hackintosh/macintosh
is it worth it to just pay the lump of money it costws for an apple computer? or is there anyone here with well running hackintosh builds that they enjoy..
input!!
Some laptops are easier than others for Hackintosh. The only reason my T60 isn’t running one is because is an absolute BIZNITCH to get it running. I’m sorry but I don’t want to write my own drivers. I’ve compiled my own linux kernel, that’s stressful enough. There’s some useful websites that have different hackintosh distro’s and the machines they work best on. Good luck! And no, it isn’t worth the pice, at all. You can get the same performance if not better from a machine you built your self at 1/2 the cost.
I’d only suggest doing a Hackintosh if you are extremely familiar with shell scriping. That is DOS/ASH/BASH/Telnet etc..
pretty sure this is gonna get locked as dont think your aloud to talk about hackintosh here
oh woops my bad didnt know..
I’ve always been a PC person. I built my first computer to my last one. My last laptop (which I spilled milk all over about two weeks ago :[). My vote is go get a MacBook. PC’s tech support BLOWS. I used to torrent years ago, and I went legit and started buying everything legitly and all it did was come back to bite me in the ass. I bought Win7, after updating my Laptop to it over night (A week after its release) it told me to restart my computer and I did, and after the restart it cleared my entire hard drive. My brother had a small problem with his MacBook with the ram, he took it back NQA - they helped him out.
F*cking worth it to buy a Mac just cause of the service you recieve. And hey, its the optimal thing to use for what we do anyway - so why not?
I supported Windows for years / PC’s, and I will NEVER buy another one again in my life. Whether its buying it pre-made, or building one myself. F that S.
I say support the company. OS X releases are cheap enough, and you really do get your money back in service.
I had an issue with my last macbook that caused it to overheat like it was its job. I had to deal with there service for a little while, but they gave me a new one.
I’ve had far too many NQA fixes at genius bars to even think about another company in terms of tech support…including the day I spilled an ink well on my laptop. They ended up giving me a new keyboard for free and made sure nothing else was damaged…and it didn’t void my warranty. I was lucky because the guy “broke the top case” taking it apart to fix it, but…it still worked out.
I also remember talking to a Microsoft employee in an Apple store once. He was buying a copy of Snow Leopard for his personal laptop.
Yeah it’s pretty tight around here with talk about hacked software/hardware/anything..
haha - support the company that just had a $20b profit quarter
I say knock one up if you’re good enough, then if you start making money from digi-djing throw a few coins apples way. Unless you’re a freak though it will invariably have more problems than it’s worth..
Good luck hombre
my old acer could run hackintosh fairly well (had same mobo than old macbooks) but it’s far from the experience you get with an apple computer. my mac is still running as fast as the 1º day and had no harware issues.
IMO, it works to give you a 1º impression of OSX, but you will end up owning a mac
Dude the point isnt to support the big company at all.
The point is not to get DJTT in hot water with a company that could eat it alive.
Respect DJTT basically… last thing DJTT wants is to be known as a place that you can come get advice on doing illegal activities despite whether we agree/disagree on hacks and cracks.
Thats my take on it anyway YMMV
Ive nver used a mac, I cant bring myself to give them all my monies.
Its true theyre well built, designed, decent customer support & they’ll run DJ apps very well indeed.
But taking a £1500 piece of hardware on the road into a hostile environment like a club is, in my opinion, insane.
I think generally you’ll be alright with it. Unless someone spills beer on it / steals it/ knocks it off the lappy stand.
Thats pretty much why I brought a second hand refurb HP lappy and threw win 7 on it. It cost me £250 and I have another windows laptop for all my junk, surfing & backup. Then I have a portable hard drive which backs up that too.
All of this costs about half the price of one new 15" mac pro and both lappys run traktor scratch pro without issue.
My current Macbook is 38 months old according to my little app to measure the age of my battery, though that seems a bit old to me. It’s a 2.15 blackbook.
It’s been knocked off tables multiple times…most of them because someone snagged the edge of the screen with a backpack causing it to fall off the desk and onto the floor.
