Except you have to consult a compatibility list on a forum post that may be 2 years old, and if that part isn't available you roll the dice and buy something you think might work. If it doesn't, you're on your own with no support.
Speaking from experience here -- if the price of a Mac is your barrier, forego the Hackintosh and buy a used Mac.
Not really. The biggest point of failure will be the drives and they’re universal. The only truly Mac-specific part is the motherboard and there’s plenty to choose from.
There is no Mac that supports my needs, used or new.
As someone who has spent, as best I can tell, $50,000+ on Apple gear at home over the last decade, tell me again why I'm a cheapskate because I take issue with the world's richest company charging me nearly five times market rates for memory?
Oh, for the "Apple experience"? Please.
The last two Apple experiences I had involved them wanting to charge me $900 to repair a charging circuit in an otherwise perfectly functioning MacBook, and another where they repeatedly denied me warranty service on a maxed out MBP which could repeatedly be made to crash, oftentimes multiple times a day (due to what Apple begrudgingly admitted nearly six months later was in fact a design issue).
To be clear I'm perfectly happy with Apple hardware and software and realize that my experiences are outliers. But "because I'm a cheapskate" isn't really a valid argument here.
That's backwards. Rich megacorps are the ones that should be pressured to change their behavior, not individuals.
Plus the full Apple experience is just about getting your money, it's not actually better than the full Linux experience or the full Windows experience.
> it's not actually better than the full Linux experience or the full Windows experience.
But it is?
- Can I view my iMessage texts / make and receive calls using FaceTime on Windows/Linux? No? There you go, a feature I'd miss on day 1.
- Can I run the Affinity suite on either of those? Nope. For that matter, you still can't use Adobe products on Linux, can you?
- Can I develop for iOS/macOS? Nope.
- Is there a consistent UI for native applications on Linux yet? Nope. For that matter, is Gnome still the bare bones GUI of choice for the most widely used distros?
- Do either of those two platforms integrate nicely with the rest of my Apple devices? Nope.
- Is the X Window System still a thing? How about Wayland, is it ready yet for a retina grade multi monitor setup? Am I able to take screenshots now, for the love of all that's holy? Let me guess, probably not.
- Is Windows still the insane mess that contains Win95/2000/XP UI elements?
- Is Windows still the telemetry infested product it was a few years ago?
I could go on, and on, and on, frankly, but what would the point be? I have slightly different preferences than you have, and that's totally fine. I'm sure you get by well with Linux/Windows, just as I get by well with using macOS.
Of course Apple created macOS and Mac hardware to make money! I assume correctly that Microsoft didn't create Windows to lose money on it, did they?
Full experience presumes you buy into the platform and get used to it, drop all the alien stuff and alien ideas from other platforms, especially all the exclusive lock-iny ones that you listed.
What do you have in defence of the other half other than empty platitudes about "buy in", which is of course somehow different from the "lock in" Apple sheep do?
For me I like the hardware of Mac but hate the software (macOs) as it assumes the users is a dummy, it is particularly hostile to power users.
Heck, even my wife (which is not a power user) thinks that macOs on her MacBook Air is too limiting and tries to hide "too complicated stuff" from the user, and considers getting a Windows laptop after using Air for 6 years. The only benefit of macOs from her perspective is integration with iPhone and airpods.
Similar feelings from my coworkers who choose MacBook over Lenovo at my work (particuarly using fullscreen on 2 monitors is a PITA).
The Terminal is always there at your disposal. OS X is a real UNIX so I don't get how you're limited in any way. Why do so many developers swear by their MacBooks if it's so dumbed-down?
Maybe not every developer is a power user? There are those that are happy with UI and there are those that prefer CLI.
Maybe it is a frontend/backend preference (I prefer backend BTW)?
Some of the issues that my wife had (ordinary user):
- directory structure in Finder is strange, you don't know where your Documents is located
- photos after transferring from iPhone using the default app land in some strange format, should would expect to have jpeg/heic/mov files, but what she sees is a binary DB file (how to send photos to relatives from e.g. gmail, when you can't select it from the filesystem?)
- closing apps - when I click on the red button I expect the app to close, not just one of the windows, so the only way on macOs is to go to app menu and click Exit (too many clicks and needs scanning for a text), while I think most would prefer the other way around (my wife does)
And from myself: Why the default unix tools are in ancient versions?
One has to install brew to do anything non-trivial in Terminal.
Anyone doing this should support any of OEMs selling the BSD or Linux based hardware instead, like System76, Tuxedo, Dell, Asus.
Either one buys into the full Apple experience, or not.