Hackintosh or iMac?

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Hackintosh. A year on and my PC is still cheaper AND faster than even the best specced iMac. And looks like it will still be faster than the best specced quad core iMac.

Not as aesthetically pleasing but then i look at my screen, not my tower :)
 
I'm not sure

iMac looks nice and quieter than almost all PC's.

A hackingtosh will be bigger and more noisey, unless you go watercooled, even then you'd have a job to beat the iMacs quietness...

An overclocked q6600 + 8gb would be tempting in the hackingtosh tho...
 
Defeats the whole point of an iMac.

If you want a nice looking desk, computer system and a VERY sleek and nice looking machine, offers enough power..iMac.
 
What about the speed difference? E6600 at 3.2GHZ to 2.66. Same amount of RAM, though slower I'd expect.
 
ichabod crane said:
Imac! a hackintosh is not a mac no matter what people say its still just a pc.
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You say it as if Pc's are somehow inferior.. :D

I shall not get into this, as from past experience there is no changing a Mac users mind, looks will always seemingly come first or at least be largely used for purchase/hardware shortfall justification, yet needless to say one year on from building my tower, Photoshop is still faster today as it was then (On ANY iMac, it's a laughable comparison to the similar priced one), and looks like it still will be even after the next product refresh :) Looks? Pah! I have Commes des Garcons and a good facial bone structure for that thankyou very much :p
 
Out of those two, I'd go for the hackintosh. Perhaps the main reason why I've steered clear of that route is... well I'd probably screw it up. If I could do it myself, I would love a near Mac Pro specced hackintosh... but for me it seems if I want one I'd have to pay the premium and buy a real one.
 
there is no way you can use a hackintosh for serious work

for experiment, yes, for browsing the web, yes, but honestly not for anything serious.

They are just not that stable. Also defeats the point of getting mac as you are overcomplicating it.
 
sid said:
there is no way you can use a hackintosh for serious work

for experiment, yes, for browsing the web, yes, but honestly not for anything serious.

They are just not that stable. Also defeats the point of getting mac as you are overcomplicating it.
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Don't tell me they're not stable, I've been using one for months.
 
sid said:
there is no way you can use a hackintosh for serious work

for experiment, yes, for browsing the web, yes, but honestly not for anything serious.

They are just not that stable. Also defeats the point of getting mac as you are overcomplicating it.
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Right, I feel I can have some input in here because I was using a hackintosh for around 4-5 months. It was perfectly stable. I did the original install on 10.5.1 and did the updates as they appeared all the way up to 10.5.4 and I had absolutely no issues with stability or with day-to-day running whatsoever.


Ol!ver said:
Don't tell me they're not stable, I've been using one for months.
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Justin said:
They're not.

How many times have I seen posts by you saying "Update isn't working" or "I had to re-install everything because of that update".
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Then he was doing something wrong. Once I built the box and got OS X on it, I never had to reinstall anything. Ever. The only thing which didn't work for me was sleep mode. Everything else, perfect. I would have challenged anyone, any experienced Mac user to sit in front of my hackintosh and without looking at About This Mac or the System Profiler to not know it wasn't Apple hardware.

Some updates were a little tricky to do, going from 10.5.2 to 10.5.3 took me a couple of hours to tweak and get working but I sure didn't have to do anything like reinstalling. 10.5.3 to 10.5.4 was just a Software Update as usual. On a gigabyte board with a C2D it gave an xbench test faster than a colleague's 2 x dual core xeon Mac Pro!

Having said that, I just recently bought a 2008 model Mac Pro. It's faster than my hackintosh was, but not by too much. I'd imagine that if I'd had a quad core hack then that may well still have had the edge. I don't know, I don't care any more.

Those who claim that hackintoshes aren't stable, or can't run OS X as well as apple hardware are generally not talking from experience but from hearsay and from how they'd like them to perform. It annoys me to hear this from people who can't bear the thought that non Apple hardware can do the job as well as the Apple stuff.

But to answer the original question. Get an iMac. Why? Because you'd be breaking the EULA by running a hackintosh. I did it, but it was an effective stepping stone to finding out about the OS and then making the move to Apple hardware once the time was right and I found a box at a price I was happy to pay. If you're already know you like OS X and are considering buying an iMac or using a hack then I will always suggest you get the iMac. If you're building a hack just to see if you get on with the OS then you're doing the right thing.
 
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