i brought my mac for, the os, the design of the imac, the good customer service apple give, not having to worry about all other things that could crash the operating system.
so i would say imac,
so i would say imac,
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iMac vs Hackintosh
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Quick digression before answering. If you buy Snow Leopard and install it in the privacy of your own home with a custom bootloader and leaving aside improper licensing use, it's not hard to get an Hackintosh up and running (provided you stick to a shortlist of components known to work well, especially those that work without modified kexts... and provided, when there is a new 10.6.* update, you wait for someone else with an identical setup to report back any issues). Many new Hackintosh users get their systems up and running, then troubleshoot glitches and then run Software Update, which sometimes installs a 10.6.* update which sometimes, on the subsequent reboot, causes kernel panic at boot. Not having a grasp of even basic terminal commands they find themselves locked out, occasionally still the case even with a preboot CD. In short, if your partner is willing to be your technical support, that's one thing; if you are late handing in a paper or other assignment because you are having unanticipated Hackintosh problems, you rue the day you didn't buy a real Mac.
Even assuming you don't have a bumpy ride and you end up with, say, a Sandybridge CPU running on the 10.6.7 vanilla kernel and a cutting edge graphics card that hasn't quite seen its way into an as yet unreleased Mac, even if you did score a great deal on those components... the aesthetics of the Hackintoshes are still mind bogglingly ugly, in my opinion. Big wince. If you go the route of modifying a Mac Pro's case, it's a lot of work with a Dremil and other tools. Again, in short, with the greatest respect to people who like to tinker in the privacy of their own home, do you want a hobby or an Apple!
Even assuming you don't have a bumpy ride and you end up with, say, a Sandybridge CPU running on the 10.6.7 vanilla kernel and a cutting edge graphics card that hasn't quite seen its way into an as yet unreleased Mac, even if you did score a great deal on those components... the aesthetics of the Hackintoshes are still mind bogglingly ugly, in my opinion. Big wince. If you go the route of modifying a Mac Pro's case, it's a lot of work with a Dremil and other tools. Again, in short, with the greatest respect to people who like to tinker in the privacy of their own home, do you want a hobby or an Apple!
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It's not hard except for the moral issue that X=Apple is responsible for (or bought ownership in) the existence of P=OS X and therefore is entitled to controlled its usage (i.e., no user could use OS X without Apple's choice to design and release it under the terms that Apple provides). Unless you have a counterargument designed to undermine the premises as noted above, it stands by itself as a logical argument for why it should be OBVIOUS that there is no legitimate basis for this action.
but that students will eternally continue to do it anyway with crappy netbooks, secondhand notebooks, cobbled together PCs but that the great thing is that a lot of them graduate to buying the real thing. What is worth commenting on is that at the point where a person reading this can afford to buy the real thing, they are cheating themselves not doing so, aesthetically and, in the case of the iMac, because it has a stunning IPS panel screen.
You realize that you can get the same panel from other vendors?
Dell sells the monitor for about $1000-$1300 CAD (depending on coupon codes,) and that can be independently turned off, used for multiple inputs without having to toggle Target Display Mode.
I would have built an i7 Hackintosh instead of buying the i7 2.8 iMac, but given the similar price, I went with Apple. In the end though, having to deal with numerous issues (yellow tinted screen, shipped with broken glass, dust behind glass and smudging on the LCD panel itself,) I should have just gone with the Hackintosh.