New Mac....ish story

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bigsofty

I purchased an iMac and then a Mac Mini a few years ago when I had some Mac/iOS contract work. They were both second hand, total about £1000'ish. Even then I cringed as I knew they weren't worth it. PC wise, the hardware was way outa date and now their just gathering dust in a cupboard. God Mac hardware is overpriced!

Something I thought about years back was building a Hackintosh but I heard it was tremendously difficult and throught with comparability problems. Also I'm an AMD guy, so this was outa the question on my hardware.

But out of sheer interest, as I no longer support OSX or iOS, I purchased bog standard 2nd hand Intel desktop base unit off of eBay. It had an Intel i7 3770 and was on an Ivy Bridge(both CPU & MB being Intel, makes for an easier installation) mother board, with 4 meg of ram, 300GB HD, 300WATT PSU, in non-de-script black desktop case. £100, not a bad find. Although an i3 or i5 would have been just as good for this. I was lucky, that it came with a free(it wasn't even mentioned in the ad) NVidia GT210 GFX card, which was a surprise as I thought I would have to use the CPU GPU(which works also). It's not an expensive card though, £10-£15 on eBay, actually its pretty bad card but what the hell.

Since I wanted to support High Sierra (Mojave would not use the NVidia GT210 but the installation procedure is the same if I want Mojave) I choose that. The method I chose did not require a Mac to create a recovery USB, its all done on a Windows PC. I just followed the instructions off a website and created and a couple of hours later I had the OSX installation USB drive on an old 8GB USB 2 Key. Booted to that and installed onto the 300GB HD. Resetted the machine and it booted into High Sierra. I may have been lucky but everything worked. It's a full Mac on the screen. It comes up as an iMac 13.3. No incompatibilities, sound, network, keyboard, mouse etc. I can log into the App Store and it is not rejected and seen as a legit iMac.

It was a bit weird, seeing a Mac on a PC monitor but it does work. I've used it various things, nothing serious though, just resting compatibility TBH. Its fast, I hate to say it, OSX is much more optimised than windows, even on this relatively tame hardware its very smooth(Although I did stick in an old 4GB DIMM that was in a drawer afterwards to get 8GB), not a hint of jittering. I have also stuck in(I'm a bit of a tech hoarder) an old 250GB HD and installed Windows 10 on that, the Mac boot menu supports dual booting off the bat so nothing else needs to be done to support a dual OS boot.

It's a time consuming and pretty exact process that had to be done in many multiple steps but an evening can get the job done. Hell if a numpty like me can do it...

But the equivalent iMac (A1419) on eBay today would be, 2nd hand, £750 - £1000 (Admittedly with a screen). My total cost(Excluding some old junk I had lying around) £100.

It was fun, in a nerdy kinda way, to see if it could be done mainly, I would definitely advise anyone to give it a go.

The main reason I mentioned this is I know some of you still want to support a OSX(iOS possibly on other dev kits), so this may be a cheap option for that.

It's also rather, ahem, grey area legal-wise. So I can post the link to the website I used for the instructions via PM if your interested.

Any admins not happy with the post, feel free to move/delete it, no harm done. :)
Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

MrPlow

Cool! Also, I myself would totally go with purchasing the OS software - just to avoid any viri etc. (what is it 70 euro? not sure?) And then can't see any issues with that... :)

Excellent work re-genning old tech - I mean why do people think they 'have' to buy the newest laptops etc.!!

I am on a laptop (lenovo) for last 4 or more years I think...? I am looking to mirror my drive (out of fear of HD failure!)
Comp:
Speccy-48k, Speccy-128k, Amigas, PCs

bigsofty

Weird thing is Mojave is free on the App Store. But this is probably seen as an update, so I'm not sure what info is carried across.

Thank you, yes I agree, lots of the old CPU are still solid work-horses. This eBayed one can still do 3.4 gigs over 4 cores and supports 8 threads. Good enough for most things, even today.

Lenovo make great Laptops, I've a Lenovo Ideapad Y500 circa 2013 IIRC. Solid performer, I am currently using it for GLBasic which it does admirably!

I bought an i5 HP Omen last year mainly for my music stuff(I mess around with synths in my spare time), to run Ableton Live but frankly it's garbage. It's slow and the fan is cranked up all the time(The BIOS setting does not effect it, I think it throttling continuously), so it's noisy. Finally gave it to my son. The old Lenovo beats the pants off it!?!  I blame the recent curse of trying to make laptops super thin. The result is bad thermals = lots of throttling.

BTW MrP. You've probably heard of this already, I use the free version of Macrium Reflect, it clones drives with absolute zero bother. It can even create a mountable drive image file of a complete drive too. It's saved my bacon a couple of times in the past. I really should buy it but I'm a total skinflint!  :D
Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

MrPlow

Good to hear another Lenovo fan! My past one was a Sony Viao and although I liked it - it weighed a ton!
My next laptop will be same make again I think (I used to work for the mfg of the Lenovos many moons ago)

I have full macrium here somewhere - I got it with something...I have a Drivewire too and something called Inateck duplicator
(never used yet)

Comp:
Speccy-48k, Speccy-128k, Amigas, PCs

hardyx

#4
All the macOS systems are free since Mavericks. The problem is that Apple deletes from the appstore, but I have backup of the last installers.

