A year and a half ago, we made a video wherein a $1,000 Intel Hackintosh was bested by—what
was then—the first Apple Silicon M1 Mac mini and I subsequently declared the future of Hack Macs all
but dead. That’s certainly still true as we’ll discuss later, but the video’s title ended in a
question mark and Betteridge’s law of headlines states that any title ending in a question mark
can be answered with “no.” So, this is the real last hackintosh—right? I call it Winter’s Last
Whisper: a computer running macOS Ventura and an impressive one at that. It has 10Gbit Ethernet,
DisplayPort passthrough via Thunderbolt enabling use of an Apple Studio Display or ProDisplay XDR,
really, it does everything you’d expect a real Mac to do—but better—because it outperforms the
$4,000 M1 Ultra Mac Studio. Oh, and it does so at half the cost. [5-8 sec cool intro]
Apple’s done releasing Intel-based Macs, but they're not done supporting them. I mean,
they still currently sell an Intel machine—the Mac Pro. Time will only
tell how many future versions of macOS will support x86, but Apple has set the
precedent of maintaining their computers for 6-7 years. That does not mean, however,
that hackintoshes will have that same long-term support. Starting with 2017 Macs, Apple’s
[T2](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/dwslx9/comment/f7lp8fa/)
coprocessor acted as a controller for disks, SMC, audio, and more. As of yet,
there's been no way to bypass or emulate it and so it's possible that as soon as later this year,
Hackintoshes will be stuck forever on the last supported version of macOS.
But that day has not yet come and current-generation processors are supported
in Ventura so we elected to use an Intel i7-13700K cooled by a Noctua DH-15 which I feel hits a great
price-to-performance ratio and certainly packs a punch with 8 performance and 8 efficiency cores.
What's not current gen is our GPU. In Winter's Last Whisper, we're using an AMD 6800XT.
Apple added graphics support for Navi 2x in late 2021 upon the release of updated workstation cards
for the Mac Pro. Which answers the question: why no current-gen card? There's still no Radeon Pro
variant of the 7000-series—and that’s only variety Apple uses—but even when AMD *does* roll those
cards out, there's no guarantee Apple will sell or support them. Alas, it's no matter because
this card is still an excellent value and superb performer—particularly considering Apple Silicon's
achilles heel has always been GPU performance. As for our other components, arguably, we went
overkill: the motherboard is a Gigabyte Z690 Aero D—an ATX-sized board that's blinged out
with on-board Thunderbolt, 2.5Gbit AND 10Gbit LAN, DisplayPort passthrough, a high-impedance
headphone amp and more. There's 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory in addition to an 1TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe
SSD that slots into the board. All those guts fit fabulously in Fractal's handsome Torrent ATX case
and an attic-mounted Corsair 1,000W 80+ Gold power supply gives the build it's first signs of life.
The looks befit the price. A price that isn't cheap, but not outlandishly expensive either.
We could have gone a lot more thrifty on several components, but I really wanted to match the Mac
Studio spec for spec as cheaper hackintoshes often skimp on I/O, disk performance, power
supply quality, and more that Apple truly does an excellent job with but seldom receives credit for.
Turning a pile of PC parts into a functioning Hackintosh has become more nuanced than it used to
be. A few years ago, you could download a couple of tools to auto-compile a thumb drive and using
the Clover bootloader be up and running with a new hackintosh in minutes. OpenCore, the new norm and
what I used for this build is *not that.* Creating a hackintosh in 2023 has a steeper learning curve
and is more involved than it used to be, but it's worth it because OpenCore has a number
of huge advantages: it's built with modern UEFI standards permitting better hardware compatibility
(like support for AMD processors) and offering resilience against future macOS updates —it's
rare you can't just update your machine like any other Mac, there's way fewer crashes and
hackintosh "oddities” due to strict adherence to Apple's bootloader structure and OpenCore supports
FileVault and Secure Boot ensuring a safe macOS experience on a non-Mac. And while it's a little
tricker to build an OpenCore installer, the post-install experience is much better and the
incredible documentation doesn't just tell you how to make a hackintosh, but teaches you how and why
things work arming you with knowledge you'll want should future troubleshooting become necessary.
