Macworld August 2017

If you’re curious about how to build your own Hackintosh, Kirk McElhearn and I recently built Hackintoshes and wrote about our experiences. These articles, which appear later in this section, are great starting points for researching your own Hackintosh. WHY YOU SHOULD BUILD A HACKINTOSH There are many reasons to build your own Hackintosh. Here are the three biggies. 1. Customization: You can build exactly what you need, not what Apple wants you to have. From a pint-sized portable to a full-size mega tower, onboard video or high-end video card, hard drive type, number, and capacity, speed and amount of RAM, etc. What you build is up to you and your needs (and budget). 2. Affordability: By buying your own parts and assembling them yourself, you can wind up with a much less expensive…

Fellow Macworld contributor Kirk McElhearn recently built a mini Hackintosh; that is, a generic PC styled like a Mac mini on which he installed and ran macOS. This is a road I’ve gone down myself, way back in 2008, when I built my Frankenmac. As Kirk was building a relatively low-end Mac clone, and as Apple has ignored the high-end Mac Pro for so many years, I thought it’d be interesting to build a new high-end Frankenmac. WHY BUILD A HACKINTOSH My current machine is a late 2014 5K iMac, and while it works well for most tasks, it really suffers when I pursue my avocation: Flying the X-Plane flight simulator. Frame rates can vary from decent to slow, and the iMac’s fan ramps up nearly as soon as I launch the…

All the cool kids are doing it these days: they’re building Hackintoshes. Since Apple isn’t updating their desktop Macs as often as people want, some Mac users have gone the home-build route, making their own Macs using off-the-shelf parts and hobbyist software. I have an old Mac mini that could do with a refresh, so I decided to try this out and build a Hackintosh mini. Here’s how it went. WHY BUILD A HACKINTOSH? I own a late 2011 Mac mini that I use as a media server to host and stream my Plex video library, and for Time Machine backups. It runs macOS Server, and uses its caching server feature to cache app updates. It’s not connected to a display, and I control it using Screen Sharing. It’s not a workhorse by…

In this column, I point out things that Apple should fix in macOS, iOS, and in its services and hardware. But it’s important to acknowledge the company when it does fix some of the more egregious problems that plague users. Apple gave us an extensive look at the next versions of macOS and iOS at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, and a number of the new features it announced fix long-standing issues. I’d like to highlight a few issues that Apple has announced that it will be fixing in the next versions of macOS and iOS. MESSAGES One of the biggest small announcements Apple made was that Messages will now sync across devices. This fixes the long-standing problem of having to delete the same messages on each device you own. As Apple…

It’s been nearly two years since Apple updated the iMac, which may not seem like such a big deal, especially for a desktop computer. So, understandably, if you bought an iMac in the past three or four years, maybe you aren’t looking for a new computer right now. But if your Mac is older than that, you’re probably looking to upgrade, and it’s hard to convince yourself to invest in a computer that was released so long ago. Apple has finally updated the iMac, so if you’re in the market for a new computer, now’s the time to do some shopping. In this review, I take a close look at the high-end 21.5-inch iMac with a 3.4GHz Core i5 Kaby Lake processor, which sells for $1,499. KABY LAKE UPGRADES, NEW GRAPHICS, RAM The…

It’s now year three of the MacBook as we know it, and it seems that after initially being a laptop without an ecosystem, and then a laptop that we’re still getting used to, the MacBook has settled into its groove. It’s established its place in Apple’s laptop line, and it’s finally gaining acceptance by the consumer. But maybe you’re still a holdout. You’re out there, I know, still not convinced that the MacBook is a good buy. Well, I have some good news: The newest MacBook is a better buy than it has been, thanks to performance improvements by its processor and graphics upgrade. What Apple has in the MacBook is a small and light laptop that packs a nice speed punch. KABY LAKE, GRAPHICS, SSD UPGRADES The speed increase is largely due…