It’s been dropped 8’ off of a stage.
It’s been carried daily to class and back in a messenger bag with only a thin incase sleeve to protect it from headphones, books, pens, etc..
It’s actually missing case screws because of the number of times it’s been dropped, crammed in a bag, or thrown across a room.
I have a bit of a temper problem some times. I’ve never hit another person in anger, but I have definitely thrown this laptop across a room and onto/into something hard at least 3 or 4 times.
The fans make noise (need to get around to getting that fixed) because I haven’t ever cleaned them.
I’ve repartitioned the hard drive more times than I can count without reformatting my OS X partition or reinstalling OS X since Snow Leopard came out, and it’s currently running a non-standard boot loader so I can dual-boot with Linux for specific coding projects. (in non computer terms…Apple won’t support the software at all without me reformatting/reinstalling from scratch because of something I did)
I run 2 open source package managers. If you don’t know what that means…it’s supposed to be dumb. Linux does not stand up to that kind of abuse.
As of right now, I have 1.61GB free disk space, though part of that is because my Ableton Cache is up to like 12GB and I use a 64GB SSD that has 2 Operating Systems on it.
I don’t do anything to optimize my system for DJing or audio. I don’t turn off WiFi or Bluetooth when I play. I don’t stop my desktop background from cycling every 5 seconds. I don’t use a custom install. I don’t use a separate user. I usually don’t quit my web browser. At least, not when I’m practicing. I do the ones I remember when I’m actually playing for a crowd, but it doesn’t usually happen until my 2nd or 3rd song.
Seriously…if this computer can put up with me, it can put up with anything the road can throw at it.
This computer has crashed once that I can remember. I was DJing a house party and didn’t realize that I had set it on a table right next to the exhaust fans for a QSC amp. The temperature on the table was over 100 deg F, and it still took over an hour for it to overheat. The other DJ came on, and my laptop got thrown off stage because I thought it had finally screwed up and was pissed. About 2 hours later, I went back on. It was fine. It booted up without a problem…after being thrown backstage and bouncing off a pile of crap, including a fire extinguisher. Again…it was fine after all that abuse.
Seriously…you don’t have to worry about an Apple being destroyed by the road. They’ll survive better than you will. I’m not saying you don’t need a backup system for your data because shit does happen, but if you manage to break an Apple by doing anything but setting it on fire or sitting on the screen…either you got a lemon or you got really unlucky.
These things just don’t break. Unless Apple actually starts being evil, there is no other brand of computer I’m going to spend money on. Everything else is just pissing money away.
what Karlos said. 
I’ve spent a while reading questions about "what laptop/hardware setup should I get that will run OSX out of the box?
The seemingly snarky but resoundingly true response is always “Macbook”.
Nothing I’ve read about it makes doing this worth it if you need a reliable installation for DJing.
I’ll put it this way: I was wrestling with a Windows installation with driver issues and boot record corruptions a few months ago, and I thought, “hey, I like how I’ve never had to do this on the Apple machines I’ve used. Why don’t I install OSX?”
Then I realized that the singular reason OSX does its job so well is that the OS isn’t made to run on any of a billion different hardware configurations, just a few the company designs and builds. The stability is from the control they have over the hardware.
Consequently I’ve given up on the OSx86 shenanigans and am not really willing to look back. Well played, Apple.
the computer is there to serve me, I’m not here to serve my computer. I need an OS / HW combo that just works and is a pleasant to use.
I would go for a hackintosh if I need a workstation and don’t have an apple comp. Have two successful installation for a test and one failure (haven’t been stubborn enough, I guess)
OS X is simply the best OS i’ve used for workstation so far (after 10 years of work with Windows*,*Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, and experiments with BeOS,QNX,Gentoo,OS2,MacOS9,Darwin and some others). For a server my choice would be FreeBSD (OS X’s grandpa ), or Solaris if I need to run Oracle on it.
Have a mac and I really enjoy it. Would get an apple again.
