I did not find it that difficult, but there was a lot of up front homework to make sure you had a compatible hardware configuration due to needing hardware which was supported by the limited number of Mac configurations. I recall running into a problem where I wasn't getting a picture on my monitor and I could not figure out why since my video card was supported and the drivers were ok. The problem as it turned out? I had my monitor connected via DVI and macs had never supported DVI so there were no drivers. Once the install was done, it pretty much Just Worked. Linux installs are pretty easy these days but debugging problems can be very difficult. The hard part of the hackintosh was keeping up with upgrades, since they needed to be done manually (due to potentially breaking things).

In this case Apple also prioritizes performance.

Uh… didn’t this happen like 7 years ago when they stopped using intel chips?

I think they were still releasing updates for the non-Apple Silicon Macs, which meant Hackintosh was still possible.

Also why not just buy a pc to do this diy-adjacent bullshit? Not like you can’t get Mac equivalent (or better) hardware for literally the same price these days. It’s not 2004.

That’s what a Hackintosh is though. It’s running Mac on non-Apple hardware.

As I understand it, MacOS's desktop relies on GPU instructions that haven't been implemented in any non-MacOS hosted virtualization environment. So you can have a MacOS VM running on a MacOS host just fine, but you can't run a MacOS VM in a Linux host, even on official Mac hardware, at least if you want the actual desktop environment. The Asahi Linux people have mentioned it before.

It’s more cost effective to integrate the controller.

Being worse for customers is just a happy accident.

You and I both know that Apple doesnt do this shit for cost efficiency.

They do it to make make shit worse for consumers and "unauthorized" repair services.

Why? Anti-features aren't just Apple. All big tech do it to users.

Edit: And automotive, white goods companies, etc, etc

other companies arent engineering serial numbers and other identity information into every component, even shit as small as halleffect sensors, so it cant be taken from a damaged device to repair a differnt device of the same make and model.

To act like what apple does is an industry standard is nothing but blatant apple fanboy propaganda.

They are not bringing anything good back. They were a nice company like 30 years ago.

That reputation held for damn long, then they killed it and created a new one of "being luxury crap for successful success", and during the transition used both.

Now it's just luxury crap. I don't know how there still are Apple users who are not after that.

When some people talk how "but it's a Unix so you can do Unix things" - with a huge pain in the butt over Linux, and there are plenty of variants of "install once and don't care after" with Linux. As in "plenty".

In general, I think the concept of trademark has gotten old. Same with patents. These allow companies to just abuse their past reputation and also sue anyone trying to do business in the niche their past self has created.

Or maybe trademarks are fine, but patents ... when they were a good thing, new inventions were patented for some period of time. Now they patent interfaces and solutions where no new invention happened.

All these protections are needed, but the system making them has gone AWOL. We need direct democracy.

They’re a business. Reducing their costs (while charging you a premium) is absolutely what they do.

Apple’s whole deal for decades now has been building a vertical supply chain. Using their own SSD controller is one less component they have to pay others for.

They just don’t give a shit about downsides: aftermarket repairers or user upgradeability.

Oh no, they are bastards. Extra big bastards in a sea of bastards. I blame regulators. The hope is the right to repair because law in more and more places in more and more market areas.

Without the EU regulators, Apple would never have gone USB C.