Back when I originally considered building a hackintosh, I based it on a rough spec of a mac pro. Very rough. It worked out significantly cheaper and didn’t seem like such a pain in the arse to get going. Idea was that I’d build it and have it for when my now 4 year old macbook pro finally bites the dust. Alas, all that’s gone down the toilet today with apples announcement of a couple of new imacs. Could a purchase from apple actually be financially viable? Surely not!
Spec, but a little bit modified, is below.
27″ iMac
2.8Ghz Quad Core Intel i7
8GB ram
1TB hard drive
8x Superdrive
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
€2,159.01 incl VAT & Shipping
26″ NEC IPS LCD – €965.93
2.8Ghz Quad Core Intel i7 – €262.00
8GB ram – €175.00
1TB Western Digital Green Power – €69.00
Pioneer DVD RW SATA Drive – €25.50
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB PCI-E – €96.50
Logitech Cordless Desktop LX710 – €59.00
Antec Three Hundred Midi Tower – €53.00
AXP Powersupply ATX 500W – €35.00
Copy of Snow Leopard – €29.00
€1,822.93 incl VAT
Excluding shipping, but as most or all of the above is sourced from Komplett, it can either be picked up at their Dublin pickup location for free or shipped for €15.
There’s €336 in the difference, in favour of the hackintosh. Consider the following;
- The monitor in the hackintosh configuration is smaller and runs at a lower resolution. Both however are IPS panels.
- The keyboard and mouse are, at least in my opinion, far nicer with the mac.
- Cable spaghetti with the hackintosh. Putting this into an already messy apartment will add to the lovely cable clutter.
- No upgrade woes. Currently with hackintosh, there appear to be issues with upgrading. Issues that could completely screw your install.
Disadvantage of course is given that it’s an sealed unit, you presumably can’t upgrade it without sending it back to Apple at huge cost. So whatever you buy, you better make sure it’s a decent spec. Storage, at least for me, is no issue. I’m currently coasting along nicely on the 160GB hard drive in my macbook pro. Along with that, I have a Drobo that currently has 1.4TB free on it. Also have a couple of other 1TB external drives. Not going to go short of disk space any time soon.
Hmm lets see, anything else I’ve missed?
