It's foolish to worry about what your friend thinks when you know what you want.
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Why choose Mac Mini over Hackintosh?
- Thread starter RustyMacVet
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It's foolish to worry about what your friend thinks when you know what you want.
I haven't had a Mini repaired by Apple but I have sent Apple portable Macs for repairs. Apple pays for shipping and provides the shipping box and pickup service. Average turnaround time: three days. Two days coming/going and one day in the shop.
That's plenty fast for me.
well I've had different experiences. I've had my 17 inch Macbook Pro sent to the repaircenter for 6 weeks only to get it back unrepaired. sent it back & this time they charged me ****ing 370 euros because they had replaced the logic board. (this didn't even solve the problem)
This was within the first year btw so I had full warranty rights!!!!!! they shouldn't have charged me anything!
I also couldn't get a couldn't replacement Mac because ''if they would do that for every customer it would cost too much'' thrifty mother****ers.
so yeah basicly I had to say goodbye to my 2299,- euro Macbook Pro + paid 370 euro. I sold the broken Macbook Pro for 300 bucks
that's my experience with the so called amazing service of Apple. oh yeah btw I know why people think Apple has amazing service. that's because they only hire very social, attractive and charismatic people to work in their store. I think they actually screen people for that. I've never ever seen one ugly person working at an Apple store. it's all just commercial perfection. maximized to make as much money as possible. and YES, that's how business works, I'm aware of that, but don't ever tell me that Apple is different because their service is just as crap as any other company
Apple just looks pretty on the ''front''.yeah maybe service is better in the US, I don't know. I'm from the EU.
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Sorry to hear about your experience. I figure that Apple can drop the ball just like any company...
Do you have any kind of recourse since you live in the EU? I've read that the basic warranty over there is two years vs. one year in the States. Is there any thing that can be done when a company doesn't honor a warranty?
Your comment about there being a difference in the quality of customer service between Europe and the U.S. may be correct; I've read more than one thread where the Euro Apple customer service is lacking...
Do you have any kind of recourse since you live in the EU? I've read that the basic warranty over there is two years vs. one year in the States. Is there any thing that can be done when a company doesn't honor a warranty?
Your comment about there being a difference in the quality of customer service between Europe and the U.S. may be correct; I've read more than one thread where the Euro Apple customer service is lacking...
I have had nothing but the absolute best costumer service from apple over the last 6.5 years, but that isn't the main reason I didn't go hackintosh this time. I did consider it though. I was about to purchase a new mini right after the keynote, but the lack of a discrete GPU made me consider other options. When I looked into it though, there is simply no way to make a computer as small and as powerful and as quiet as the mini. And if there was it would cost the same and be less reliable. Seriously, there is just nothing that compares to the mini. My 2009 mini has been running 24/7 for 3.5 years with only one issue, and that was a failure of the cheap drive I put in it.
As someone who's been using a hackintosh as his main computer for the last 4 years, I can tell you it's Not Easy.
People on this thread seem to think the biggest problem you'll have is the moral dilemma of running pirated software.
Uh, no. A hackintosh is sort of like a dancing bear--it's amazing that you can install OS X on a PC at all. Don't expect it to work well. And even if you buy a known-good set of components there's no guarantee they will still work for the next major update or even point release.
For example, I'm on 10.7.4 and for the life of me I can't get my audio to work in 10.7.5 or Mountain Lion, even after spending several hours reading message boards full of arcane suggestions about patching kexts and updating DSDT files. Also I've never been able to get my computer to sleep reliably and I have some intermittent problems with the ethernet adapter. But at least I'm doing better than some people who have kernel panics every few hours.
With hackintoshing, there's definitely an element of "I can't believe this works!" with a dash of "sticking it to the man" and you CAN save money but don't go into it thinking it will be easy. Personally I will be buying a new Mac Mini soon myself.
I've built a hackintosch 6 months ago, installed Lion Server and afterwards Mountain Lion Server on it. It was the hub of our media at home, movies, tv-shows, music, pictures, everything was stored on and shared trough it. I've had 2 huge faults, one where it just decided to mess up my raid array and one now where an os update broke my server and I can't get it to boot anymore... I'm going to buy a Mac Mini and a Pegasus R6 so I can have a nice, smoothly running server with huge fast storage!
The hackintosh was a nice experiment, but not stable enough to be the place to store all the media files my family has. I almost spent more time trying to get it to run smoothly and do what it was supposed to do, than that the machine actually worked...
Just my two cents.
The hackintosh was a nice experiment, but not stable enough to be the place to store all the media files my family has. I almost spent more time trying to get it to run smoothly and do what it was supposed to do, than that the machine actually worked...
Just my two cents.
For some with time, funds, and inclination to tinker, a Hackintosh could be an interesting project.
If you just want to do stuff on a computer without hassle, a Mac Mini would seem to be the way to go.
If you just want to do stuff on a computer without hassle, a Mac Mini would seem to be the way to go.
And I will repeat.
You cannot get a Hackintosh in a small form factor the size of a Mac mini, with all the options a Mac mini has, fr much less than a Mac mini.
Put together a 16 gig mini hackintosh that has built in Bluetooth, thunderbolt and FireWire 800 ports, and wireless internet, using new parts. And see how much you have saved.
You cannot get a Hackintosh in a small form factor the size of a Mac mini, with all the options a Mac mini has, fr much less than a Mac mini.
Put together a 16 gig mini hackintosh that has built in Bluetooth, thunderbolt and FireWire 800 ports, and wireless internet, using new parts. And see how much you have saved.
The "Hackintosh thing" really only works well if you're researching a build and multiple guides that get that build working and if you are comfortable enough with everything to do what is needed to modify/replace the OS X bootloader, add drivers, kexts, and patches, and to know how to rinse and repeat when running a point release update (i.e. to OS X 10.8.3). If this is the type of thing you feel like you are adept enough with Macs and computers in general to do, then yes, the Mac mini is dumb (as is all Mac desktops) and you should do the Hackintosh route. If what I described is at all intimidating to you or if you don't know what any of those things are, then you should get a Mac mini. It's really as simple as that.