hackintosh/macintosh

[PartyMcFly]

poorly designed pole. both macintosh and hackintosh suck.

I was really looking forward to this thread not being about this.

I'm ready to hear more about any OSx86 setups you lot have worked on.

[Nosferatu]

TTT....

some really good stuff in this thread.... pass the popcorn!!

and no, I'm not being sarcastic.... there are some really compelling arguments being made here.... plus I'm a fan of Knaumov's OS kung fu.

[Nosferatu]

All I know is that in full screen mode, Traktor looks the same with whatever hardware you use

+1000!!

a point I've been trying to make for ages!!!!

[loop]

... Just a couple examples.

agree and respect all you say.

Thank you for all the educating and support you provided us(community) thorough all these years!

love you guys and I'm thankful that we can speak from our harts and past and understand each other so well.

Geeky topic this one is, eh

[bigbeatzz]

I have owned many macs in my day and honestly with a nice clean windows 7 installation it's about the same. If you need to save some bucks spend 300 - 400 bucks on parts and build a machine. Traktor will run great on both platforms and will produce the same results at the end of the day.

[mostapha]

The main turnoff for me (a gentoo user) is 1) I hate Finder. I don't know of any way to use KDE or other Window manager (and it would probably suck anyway) so I don't bother. That doesn't mean I have to wank to Jobs though. I've found Dolphin to be far superior to Explorer or Finder... although it took them ages to get it right.

I've had some rough luck getting Unixy stuff running that doesn't flat out run natively on OSX. That is specifically harder on a Mac I would say. The terminal is crap: just now got Tabs in 10.6 and it seems there's no way to tell Snow Leopard to use Unix behavior (IE, copy w/ highlight and paste w/ middle-click). It's only a feature of the terminal, and not a good one (only uses currently highlighted text -- not last highlighted). Would love to know if I'm totally missing the boat here.

I won't say Portage is the end all be all. It has it's own issues. Overall I love it but it can frustrate the hell out of me. Way better than what anything else can offer though. I'm a certified Red Hat hater.

Now, having said all that, I have little need to run gentoo on my laptop. I do some "work" on it from time to time, but I generally just use the terminal to ssh into a dev machine and do it there, which is fine by me.

I'm 99.99% sure I remember Terminal having tabs since I came to OS X, which means 10.3 or 10.4 ish…I forget. But you had to enable it in a setting. At any rate, screen has been a part of the OS X install for as long as I remember. I think you're right about the copy/paste behavior, but…well…I always hated the middle-click way of doing it. Seemed hokey and dumb to me. I like being able to cmd-c and cmd-v inside emacs and zsh because it's captured by Terminal.

I'll look at Dolphin. Finder's always been weird, but I've never had specific problems. I use quicksilver and Terminal for almost everything I'd want to use it for except for quick look.

First of all, stop calling OSX "Unix". It's not. it's based on Nextstep and Openstep, which is based on parts of BSD (which was based on Mach). A/UX is Apple's Unix variant. That's like calling Windows "DOS".

It's about as close as Linux is. Or anything else at this point. And no, it would be like calling Windows "NT," which it still was the last time I cared enough to look into it.

To specifically answer your question, let's talk about a couple of situations that would come up in a DJ's world. First, the OSX footprint is GIGANTIC. Especially if you're putting together a computer specifically for DJing, there is NO reason to have the OS taking up 14gb. I won't even begin to get into the problems Apple gets into regarding patching because all of the non-OS junk that gets installed by the OS instead of later by the user. In Windows, I can scale that installation size down (yes, even on 7 - but XP is still amazing in this regard) to under 2gb. Important? If you opted for an expensive SSD and have limited space for music, absolutely. Or if your computer came with a drive smaller than your collection. If it were Unix, I would be able to choose what packages I install on the computer, and it wouldn't force me to have iTunes, Flash, and every printer driver ever.

Your first point is just plain wrong. I don't have a clue where that comes from, but my last OS X install was under 5GB without me doing much to "optimize" that. I didn't install language packs or printer drivers that I'd never use, but that's it. Frankly, I don't know how you'd get the install up to 14GB. I'll grant you that they install things like iTunes and Safari…just like every other major OS, but it does not force you to install printer drivers, it's just a default. If you think it does, it means you haven't done an OS X install. And you can delete iTunes. And a lot of the other stuff.

As for hard drive sizes…I haven't seen a 2.5" hard drive big enough to store my media files. I'm not convinced they'll exist for quite some time. Yet I can still get by on 64GB unformatted. The only thing huge laptop hard drives do IMHO is encourage people not to have backups. But that's just a preference thing. And since you can upgrade hard drives in any laptop made, it's also not a real consideration.

What patching issues are you talking about?

And hardware is a MAJOR problem for me in Apple-Land. It's pretty, absolutely. But NOT AT ALL user friendly. Again, we're being protected by Apple's walled garden. In my Windows world, I can fix a computer that suffers from an HD failure in less than an hour - swapping out the old HD into an enclosure and dropping a new HD into the handy slot you'll find in almost every Windows laptop ever made. I've done this for co-workers and had them not only back up and running, but with information restored from their old HD (with recovery software) before the end of the day. I could get this entire process done in the time it takes a typical MacBook user to wait in a store for service. This applies to all kinds of hardware issues you're prone to get on a laptop.