I have a macmini 2013 (the last that was upgradeable memory) bought in amazon from a german shop and was new. The price was 700 euro, but was the best computer buy in many years. I put a ssd disk and works fast and very quiet.


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bigsofty

#5
Apple actually has a server download for the last four versions MacOs installers and even just specific updates if your require. You can create an official Mountian Lion to Sierra installer DMGs using python. These are free and official from Apple.

The easiest way to get them is using Python, see here... https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/using-installinstallmacos-py-to-download-macos-high-sierra-installers/ This process is on MacOS but you can do the same on windows. Its a small step to create a bootable USB image from the DMG.

I stuck on a £5 bluetooth dongle on the Hackintosh today, as I have a Magic Trackpad from my old Mini. Worked first time, very pleased. Again, works great on OSX, lots of gestures for doing repetitive things, something that was sorely missed when I paired with Windows 10 a year back. Not unexpected though, each company is hardly well know at supporting the others hardware!  :S
Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

dreamerman

I was also looking at hackintosh (MacOS on pc) stuff, but finally didn't test it, only installed SteamOS for app testing. From Apple products I'd pick mini Mac's they are ideal as desktop/under TV box for most office/home tasks (where You don't need powerful gpu), but that premium price just kills it. Most sad is that pc manufacturers didn't really go into small PC topic, they also try to push them with premium price point..
For me main reason to use MacOS on pc would be to test/publish apps on Apple store, yet now I don't know how it will look with current requirements 64bit/Metal...

That's a little offtopic but in past few years there were only little improvements in Intel cpus (for real daily workloads) in clock per clock comparison. So older generations of Core processors like i5 are really capable for normal working and gaming. AMD made small revolution with Ryzen's  - jump in IPC, and core count. I'm really curious about their lineup of upcoming 7nm products.

Laptops are also specific, older business class models are made much better in terms of components/materials that those new for 'normal' users..
Check my source code editor for GLBasic - link Update: 20.04.2020

bigsofty

Yeah I see what you mean Ian. I'm actually holding back on upgrading this year because of the current AMD Zen 2 rumours. I'm hoping the more cores/threads will help with my GLBasic compilation times. There are rumours of a 16/32 thread monster CPU for about £500 quid. Although still quite expensive, in relative terms, nothing of this power has really been seen on non-server market before. These chips will definitely shake up the desktop market IMHO later this year.

Yeah, no Metal support for NVidia GPUs past GTX680(Quattro-GTX680 are still Metal supported though) in Mojave. There's  quite an interesting spat between NVidia and Apple just now. Apple aren't allowing any NVidia drivers for their new graphics cards in Mojave, since there is no NVidia native Metal drivers for them but will accept unsigned drivers, which are needed for an Apple sourced wrapper. Apple knows that NVidia will never supply them with unsigned drivers(it's a real security risk as far as NVidia are concerned, since they are at the end of the day, kernel level drivers), it's really Apples way to force NVidia to support Metal, whether NVidia wants to or not.

Simplest solution, stick any bog-standard Radeon in your Hackintosh and your good to go though as far as Mojave is concerned.

Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)

Kitty Hello

Very interesting. My macMini was not supported with further updates, so Installed Linux Mint on in, and use it for watching DVD or YouTube and keeping our family photos on it. It works good and I didn't have to dump the hardware. The case is quite appealing to me. It fits a living rooom, fine.

dreamerman

Ah I forgot about topic :> Talking about MacOS/iOS requirements I meant that new apps for will those systems will need to be 64bit and use Metal for graphics (not OpenGL) - or maybe they changed this already, completely I've no idea what's current status on that.
Generally my initial idea was to have 3 systems on desktop pc - Windows + both SteamOS and MacOS for testing GLB projects, for now I didn't install MacOS yet due those (above mentioned) requirements, maybe some day :]

It's interesting thing about those issues with Nvidia drivers in MacOS :D Glad that I'm rather AMD gpu user - just better performance/$$ in my budget, so this shouldn't be a problem. Also I'm curious if Apple will use new AMD cpu's in near future.. Oh this year Computer and E3 will be HOT :)


Kitty Hello: that's great second life for macMini and it's surely better than android based media players. But most important You don't threw it into garbage and pay extra $$ for good media player.
Check my source code editor for GLBasic - link Update: 20.04.2020

bigsofty

#10
Saw this the other day, this looks like another cool option using a virtual machine this time...



QuoteOh this year Computer and E3 will be HOT

Have saved my money, am now waiting for that 16 core/32 thread AMD CPU GLBasic monster compilation upgrade! :D
Cheers,

Ian.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC.  As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)