Can i build my own mac

Actually, there are a couple of ways you can get yourself a machine that runs the popular Mac OS. Building your own computer is a great way to learn about the various parts and how they work together to create a functional computer. There are online guides that can help you choose your parts however. As far as instructions for choosing the parts for your Hackintosh, assembling them into a working system, and installing Mac OS on it are concerned, there are simply too many things to consider and too many details involved for me to cover them here.

First, let me start by saying I am in no way advocating to ditch Apple. Anyone that knows me will tell you that I am one of the biggest Apple fans ever. I own every device they have ever made with the exception of the new Mac Pro—we will get to that in a minute. I have used Macs exclusively since the days of the Macintosh SE.

I even own Apple stock. Mac people: as you read this, do not be mad at me. It is what it is and I did not want to believe it either. In contrast, and formerly in harmony with Apple, I always advocate using the best tool for the job. Anyone that has been on one of my commercial productions will tell you that we do not always use what everyone else is using in terms of equipment. We use whatever we feel is the best tool to get the job done.

It used to be that the Mac OS was light years ahead of Windows in terms of intuition, ease of use and reliability. Back in the s, I could not even figure out how to print a Microsoft Word document on a Microsoft Windows machine.

The old Mac vs. PC commercials were so dead-on correct and pretty funny back in the early s. Flash forward to the present day and you will find that Windows 10 is a very useable operating system. Albeit different than the Mac OS, it is very easy to navigate and use. A comparison would be using the dash and touch screen system in a BMW versus a Mercedes—both are different but easy to figure out even if you are used to one versus the other.

Flash forward again to the present day and I can tell you first hand that the Mac OS has become so bloated with unnecessary features that they actually degrade the experience instead of enhance. Can you imagine how fast the Mac environment would be if all the bloatware was stripped away or if you could at least turn it off like in the days of OS9?

Functions and operations have changed and, for all I can tell, just for the sake of being changed. Many functions are no longer intuitive. I find myself Googling just how to change simple preferences on the Mac because I can no longer find those preferences. Go ahead—I will wait. And, lastly, in the ecosystem department, apps that we all love and use everyday to edit our videos and photos like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, are identical in Windows as you see them on a Mac.

Once you have Photoshop open, you cannot tell if you are on a Mac or Windows machine. The same with Capture One and just about any other app. My point with the last two paragraphs is the Mac OS is no longer an advantage over Windows. In my mind, it is an even playing field and that is what started me down this path of even looking at a Windows workstation. Going back to my point of using the best tool for the job—the Mac may no longer be the best tool especially when you see the next two paragraphs.

And before we dive too deep here, if you are using a Mac for email, web browsing and other simple apps, there is probably no need for you to jump ship. In fact, if you are only using your Mac for those simple apps and photo editing, the MacBook Pro or the iMac Pro are all you need. Up until three months ago, I had actually been using my trash can Mac Pro circa as my main photo editing workstation and never had to wait for any Photoshop tasks and I routinely work on mutli-gigabyte layered files.

In addition to not needing the new Mac Pro, building a Windows workstation really will not be beneficial to you. And for those types of work, you want a lot of horsepower CPU cores and graphics power. If you live in the Apple bubble, you may not know that for a fraction of the cost there are 32 and 64 core processors out there that will trounce the Xeon W processors that Apple uses.

Also, Apple for some reason does not like Nvidia. Nvidia actually makes the fastest and best graphics cards out there—that is a generally agreed upon fact among gamers and CGI artists. So there is zero compatibility with MacOS and Nvidia—you cannot use them together at all.

Here are the specs on the Windows workstation I built and have been using for the past three months:. The parts you need to build your own Hackintosh are commonly found at stores like Amazon and Newegg. For Apple's own Mac computers, the company uses custom parts that are harder to replace yourself. To get repairs, you'd have to take a broken Mac computer to an Apple store, or at least to an Apple-authorized repair shop.

YouTuber Peter Paul Chato had a broken power supply in his Hackintosh, and he was able to replace it. In his video, Chato said "I was able to pull the damn thing out, go to my local Canada Computer store, get a different [power supply] I would take it to a Mac store The catch, of course, is that any Hackintosh you build will likely not be covered by technical support, anywhere.

You're on your own. You can install macOS on several non-Apple laptops and desktops, and you can even build your own Hackintosh laptop or desktop from the ground up. Apart from choosing your own PC case, you can get pretty creative with the way your Hackintosh looks. Some cases feature a glass side panel, which bares your parts for all to see, which some might like.

There's also a huge variety of "RGB" parts that can light up in different colors and flash in different patterns, if that's your thing. As for laptops, you can get "bare-bones" laptops that come with the essentials like a processor, giving you the opportunity to pick out and install your own hard drive and memory.

You can get an idea of the types of customization you can do with a Hackintosh by checking out tech YouTuber Dom Esposito's Hackintosh video:. It's not impossible, but it's not that easy, either. It usually involves tweaking settings that most people aren't used to, like a motherboard's "BIOS" settings. You also need to use some esoteric utilities, created by enthusiasts, to install macOS on a Hackintosh. Either way, if you're interested, I'm certainly not going to stop you.

If you're interested, it's not hard to find resources on the topic. Before buying parts for a Hackintosh, it's a good idea to see which parts have been found to be compatible with the process.

The Hackintosh community maintains lists of parts that are known to be compatible. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.