On the Death of Hackintosh: A Reflection
With the release of macOS Tahoe, Apple is ending their support for the Intel platform in favor of their Apple Silicon chips. While this move makes sense in the context of their ecosystem and with how mature/performant they have become, I can't help but feel a little melancholy about the change, because the death of Intel on macOS also means the death of a project that has had great significance in my tech journey.
The Beginning
My earliest foray into Hackintosh was back in 2012, when I was in ~middle school. My uncle had given me his Asus EeePC 1000HE, on the condition that I install what was then OS X on it. At that point, I already had exposure to the idea of installing alternate OSes by way of Linux, so I wasn't completely ill equipped. However there was so much new information that I needed to understand - what is a kext? What is a distro and how is that similar/different to the same term in Linux?
I started with a DVD of iATKOS V7, which was a copy of OS X Leopard 10.5.7 that shipped with an array of pre-selected patches that targeted the widest possible spread of PC hardware combinations. There was already significant alignment against the use of distros within the community, due to their more blatant breach of the TOS (i.e. shipping full copies of OS X which at the time was still paid), as well as their tendency to include unnecessary and sometimes unvetted bloat, so it was always a means to an end for me to achieve what was referred to as a "vanilla install" - using an untainted copy of OS X and only patching/injecting what was absolutely necessary.
I eventually achieved this with the help of an external DVD drive, my uncle's retail copy of Snow Leopard, and something called netbook-installer:
This tool came with device profiles for common netbook hardware combos (including my own). Together with OS version detection, it allowed for seamless installation of OS X on netbooks. It was how I was able to hop from retail 10.6.3 to 10.6.8, which had some quirks stemming from the inclusion of the Mac App Store among other things.
This was where I learned a lot of key truths about OS X, including but not limited to:
- OS X is heavily reliant on the Quartz Extreme / Core Imaging (QE/CI) graphics acceleration for smooth daily usage.
- Don't Steal Mac OS (DSMOS) is a cheeky yet integral part of the boot process, going hand in hand with the System Management Controller (SMC) not found in PCs.
- Kernel extensions cannot just be edited in place - there is a special ritual needed to properly patch them.
- As with some barebones Linux distros like Arch, even the most inane system functions (e.g. lid sleep) that "just work" everywhere else need special attention in Hackintosh.
I eventually got the netbook to a fully functional spot on 10.6.8, but after that, I needed more.
My next victim was my new desktop machine, which my grandma bought me from Frys Electronics. This was a tough one to hack as it was on an AMD platform, which had even more quirks to overcome than the typical Intel platform. I tried every method under the sun to no avail, until someone on IRC pointed me to this guide:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121119031611/http://philtesone.com/hackintosh.html
Not only did this work beautifully, but it achieved a vanilla install that eventually led to writing my own first guides:
The machine wasn't a completely out of the box experience - the NVIDIA GeForce 9200 iGPU wasn't compatible with OS X, which prompted me to make my first GPU purchase/install with the ASUS Radeon HD 5450 512MB. The Ralink RT3090 Wi-Fi Card was also a bit clunky, needing a third party utility to work by spoofing it as an Ethernet device, so I decided to build my own native card instead by following this guide:
Nathan
I would go on to tear through my family’s computers and Hackintosh everything I could get my hands on. This is what my area looked like in those days:
OSx86.net
Of the great Hackintosh websites of old, OSx86.net was once the central file repository for the whole community. It also had a tiny forum, which didn't get as much attention as some of the other sites with a larger developer presence and/or stricter guidelines around what hardware configurations would receive support. As such, a lot of threads with non-standard hardware often went unanswered.
Coming off my netbook and AMD PC wins, I was hungry for more weird problems to solve, and saw this barren sea of unanswered threads not as a wasteland, but as an opportunity not only to hone/test my knowledge, but to also help people in the process. With fervor, I started to answer and solve many of these threads with speed and precision.
Fast forward a bit, and I'm on a road trip with my family; we'd just stopped at a Panda Express after a long stint in the car. Per usual, I checked my unread forum notifications (all on my mom's iPhone 4S, as I didn't have a phone at the time), when one of them caught my eye - it was the site owner, not only praising my work, but also extending an invitation to join the site moderator team. I eagerly accepted, and spent the next few years working my way all the way up to Supervisor.
In a way, OSx86.net was my first "help desk" job, where instead of tickets there were forum threads, and instead of "help my computer is slow" it was "help me disable my NVIDIA Optimus GPU with DSDT patching". The latter scenario was an actual problem I helped solve, which netted me my first "paycheck" in a sense (it was a paid support request).
In closing
There's a whole host of other things I could gush about in my Hackintosh journey - BIOS modding with Ozmosis, AppleHDA pinning, AMD SSSE3 emulation testing, further guide writing, to name just a few. However the early formative period encapsulates pretty well the experience I had and some of the lessons that I learned:
- Don't let the perceived complexity of a problem shy you away from tackling it.
- Start each problem with a simple entrypoint that sets the stage for your later troubleshooting. Gathering specs, logs, etc, is a great way to assess the situation rather than just jumping headfirst and shooting into the dark with a random action to try.
- It's okay to not have all the answers - omniscience isn't the expectation. Learn to solve and solve to learn.
- Maintain good customer service throughout. These kinds of things can be arduous and frustrating for all parties, so it's important to maintain decorum to preserve the focus on the real issue: the computer problem.
- Write [good] documentation! It not only can save you in a pickle if you've forgotten how to do something, as well as strengthen your knowledge - it helps others in the process!
Sadly OSx86.net is not around anymore, and after macOS Tahoe, Hackintosh won't be either. Regardless, both made significant impacts on my life/career trajectory, and in reality form the basis for everything else I know/do in tech.