I use Macs but made my girlfriend a Hackintosh. They’re not 100% stable and you need to know what you’re doing when things go wrong (and they do).
Could save you a lot of money though.
I had a Hackintosh till I traded for some gear with a friend who needed a laptop badly. Mine was a 10.1" MSI Wind 1.6GHz, that thing run well. I originally ran it with Torq, then when I made the switch to Traktor it handle that too. Hackintoshs do work, but it does take work to get them going. But once it does it works just like a mac, flawless. I would do it again, I built mine out of the love of small form factor computers and to lighten up my gig bag, I saved 5lbs doing so. Besides a smaller computer is easy place in a tight booth.
What is the point of going with Apple at all? This is the question you need to ask yourself. I’ve built a couple stable Hackintoshes that I used for product development, and it’s not rocket science as long as you read up beforehand and pick hardware that is compliant. But any mid level PC running Windows 7 will be able to deliver the same performance out of the box. There are also computer builders that specialize in computers for audio and video applications (like Rain Computers), and you can still a better bang for your buck going with a boutique builder than with a stock Apple computer.
There are 2 reasons I would base buying an Apple computer on. First and foremost, there is Apple only software out there that is VERY attractive (Logic and FCP are 2 solid examples). If you’re planning on using any of these apps, Apple is the only way to go. Save your money and buy the real thing.
Second, if you are absolutely unwilling to learn about the computer you’re using, buy an Apple. You know your own tolerances here, so be honest with yourself. The Apple experience is generally a “walled garden”, and they tend to keep you out of places where you might get in trouble. This trade-off makes it harder for a power user to do what they want to do, but makes it easier for those with the “just works” mentality to operate.
Why does that matter? I’ll give you an example from my own experience. When I was at Stanton, we needed to buy several computers to be at demo stations at the 2008 NAMM show. After thinking it over, we decided to buy 3 Lenovo T42 Thinkpads from TigerDirect for about $450 each. I upgraded the RAM from 512MB to 2GB each at a cost of less than $50 each. I was then able to tweak those computers into consistent single digit DPC latency, rock solid DJ machines. They ran Traktor and Ableton all day long, and never gave us any problems. These laptops are still being used today, and will still take any software thrown at them. They don’t require constant tweaking (typically the only thing needed were software updates before a show), and are VERY low maintenance. So, for under $550 shipped, we got new laptops that still works flawlessly after 2 years of brutal trade show and product testing performance. We were able to do that because I spent about an hour a piece tweaking them and installing memory when we first bought them. They don’t overheat, they don’t need service, and we didn’t pay an extra $300 for some warranty. They have plenty of I/O, easily replaceable parts (if a drive ever fails for instance), and I can go to any number of local stores and buy replacement/upgrade parts at reasonable prices - no matter where in the world they are.
You simply can’t do that with a Mac.
But I’ve been tweaking hardware for more years that I care to admit, and I know a lot of people just don’t have a head for it. But generally, if you’re savvy enough to build a Hackintosh, you’re probably savvy enough to save some money (or spend that money on better hardware) and have a rock solid PC. If you think you’re not that guy, don’t go half ass and do a Hackintosh. Buy an Apple computer. Unless you drop in on the whole deal (hardware and OS), you’re not getting the full benefit of going with an Apple solution.
If you want a stable, sturdy machine, get the mac. They may be a pit pricey, but they’re absolutely unbeatable if you want a machine that works pretty much rock solid without investing too much work in that. For DJing, the cheapest entry level model will be more than powerful enough anyway.
Hackintoshes are fun for a technical exercise, but for something that’s supposed to work, last and stay updated, they’re the wrong choice.
stop tempting me. Augh!
+1 for nem0nic
FWIW, I love the mac/pc threads…I find the points of view so interesting.
The myth that mac is the only game in town for DJing is also very interesting…it makes for good reading indeed.
Ever since my friend bought a mac to have something to show overseas, (while DJing primarily with a Dell) I knew this was more of a social issue than technical.
No other thread topic evokes so much emotion. Keep on keepin’ on!!