Revisiting Hackintosh

Like many others I’ve been unhappy with the lack of Mac hardware lately so thought I’d revisit the world of osx86 after many years. There seems to be many more people involved in the scene now including some excellent how-to Youtube videos even by some high profile Mac blogs and building some absolute beasts of machines. My story is I use a 2012 Mac Mini as a server and that is limited to USB 2 so was looking to upgrade, however not only is the current mini 2 years old but doesn’t have user replaceable drives or RAM so a straightforward Mini upgrade was out. Also I use a mid-2015 15″ 16GB 256GB MacBook Pro which despite all efforts to remove everything non-essential I’m running with only a few gig free, which makes working with large IPSWs painful. Furthermore because I typically have at least Xcode, Intellij, Hopper, Textmate, Transmit and Safari with at least 10 tabs open I find the 16GB memory too limiting and I in fact run most of the time with a 8GB page file which again eats into my SSD. I considered getting a new MacBook Pro with 512GB however 16GB RAM is still the max, plus I wasn’t ready to sacrifice ports or function keys. I have felt let down by Apple when I upgraded from the 6 to 6S for 3D Touch which I hardly ever use. To solve both my problems I thought I would built a high-end Hackintosh to be used both as a development machine and server, and then use a lighter travel laptop instead for casual work, perhaps a 13″ function key MBP. There are 2 things I’d have to deal with though. I tend to work a lot in coffee shops so would need to give that up and spend more time at home. Also I would need to investigate syncing large code projects between machines pre-commit, however I have an idea about that. Because a lot of my work lately has been on sync systems I think it is time to embrace a multi-device world and looking forward to the challenge.