In 2020 I decided to build my own computer. I had in mind to build a gaming PC, so I didn’t wanted to spend too much but I didn’t save on specs either:
- Ryzen 5 (3600) CPU
- Gigabyte Aorus Ultra X570 Motherboard
- PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB GDDR6 GPU
- SSD NVMe 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus
- 32 GB RAM Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (2 x 16 GB), DDR4, 3200 MHz, C16, XMP 2.0
After I got tired of gaming in PC, in 2022 I was primarily using the Linux partition of that PC for development but at the same time I was in love of my 2017 MacBook Air and the macOS experience, but I needed more computing power. So I bought a couple of things to transform my PC into a hackintosh:
- WD Blue SN550 1 TB NVMe SSD, so if I have a full SSD to play with and in case I screwed things up, I could just change the boot order on the Bios.
- Fenvi T919 1750Mbps PCIe, So I can use special WiFi and Bluetooth features like handoff, universal copy paste and airdrop.
How it works
The main part to be able to boot MacOS on an unsupported PC, aside of compatible hardware, is to build an EFI partition with your hardware information and some kext files that are a sort of drivers necessary to run your hardware with macOS. To build the EFI partitions you will need to go to the OpenCore project. I'm not going to go deep into how to build this EFI partition, but if you're interested, leave a comment bellow and I will write about it.
Once you have your bootable USB drive with your custom EFI partition, you're then able to install MacOS. But you're not done yet. Once you boot for the first time, chances are that your graphical card and/or your Wi-Fi card won't work. Then you need to install and run OpenCore Legacy Patcher (do not mistake with the OpenCore I talked about previously).
My experience so far
Running MacOS on such a powerful computer it's been a pleasure. I've been doing it for the past 2 years and it is comparable to be running an extremely expensive and unaffordable MacPro. I'm still using it as my primary computer to this day but I'm speaking in past tense because chances are that hackintoshes have their glory days numbered.
A dying practice
The release of the Apple Silicon started the end of the hackintosh computers. Apple has been removing support for non Apple hardware and it has been harder and harder over time to develop compatible drivers to make ours computers work. The reddit forums are starting to predict the end of this practice for that reason.
Every time there is an operating system update something can go wrong. Therefore it is advised that you always use a dummy USB before you apply the update on your main machine.
For me it is no problem. It is kind of fun for someone used to play with Linux distros. But sometimes I wish I had an official MacOS machine so I can just hit a button and update without any fear. Sure you can just not apply any update. You could stay on whatever version you currently are and call it a day, but I like being on the latest and greatest and take some risks, so I guess I'll keep updating it until OpenCore drops support, or until I break my system.