from Hacker News

Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

by opengears on 3/8/25, 5:36 PM with 78 comments

  • by mikae1 on 3/11/25, 5:55 AM

    I ran a Hackintosh as my main machine for many years. I specced (using info found on tonymacx86[1]) and built it around 15 years ago to make it work well as a Hackintosh.

    And work well it did. Incredibly well actually. But now the doors are closing. macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era. That's the reason I'm not willing to invest the time or energy to do the same again.

    Hopefully sometime another era of Hackintoshers will find a way to make macOS run on non-Apple ARM hardware. Perhaps it's already happening? :)

    After 20 years of Hackintosh and Apple hardware I eventually lost hope in Apple due to their unsustainable practices (mostly unserviceable and unupgradeable soldered memory and storage) and moved on to Linux (https://getaurora.dev/). Couldn't be happier with KDE Plasma.

    [1] https://www.tonymacx86.com

  • by wilg on 3/11/25, 5:29 AM

    For calibrating your understanding of greenhouse gas emissions producing, packaging, shipping, using, and recovering materials from a 14-inch MacBook Pro in 2023 emits about 243 kg of carbon [1], which is equivalent to using 27 gallons of gasoline. [2]

    For some people, this may math out. But it's probably easier to worry less about buying a new laptop every once in a while, and more about driving a bit less or getting a more efficient car.

    [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-... [2] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...

  • by rock_artist on 3/11/25, 6:00 AM

    I've also had a very "sustainable" 6800k machine with 32GB ram that was designated later for many other tasks.

    But the title is more of a click bait rather than backing that claim.

    The power source I guess is also a factor, since newer Macs are much more power efficient than Intel days.

    Since 2016, Apple made their machines less "sustainable" in the sense of upgradability (my MacBook Air 2013 was borderline with 8GB of RAM and ended with 2TB hdd), I'm happy the new Mac minis are also going that "hackable" direction.

    Anyway, Software wise, the "Hackintosh" scene is also valuable for true macOS users just as enabling Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, you can get up to Sequoia with running those custom EFIs.

  • by justahuman74 on 3/11/25, 5:00 AM

    Just install linux and move on with life

  • by ch_123 on 3/11/25, 9:38 AM

    There are at least two problems with this article:

    1) If you can hack a current version of macOS to run on non Apple hardware, you can probably also hack a current version of macOS to run on older Apple hardware (see OpenCore Legacy Patcher). 2) Support for macOS on x86 hardware will be discontinued in the not so distant future, putting Hackintoshes into the same category as old x86 Apple hardware.

  • by sc68cal on 3/11/25, 1:33 PM

    I recently purchased a new laptop battery and installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a Macbook Pro from 2009 that I had kept in storage. It is used for light note taking and e-mail, because I wanted to try and see how viable it was to try and stretch the hardware a bit longer instead of adding to the e-waste problem by buying something new.

    It's worked well so far. I will keep using it, and then eventually perhaps pick up another refurbished machine when it finally comes time to replace it.

  • by hot_gril on 3/11/25, 5:29 AM

    I've done this three times, albeit not very recently. First you need a regular computer, on which you're both going to Google a ton and prepare a lot of software. It's only for fun or maaaybe a niche work use case.

    I also had a MacPro5,1 I used extra long, thanks to some of the tooling mentioned here. Great machine. But seeing how it used 200W and I had to buy a new RX580 for it to be usable, idk if that really helped the environment, nor was that the reason I had it.

  • by danw1979 on 3/11/25, 7:19 AM

    I thought it would be interesting to run the numbers for the question “how far can I drive my Prius if I didn’t buy this ?” for a new Macbook Pro M4 (14 inch).

    The answer is a pleasing 1337 miles (198kg lifetime CO2 of the macbook / 148g mile CO2 average for the 2011 Prius).

    This is pretty surprising. I’d always thought laptop purchases had a much higher impact than an average couple of months of driving.

  • by axiologist on 3/9/25, 9:21 PM

  • by aspenmayer on 3/11/25, 5:39 AM

    Hackintoshes make for good troubleshooting devices when working with Mac formatted drives and images.

  • by fexecve on 3/11/25, 5:59 AM

    Seems AI-written. Doesn't give any justification for MacOS being better for older hardware than Linux or even Windows. You won't be getting updates for your Intel hardware on MacOS, so you're right back where you started with Windows 10 going EOL.

  • by userbinator on 3/11/25, 4:46 AM

    The only reaction I can think of to this massive non-sequitur of an article is "WTF?"

    If you really care about forced obsolescence, refuse to upgrade and push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly. Write and prefer native code. Add drivers for hardware that's "no longer supported". What does this have to do with Hackintoshing? No idea.