Any experience building one of these ? For various reasons, exploring a Mac .. but the price of the iMac and Macbook Pro are very steep.

My main PC died a quick and unexpected death a few weeks ago; thus only a short cameo on TF2 the last few weeks .. save your thank you's for the PC gods.

Anyways, with all the Mac stuff that has infiltrated, it is easier to run 1 Mac house than a mutt system. Only operating computer (non handheld device) is a 4.5 yr old Macbook Pro laptop. Would have some interest in trying to build a desktop or laptop hackintosh. Nothing useful to salvage out of the old dead PC tower save perhaps a power supply or DVR-RW drive.

Opinions ? Cheap options ? To go new, I would have to do something with payments which I would like to avoid, but is feasible.

The sound of silence is deafening. I will have to bide my time and save up looks like.

Would welcome any thoughts of opinions from the Mac folks or others who played both sides of the field.

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sorry, but I have no experience with macs.

Saw this a couple of days ago...thought you would have googled it by now...
http://lifehacker.com/5841604/the-always-up+to+date-guide-to-building-a-hackintosh

or

http://lifehacker.com/5978649/the-customac-2013-buyers-guide-offers-hackintosh-builds-for-every-budget

If you do go this route, take some pics and post it as I am sure some of us would be interested in seeing this...

I'm interested to see how this turns out Fubar, it's something I've wanted to do for a while. Let us know if you get anywhere with it!

^^ what he said

I looked into this a few years back (just out of morbid curiosity and novelty). You have to make sure that every component in your PC (especialy motherboard) will work with OSX. OSX is tailor-made for certain hardware configurations -- it's not like Windows or Linux where it's esigned for maximum hardware compatibility. Luckily, many people have tried this, and there is a wiki that shows what will work and what will not and how well.

I think the bottom line, is you will not end up with a stable system where every aspect of your hardware works to it's full extent -- there will always be small annoyances. The Mac ethos where everything "Just Works™" is hard to attain outside of Apple branded hardware. You'd have to *really* like OSX, and have a hacker spirit in order for it to be a viable choice. Just wanting a "cheaper MacBook Pro" might not be worth it in the long run.

If you want to avoid Windows, and still run Steam, shameless plug: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

Thanks Earl, those are good points. For me I like the challenge, and I'd say I probably have a hacker spirit. I have learned to leave my wife's system alone though, she's the CentOS of the family, I'm the Fedora Alpha haha.

Ubuntu is an alternative, in fact I'm installing it *right now* as a virtual machine, but I must say that for whatever reason, I hate it... It's my least favorite distribution. I don't know if it's because of the "earth" colors, or the "simplicity" where they decide what I should have things set up as, or their popularity, I don't know, but it irks me... I'm not saying it's right, it just does. But I still run it on my daughter's computer because it works for her. I'll usually run Arch if I need something *nix, but these days that is becoming less and less as I move away from active programming

Still though, when you're main complaints are that something is too brown or too easy to setup things are pretty good heh heh. I guess I could always quit complaining and bootstrap a Gentoo machine if I want challenges.