Can I Hackintosh This Setup?

[Heat_Fan89]

As an owner of a 2012 Mini who was looking to upgrade but decided against it because of the soldered SSD, I was looking for alternatives. It would have cost me around $999 if I upgraded the 128GB to 256GB from Apple and everything else stayed the same.

So I priced a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720 Tiny with the a i3-8100T 4 Core CPU 3.10 Ghz, Intel 620U integrated graphics, 8GB of Memory Single Slot DDR 2666 Mhz, Intel Wifi, 256GB Solid State Drive, PCIe-NVME Opal, M.2

Total Cost with Tax $436 which includes a Lenovo discount which is less than half price for a similar setup to the 2018 Mini. Seeing that the specs and internals are similar would this setup be easy to Hackintosh?

 

[treekram]

It would probably be better if you asked your question on a hackintosh site.

Unless you've had previous hackintosh experience, it's best to stick with a computer where somebody has written a guide on how to install macOS on it. On the site I tend to go to, I don't see a guide for the computer you're looking at.

There is a guide that I see for the Intel Bean Canyon NUC's (8th-gen Intel CPU's) which is a bit different in it's form factor vs. the Lenovo. I would tend to stick with the Intel NUC's for Mini-like computers but I don't have any experience with the other competitors in this space.

If this is your first hackintosh, this is a suggestion I've made before (a while back) - for the typical hackintosh you prepare a USB flash drive. This can be done without the hackintosh computer. For some of the guides, there is also a procedure for doing updates to the hackintosh computer before you apply any future macos updates. This too, can be done without the hackintosh computer. If you go through this process and feel uncomfortable with it, you should think twice before doing a hackintosh.

 

[eltoslightfoot]

It would probably be better if you asked your question on a hackintosh site.

Unless you've had previous hackintosh experience, it's best to stick with a computer where somebody has written a guide on how to install macOS on it. On the site I tend to go to, I don't see a guide for the computer you're looking at.

There is a guide that I see for the Intel Bean Canyon NUC's (8th-gen Intel CPU's) which is a bit different in it's form factor vs. the Lenovo. I would tend to stick with the Intel NUC's for Mini-like computers but I don't have any experience with the other competitors in this space.

If this is your first hackintosh, this is a suggestion I've made before (a while back) - for the typical hackintosh you prepare a USB flash drive. This can be done without the hackintosh computer. For some of the guides, there is also a procedure for doing updates to the hackintosh computer before you apply any future macos updates. This too, can be done without the hackintosh computer. If you go through this process and feel uncomfortable with it, you should think twice before doing a hackintosh.

This is great advice. I have set up a few over the years, and even with a build guide and matching hardware it can be tough.

 

[flyinmac]

If you have the option of a return period, you could possibly install a different hard drive temporarily. Then try the hackintosh with that drive in the machine. If it doesn’t work, then return it.

But, from my experience so far, with brand name machines, I’ve found Dell to be the most likely success. Though I haven’t really experimented with other brands, I’ve found more alternative drivers available for Dell, and had easy success in my attempts.

But then I stumbled on some Macs somebody was throwing away, and replaced my hachintosh machines with them.

 

[hpucker99]

As an owner of a 2012 Mini who was looking to upgrade but decided against it because of the soldered SSD, I was looking for alternatives. It would have cost me around $999 if I upgraded the 128GB to 256GB from Apple and everything else stayed the same.

So I priced a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720 Tiny with the a i3-8100T 4 Core CPU 3.10 Ghz, Intel 620U integrated graphics, 8GB of Memory Single Slot DDR 2666 Mhz, Intel Wifi, 256GB Solid State Drive, PCIe-NVME Opal, M.2

Total Cost with Tax $436 which includes a Lenovo discount which is less than half price for a similar setup to the 2018 Mini. Seeing that the specs and internals are similar would this setup be easy to Hackintosh?

Your best route is to go to https://www.tonymacx86.com and see what the members there have done.

 

[Kaida]

I recently used a NUC8i5BEH to do it and got pretty good results following this guide.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...2-on-intel-nuci5beh-using-clover-uefi.268502/

 

[Heat_Fan89]

Thanks for all the answers and suggestions. I’ll try that Hackintosh site that was mentioned. I plan on keeping the ThinkCentre Tiny anyway, the entire build cost $398 minus sales tax. If I can get it to run macOS, that would be great. If not I can always drop Linux Mint 19.

 

[cococheaf]

Intel wifi will not work as apple is using atheros chips. you will get no driver even from any hackintosh forum.
The only way to do it is to change the internal wlan module to a atheros one.