Building a Mac

Do you mean a Hackintosh?

Have you tried the following Hackintosh specific fora and websites yet?

• tonymacx86 Blog - very good guides and quite good message board
• InsanelyMac Forum
• InsanelyMac Hardware Database
• Hackintosh.com
• OSx86 Project

 

Spend a couple of hours taking a look over Tonymacx86 - the wiki and the forums.

It has everything you need.

 

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Making it is the easy part. The problem with them is that its not very stable by comparison. It's non-Apple hardware so if they get rid of compatibility you have your hands on a $2000 paperweight. It's usually best to just buy an actual Apple.

 

I tried hackintoshing my PC (had a mini before trying it, wanted to get myself a high spec mac ).

I don't think its worth it.

I spent quite some time getting an EFI loader that would work with my hardware, my sound card didn't work, and I was constantly worried about whether software updates would break the machine.

Which, imho kinda defeats the purpose of having a Mac. Sure, the hardware spec may be better than what apple have on offer in your price bracket, but you lose out on so much else.

With real mac hardware I don't need to worry about mucking about trying to make the hardware work. It just does out of the box.


I mean its an interesting project to try out, but i wouldn't rely on a mackintosh as my primary machine.

 

What do you want to make different to Apple ? They doing quite some good job; don't they ?

Buy a Mac Mini to enjoy Apple in the easy way
AND
Build a Linux box.

 

There is a MASSIVE gap in apple's lineup at the moment between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.

Some people want the ability to upgrade video cards (and have PCI slots for other peripherals) without having to purchase a full-on 6 or 12 core Xeon for several thousand dollars. They also want more freedom of choice in terms of display, without needing to go to a Mac Pro.

At the moment, if I want an apple desktop with reasonably high end video, i have a choice between a 27" iMac, and a Mac Pro. The iMac video is not great, and the Mac Pro is MASSIVE overkill (and very expensive) if i only want the 3d card for gaming....

I don't play many recent PC games any more so its a bit of a moot point for me now, but it was what kept me off the Mac for a long time. I'd wanted a Mac since the intel switch, but the high end 3d video support just wasn't there.

Also, if you're a mac person and want a PC that will talk to it not running Windows, check out PC-BSD....

 

I fit in the group that wants a middle ground between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro. I want an i7 iMac with the screen seperated. Should only cost $1200 with the i7 and even that's higer than the Windows boxes so there must still be a profit margin in there for them.

 

While I'd agree there's definitely a market for a headless iMac/Mac Mini Pro type system with a couple of expansion slots but not the overkill of a Mac Pro, you're getting closer to the point where you could actually DIY such a beast: If the MSI Gus II ships and does what it claims, you'll be able to put a midrange PCIe graphics card into an external Thunderbolt box and run it off any Mac with a TBolt port. Paired with a quad-core Mac Mini Server (with a pair of RAID0 drives internal, if you were so inclined), it's not a bad setup, in theory. Expensive, and you might be stuck using it for Windows due to lack of GPU drivers for the Mac, but not bad.

I'm skeptical that there's enough of a market for Apple to ever actually produce a MaxiMini, but you never know. Heck, if they do end up axing the Mac Pro, they might meet folks halfway by replacing it with such a beast.