Just a couple examples.

It took me 10 minutes to install my SSD. It then took me ~20 minutes to install the OS because I had it on a partition of my old hard drive and Apple doesn't do asinine (and useless) copy protection…and will boot off FW…and probably 45 minutes after that to migrate my system settings and data, but I was somewhere else at the time.

The last time I had an actual drive failure (which was my second-to-last hard drive in a laptop) I was back up and exactly where I was inside 4 hours including driving up to fry's to buy a hard drive. But, my backups are kind of paranoid.

And no, using other peoples' drives doesn't void the warranty. Nor does installing stuff yourself.

Also…your "typical MacBook user" is an idiot. At least, the one in your example is.
Check out: www.apple.com/retail

The longest I've ever waited at a Genius Bar for service was about 25 minutes. And it was packed.

I can't speak to statistics, but the only other hardware issues I've had were a DOA optical drive–which took about 10 minutes to replace–and a damaged cooling component that caused ridiculous CPU temperature spikes. That one took about 5 days to resolve, but it resolved by Apple giving me a new computer, including the hardware upgrades that happened in the process. Oh yeah…and my warranty reset.

[nem0nic]

I don't have a clue where that comes from, but my last OS X install was under 5GB without me doing much to "optimize" that.

Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. The DEFAULT installation size is MUCH bigger. It's possible that this has changed since 10.6, because I've never installed it. But the default installations of OSX on all the MBPs we had at Stanton (mine included) were well over 10gb. But hey, let me indulge you and take your 5gb number as standard. 5GB?! Really? If I'm trimming fat from a Windows installation using something like nLite (or vLite for W7), I can knock that down to 450mb (for XP) or 650mb (for W7) and still have an everyday driver. Assuming storing music on a separate partition, I could install my DJ software, ghost the OS, and have the ultimate restore in case of emergencies. It fits in a single CD, and installs in less than 10 minutes.

What patching issues are you talking about?

How about the most recent OSX patch for starters? http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...igantic_update

It took me 10 minutes to install my SSD.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2119529,00.asp - These are guides for replacing the HD in various MBPs. Looks like the unibody upgrade is easier than it was for my MBP (intel C2D based 2008), which required me to take the whole keyboard off. But it still requires 2 tools (the T6 isn't something everyone is going to have either), and the removal of several screws. I need to remove two phillips head screws and I have access to my HD. How about RAM? Here's the RAM upgrade process on a MBP - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1270 . For me, two phillips head screws. I just checked on my i7 based Spring Peak and it's set up the same way. I couldn't even lose a screw if I tried, because of the way they're set into the door covers.

And no, using other peoples' drives doesn't void the warranty. Nor does installing stuff yourself.

Never said it did. I don't think anyone does that.

Also…your "typical MacBook user" is an idiot. At least, the one in your example is.
Check out: www.apple.com/retail

While I agree completely, I don't know what you're referring to here. Unless you mean that the typical Mac user gets everything done at the store. I agree with that as well, but I think a big part of that is because Apple pushes that on the user by making it harder than it needs to be to do upgrades and small repairs yourself.

The longest I've ever waited at a Genius Bar for service was about 25 minutes. And it was packed.

25 minutes to get waited on. Then a week (at least) to get your computer back because Apple typically sends computers out for repair if the problem isn't something that you should be able to do yourself.

...and a damaged cooling component that caused ridiculous CPU temperature spikes. That one took about 5 days to resolve, but it resolved by Apple giving me a new computer, including the hardware upgrades that happened in the process. Oh yeah…and my warranty reset.

If I let an entire production run out of the factory with so much thermal paste applied that it actually impeded cooling, I would give you new hardware too. And if you had paid the $300 extra dollars for a warranty that doesn't come by default with your computer (like it does everywhere else), I'd probably reset you as well.

[Str8upDrew]

Speaking of Mac cooling units. I just did a case swap on a PowerMac G5 Quad at work the other day, and my god the cooling unit was a radiator. No joke this thing was bigger than some moped radiators that i've seen. I know with 2 dual core Xeon's the thing is going to get hot, but this thing was ridiculous.

And a note about mac's build quality.... Who the hell connects a power supply with 9 T10 bolts. No joke these 9 bolts power the board, not a standard clip and harness, 9 big ass bolts.


Edit- Here's a pic of the "radiator"...

[nem0nic]

And a note about mac's build quality...

Their towers are some of the best computers ever built. Board layout is smart and built for expansion, and their cases are amazing. But their laptops and minis suffer from the same overall flaw as the iPhone 4 - form over function. Their design is fantastic, but function often suffers. No external surface on a laptop should EVER get so hot that it's uncomfortable to touch.

[ctrld]

is it worth it to just pay the lump of money it costws for an apple computer?

if you're lazy and want a system you don't have to tweak too much for it to "just work", get a mac.

if you know your shit and want superior performance and customizable functionality for less money, get a pc. if you spend the same amount of money on a pc that you would spend on a maxed-out macbook pro, you will get a beast of a machine that leaves macbooks far behind.

if you really really want OSX but have no money for a mac, you might want to try going the hackintosh route. but getting all the hardware components to work properly is tiring, not to mention that since the release of win7/64 there really is no reason to go with OSX as far as stability and functionality are concerned.

note that this is coming from someone who uses both a mac and a pc.