I was an early Hackintosh adopter. My first build had Lion or Tiger installed. My path to Hackintosh world was somewhat circuitous and was driven more by my love for Logic Pro or eMagic Logic as it was called at the time than any real desire to be on Apple’s platform.
You see, I’d used Logic for music production from 2001 and when Apple purchased it from eMagic in 2002 and discontinued development on the Windows platform, over time, new plugin and app versions no longer worked. When Apple went over to the Intel platform in 2005, I saw it as my opportunity to stick it to the man; payback time!
I built my first Hackintosh in 2006. It was a great time to be in the Hackintosh world. The community was vibrant and growing. New hacks and tricks were being discovered all the time to get various hardware working with macOS. I remember when sleep finally became stable on Hackintoshes. It was a huge deal!
I spent countless hours building, configuring, and troubleshooting my Hackintosh. I had to because, to be truthful, it was never quite as stable as a real Mac. But I was happy to do it because I was saving money, sticking it to the man, and still getting the power and flexibility that I needed for music production; at least, sort of…
The truth of the matter is that underneath it all, I lived in constant fear of my little home studio going dark for days behind the slightest change, a routine update, installing a driver for a new piece of hardware, sometimes something as mundane as moving a card to a different slot.
I can recall countless “lost weekends”, getting no music done trying to upgrade to the latest OS version. I was stuck on Sierra for four years! Then I discovered the OpenCore project…
I read the spec, followed blogs and forums, and after about six months, I went for it. It took a while, but I finally got it right and for a few months, enjoyed a blazing X99 machine with 128 GB of ram. Then my mobo died and I had to build a new machine…
Triple booting between Big Sur, Catalina, and Windows 11 on my new build was a thrill but once again, when updating to Monterey in order to access the latest version of Logic Pro (remember, that’s why I was here in the first place…), I found myself right back in “lost weekend” territory.
The last two years have been tough on me. I started to get tired of Hackintosh, the constant need for cautious curation of updates was really starting to take its toll – not just in my life but also with regard to what could potentially go wrong when setting up any new hardware or software; there are so many things that can’t be handled automatically because they involve human intervention (I know right?). And then one day everything changed…
Ironically, I first heard rumblings about Apple’s new Mac Studio on Hackintosh forums, and after reflection came to the conclusion that my time is far more valuable than what had now become a fairly affordable price for such power, so I pulled the trigger!
It’s been great! My Mac Studio is powerful and stable. I don’t have to spend hours troubleshooting or configuring things. I can just focus on creating music. And I’ve still got a kick-ass Windows box to boot (pun intended). If you’re thinking about making the switch from Hackintosh to a real Mac, I say go for it! You won’t regret it.
Thanks for reading!
-The End-
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