I do hope I haven’t scared you off because it really isn’t THAT hard. You install macOS onto a
USB drive, add the base OpenCore files which is as easy as dragging and dropping, and then you follow
the guide to determine which drivers and kexts are needed for your given hardware. Also easy.
Then, our ACPI configuration. …our what? In short, ACPI is a standard that helps your computer’s
hardware and software communicate with each other to manage power and system configurations. ACPI is
the conductor of an orchestra and macOS, a system strictly designed for its hardware, freaks out
when the conductor deviates from the sheet music macOS is looking. It’s not a jazz musician. So,
we have to use what are called description table patches to help align our musician and
conductor using modified sheet music they can both understand. Using your target machine, you run a
Python script called SSDTTime which dumps your ACPI information from your PC’s firmware into
a file that you can then automatically patch to ensure there’s no conflicts between your hardware
and what macOS expects. Pretty easy. So when what’s the hard part? Where most people get fouled
up is with the config.plist file. This is an XML document you modify that basically handles the
whole boot process by making sure all those files we added are properly injected in addition to a
few other things like spoofing the model of Mac we’re using and its corresponding serial number.
Where people get stuck is through lethargy. It’s really tempting to find someone who has the
same or close to the same hardware as you, copy their config.plist file, and boom! You’re done.
Don’t do this because there are SO MANY variables at play and with a little patience,
you can build a config.plist file all by yourself that’s guaranteed to run on your hardware.
It’s not hard and the documentation walks you through the whole process. Don’t cut corners.
Once your config.plist is built, you can boot right into the macOS installer and the OS is none
the wiser. You’re on a Mac! But we’re not done. Once you’ve finished installing the OS, there are
a few steps afterwards we need to follow: for one, we need to move OpenCore to your machine so you
can boot it without the USB and speaking of USB, we need to address that. macOS is limited to 15
USB ports and my board has more than that with the internal headers on the board and the IO.
Additionally, macOS sucks at guessing which port is what speed and you’ll run into issues
if you don’t define that. Yet again, there’s another great tool that mostly automates this
for you and once you’re finished with that, well, you’re likely to be running a golden Hackintosh!
Our build has functioning Bluetooth, WiFi, 2.5Gbit, and 10Gbit LAN. Consequentially,
we can use AirDrop, Handoff, and other macOS niceties. iMessage, the App Store, and Safari
all work great. I’ve got functioning Thunderbolt 3 for high throughput devices and I can even
pass DisplayPort over Thunderbolt using my motherboard’s internal header connected to my GPU.
System Integrity Protection and FileVault are both enabled, audio works perfectly, it’s nearly
a perfect Mac. Nearly. There are three weird bits about this computer: #1 I had to disable 3 USB
ports at the back of the machine to come in under my 15-port limit, #2 sidecar doesn’t work because
there’s no support for 13th gen iGPU drivers, and #3 Intel’s big-little core design isn’t respected
by macOS and the operating system believes the performance and efficiency cores to all be the
same so that balance of power efficiency and performance you’d get in Windows by scheduling
tasks optimally is lost. Theoretically, it could even impact our system’s total performance
in macOS; theoretically. Practically…. haha…. practically this machine is insane.
How insane? Well why don’t we let the numbers speak for themselves? Starting with everyone’s
favorite heavily Mac-biased benchmark, Geekbench 6, Winter’s Last Whisper hangs
really closely to the multi-core performance of the M1 Ultra but—much
to my surprise—obliterates its single-core performance with nearly 15% faster results.
In the GPU department, Geekbench’s Metal Compute test also gives the hackintosh the upper-hand
by more than 30%. Moving to media tests because YouTuber, we see that in another synthetic load,
Cinebench, our Hack Mac silences the M1 Studio yet again. That trend continues as we move
into actual video editing applications like DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro.
