays, specialty keyboards, Wacom tablets, etc. Apparently to the new Apple, “Pro” means someone willing to pay stupid money for a shiny black tube to put in their office, so their friends can ooh and ahh at how much money they have to waste. Apple says they won’t look back, they always look forward. Which poses the question: Where do you go from there?
I’d be interested to know how much bureaucracy goes into the design process of something like the upcoming Mac Pro. Imagine how much paperwork, meetings, marketing and HR bullshit and God knows what else is involved (not even counting the actual design/engineering process). If by some miracle Apple licensed Mac OS, I think within 3-6 months you’d have a Mac Pro project on Kickstarter that’d be better than whatever Apple spits out in 2 years and at half the price.
an inconvenient truth. 🙂
Depends on your definition of better and how much the license would cost, but I’m sure there’s some truth to your implication of corporate inefficiency. My hope is that once Apple Park is fully settled into, these types of product line level mistakes will become very rare. Just be thankful that they allowed Hackintoshing; they could make it much more difficult if they wanted to. At least now this applies competitive pressure to deliver decent value within the Mac computer line. If Apple doesn’t deliver, they’re more likely to lose customers until they fix it instead of forever.
the PC he used was 5 years old ….
The Apple Cylinder is 4 years old….
(do deniers finally realize there’s something wrong with Apple’s handling of the Mac line ? )
I prefer to pay way too much money for stock hardware in a shiny case. It makes me feel better about myself, like I am better then all of you.
I’d post pics, but I’m not a pro.
you replied to my post but not sure what your post has to do with mine.
Looking at your other posts above you seem to down Hackintosh folks , but many of them are just forced to do it as Apple has been neglecting the Mac line (btw my post didn’t even mention Hackintoshes at all )
I don’t have a Hackintosh but I’m typing this on a upgraded Cheese Grater : 48 GB RAM, upgraded Xeon 6 core, GTX 980 ti, USB 3, Sierra. For doing what I need driving two 27 inch monitors (one a Wacom Cintiq) it beats every current Mac. I would rather have bought a new Mac Pro but the 980 has 2-3 times the GPU power of the highest end cylinder D700 and it would seriously trash the new MBP ( 16 GB RAM and weak GPU) . I’m been using upgraded Cheese Graters for years, no serious issues at all.
(You can of course get even more powerful Cheese Grater configurations).
Like i said many of us would rather buy Apple new hardware but the desktop line sucks — that’s not OUR (users fault) but Apple’s : so if you want to pick an issue with anyone maybe you should go at Apple instead of Hackintosh folks . (I also have a MBP, 12.9 iPad Pro and iPhone 7 plus).
The trouble is that he got that stuff for pennies on the dollar through Craigslist and his university. You could also compare that machine to a new Xeon PC server from HP and it would be a fraction of the price as well. Even if Apple had made the right design choices and continued to upgrade the MacPro over the last 4 years, it still wouldn’t have had a chance competing for value. The real story here is that you can find/get really cheap hardware that will run MacOS pretty well if your time isn’t worth that much. Comparing it to modern laptops that provide other benefits (Apple support/warranty, portability, reliability, touchbar, DCI P3 color graded high resolution screen built in, Thunderbolt 3) is just trolling for hits/views. Not trying to defend the mismanagement of the MacPro and Mac mini lines.
“would’t have a chance to compete in value”
Perhaps true years ago but the iPhone competes very well with high end Andrioids and analysts say the new AirPods are actually CHEAPER, so if Apple wanted to make a competitive product (or perhaps just slightly more expensive for better build quality) it could.
I think though many Pros would spend serious cash on a well done Pro machine. ( yeah they will complain that HP etc are cheaper but they would factor in the Apple’s advantages in OS, stability, ease of use etc). For some users it isn’t money but power which Apple is seriously lacking.
The biggest drawback of crapintosh is the MacOS updates. Anyone who has done one of these boxes soon discovers that the seemingly harmless update from Apple bricks the system. Sure, you can wait to update until the patch from the crapintosh community comes out, but that is a hassle. I gave on my box after the third time this happened.
Sounds like lots of fun to build one. I wonder how many hours he spent sourcing the parts and setting up the machine.
I think a better comparison is to a Mac mini than a laptop because the latter is portable.