I gotta say, 10 or 15 years ago, Mac OS X would have been worth the effort and it was basically what justified buying Apple hardware for me.
Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)
just in case anyone is on the fence. Apple’s developer network effects are real and impressive, people updated… nearly everything… so quickly! plus with Rosetta under the hood translations to x86 binaries expand everything runnable to seamlessly
I thought I would miss bootcamo but I dont. I have yet to install ARM Windows but I’m hearing praises about that now from relatively casual users
I’m fairly unaware of the current state of Linux on Apple M hardware, but I’d want a Linux partition on Apple hardware more than a Mac partition on x86. These days I have two devices though.
Writing to you from NixOS on an M2 Air. Aside from a handful of missing packages that aren't available for the architecture, it's shockingly good. My battery is reporting 19 hours remaining, and "setup" took about 20 minutes (not counting the brief time writing a new machine definition in my NixOS config). I don't have any fundamental issues with macos, but it's nice to have a consistent environment across machines, and this hardware is glorious.
I used one of their releases rather than building my own image. It’s a guide that merits careful reading, as some key steps are not specifically bulleted. Oh, and it’s not the NixOS graphical installer.
But it was dead simple, and 99% of the heavy lifting is from the Asahi team. The biggest downside is that updating the support files is a manual process, but NixOS of course makes it a breeze to rebuild into a new environment—and back out if it doesn’t work.
Macs do keep their resale value more though. Personally I run Linux on my own machines but I do enjoy the build quality of the MBP I get from work. It’s a whole another universe from my pretty good laptop that creaks and is made of plastic and the screen bends when I move it.. and the screen quality is not even comparable
Yep, Linux will make mid hardware punch well above its weight class so for the right person the value/$ ratio is unbeatable. But if the highest value at any price within reason is your goal then Apple is the go-to.
Which is typically why your employer who could not give a shit about a $4k expense every five years for an employee costing them a quarter mil annually in total comp opts for them.
Untrue. At least in the US you can either sign up for an annual plan that continues until you cancel it or you can extend the 3 year plan in annual increments.
It’s about the only viable option for professionally working with audio, in either studio or live setting. That's the biggest group of hakintosh users I'm personally familiar with anyway.
You can work professionally with audio in Windows, you’ll probably even get better performance out of the same hardware you’d be using for a Hackintosh.
You can, theoretically. In practice, a lot of tools like Logic and specific VSTs are macos-only, and CoreAudio actually "just works" out of the box without having to manually install and setup all kinds of alternative low-latency drivers.
If Apple is not messing up their USB subsystem like they did with Ventura, where people basically had to wait a whole major release until they got stable performance again with Sonoma.
Or if they don’t break iLok copy protection, like they just did with 14.4
And for professional hardware, you don’t have to install “all kinds of alternative drivers”. You just install the one official driver from the hardware vendor and that’s it.
Having used all three major OS’s for music at different times, MacOS is still my go-to. There just isn’t the futzing I had to do on windows. Linux was actually a contender for me back in the day - I feel like MIDI routing on Linux is just easier[1] although older OSX touting was also very good imo. I kept my G4 tower going for a looooong time because I had just the right setup of tools and hacks to do everything I needed to where windows wouldn’t cut it and no one wrote the drivers I used for Linux.
These days I don’t tinker like I used to and mostly just need simple MIDI routing and something that can copy renders from my mixer, so anything will work. I still prefer the ease of MacOS though I can do everything I need to on any OS
[1] the main drawback for Linux was really a lack of good docs for things like PD, and not having access to Live. If I’d had Reaper back then it might have been my daily driver.
Live works fine through Wine, nowadays. If I'm not mistaken, the Ableton installer works fine too - you just download the Windows copy and it installs it like-native. Very odd stuff, but it works fine from what I remember (I use Bitwig now).
CoreAudio was definitely the better choice when Linux only had JACK, ALSA and PulseAudio, but now that PipeWire exists it's very close to a CoreAudio-esque experience. You can record out of other apps, route processed audio into a voice chat, or manage the world's largest DAC without issue.
I can understand having personal preferences of course. I have been using macOS for audio production for more than 20 years.
I personally just feel that the "futzing" you mention is worse on macOS nowadays than it is on Windows.
And while Windows certainly has its share of issues as well, it's usually transparent and open enough so I can actually fix them. Whereas on macOS, the only course of action is often to just hope and pray Apple will fix what they broke in a future update.
Same here. Of course, now that we have the M1 and the likely eventual deprecation of x86 for new versions of Mac OS, things like Hackintosh are a bit doomed. If you have an M1, you'd be runnig MacOS (or Linux) and would have no need for it. If you don't, MacOS is not going to run great on it and very soon not at all. So, it's one of those things that you wouldn't use unless you really needed to. And finally, support for running mac os in virtual machines is kind of getting there. It's still made hard by Apple and only supported on their own hardware. But it's not impossible and there are some legitimate use cases (e.g. building IOS apps in the cloud). Maybe eventually somebody will figure out emulation on non Apple hardware. I think there are some efforts on QEMU. Of course the issue will be emulating enough of Apple Silicon properly.
Apple profitability by lock-in is all that matters in the Apple C-Suite now. Juice that stock price, get free stock options, buy new yacht to show off to your friends.
Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)