Hilariously, we had a number of effects errors causing Final Cut to crash on Apple Silicon—bugs
that haven’t been fixed in almost a year—the Intel hackintosh never crashed running Final
Cut even once. Furthermore, we did notice general performance to be improved on the hackintosh over
our M1 Max Mac Studio when scrubbing through RAW footage in all NLEs. This behavior didn’t exhibit
itself of course with H.265 nor ProRes footage due to the M1’s native media engines, but that extra
computing oomph does come in handy for formats like RED RAW. On the other hand, when running
PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro, the hackintosh finished behind both Apple Silicon machines. Why?
Well, Apple Silicon’s video engines are designed to encode and decode a myriad of file formats
insanely quickly and clever memory swap helps write stuff to disk with incredible speed. What
it lacks in raw compute—needed for, say, applying effects—is more than made up for elsewhere.
Moving on from video, benchmarks in both creative and development environments
give our Ventura-veneered PC the dub time and time again. But where we notice the greatest
performance disparity is in a category that should be no surprise to anyone that’s been
paying attention to Apple Silicon: GPU performance. Running Unigine Heaven,
our PC does spin its fans up a tiny bit (even with our modified fan curve), though the sound it
creates a much more pleasing whooshing sound when compared to the Mac Studio’s shrill screams. At
nearly double the performance and half the cost, things are starting to look a bit embarrassing.
Moving to real-world gaming performance playing Tomb Raider on both machines, it gets worse—or
better, I guess, dependent on which side you find yourself. Boot that same hackintosh into Windows,
load up the same title, and the machine pulls away yet again. And that really is the benefit
to a hackintosh—it’s an equally performant Windows computer with a huge catalog of games
if that’s your thing. Another thing that can be done super well in macOS Hacktura,
Windows 11 virtualization. No need to rely on a crappy ARM variant of
Windows—this is full-hog x86 Windows if you don’t want to dual-boot in between systems.
I love Apple Silicon and think Apple’s currently making the best computers it
has ever made. But I also think that there’s been this weird idolization of Apple Silicon
chips—this perception that Apple is ahead in every department. Make no mistake, Apple’s
chip design is leading the consumer industry in a lot of areas as I talked about in my recent video
concerning software-defined hardware—definitely go check that out if you haven’t seen it—but
Apple’s chips are not market leaders in raw performance and they never have been. Frankly,
save for the M1 Ultra, Apple has yet to make a chip that even gets hot enough to not work in a
thin-and-light laptop. Running at full tilt—with absolutely everything maxed out—including power
delivered over every single port on the M1 Ultra Mac Studio—a wattage you’ll never even get close
to in the real world, the machine pulls 215W from the wall. Compare that to our hackintosh,
the CPU can draw up to 350W just by itself. When surfing the web, our hackintosh pulls more than
7X as much power from the wall as our M1 Max Mac Studio and under load, say when gaming,
it’s more than 5.5X. In fairness, our M1 Max vastly underperforms the Hackintosh when gaming
but even adjusting for watts per frame, Apple Silicon still finds itself 2.2X more efficient.
But, in a home environment, what does that really matter? Because even as a heavy computer user,
you’re likely only to find a cost savings of $50-100 in energy annually. It’d take you nearly
30 years to pay for—in energy—the $2,000 premium the Mac Studio would cost you over our Hackintosh
today. So then why would you ever buy a real Mac? First, smaller power draw means a smaller
thermal footprint which results in a smaller computer—significantly smaller. The Mac Studio is
insanely powerful for how tiny it is. Second, you don’t want the hassle of building and maintaining
a Hack Mac. The trope “it just works” isn’t a trope; a real Mac just works… all the time.
Third, you identify a moral issue when willfully violating the macOS EULA you
agreed to—that you wouldn’t install the operating system on unauthorized hardware.
But last, and perhaps most importantly, Apple Silicon is a clear path forward. Applications
will only continue to be more and more optimized for the co-processors and specialized hardware
blocks that have been designed to handle specific workloads better than general-purpose compute
cores found on our Hackintosh. And when Apple does finally get around to releasing a chip
that isn’t designed to be hyper-efficient, or thermally constrained, no, a chip designed to
scream… scream it will! But until then, we’ve got this… and this is pretty great.
Let me know in the comments down below if you’ve recently built a hackintosh—or if you plan to
in the near future. Please subscribe, leave this video a like, but most importantly, stay snazzy.