Greg Gant writes about Macs, Apple hardware history, Mac Pro upgrade guides, and running classic Mac OS versions.
HN links his Mac Pro upgrade guides and his Apple vs. Nvidia history in threads about old Macs and Apple's GPU choices.
Have you ever tried daily-driving a Hackintosh? It's nothing like using a Mac, or even a Windows/Linux machine for that matter.
I dual-booted Mojave on 2 Wintel machines back during the Clover bootloader days, I could only tolerate it for ~2 weeks before giving up. Spoofing OEM Apple hardware is basically impossible, even with configuration-matched CPUs your motherboard will still mismatch the ACPI overrides that macOS expects. Any variety of modern GPU is basically forfeit, hardware acceleration is flaky, Metal is inhumane (with or without Hackintosh), CUDA is unsupported, Vulkan is MIA, filesystem support is a joke, and OTA updates have to be disabled or else your system volume will overwrite the partition table and erase everything that's installed. Reinstalling from scratch can take multiple days if you don't back up your EFI configuration, so you really want to avoid bricking your install while you tweak the configs to stop being broken.
Even as a developer, using a Hackintosh was a waste of my time back in 2018 when "everything was supported". In 2026, I cannot comprehend a single objective reason why you would use an x86 Hackintosh instead of a better-supported and more fully-featured Linux or WSL installation. x86_64-apple-darwin is a partially depreciated target triple that's not suitable for any macOS or Linux development work, and for prosumers the architecture is already unsupported by many professional apps. Hackintosh is a museum piece now, even OpenCore…
> The US has Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, all of which innovate to offer products appealing enough that customers are willing to use or buy them in a free and consensual transaction (which does not require any impoverishment). If they fail at innovating to appeal to customers, they go bankrupt.
I make iPhone apps.
No Apple software update has appealed to me since back when they were still named after cats. In agregate they have added some useful stuff, but even then what has gotten worse over the years means my only interest in updates is (1) the security issues and (2) the way all developers (including me!) are pushed towards supporting only the most recent releases that in turn means that even modern websites, let alone apps, don't work right on older systems: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2024/07/03/running-10.6-snow-leopard-in-2024.html
And, bluntly, the library updates are also unimpressive, SwiftUI has obviously been the intended way forward for a while now, but even Apple themselves have to keep updating UIKit because SwiftUI isn't good enough yet: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10118
Microsoft has a very different set of issues, but at least they sucessfully diversified into gaming platforms without destroying their dominance in office work. But how much of that dominance is the updates, vs. backward compatibility with so many people's old documents that would be extraordinarily difficult for 3rd parties to replicate?…
Steam sales are abysmal on Mac, so it's a decentproxy I think. I couldn't find a nice cut report on gaming PC sales vs standard desktops, whichi is unfortunate as the PC market in general is on a downtrend while my hunch is gaming is probably flat or rising.
On Apple and gaming...they've been on the cold with Steam, basically refusing any improvement that would help. They've Epic at their throat. They've faught Microsoft over the XBox streaming issues tooth and nails. Sony and Nintendo are the only big players that don't actively fight them. I wouldn't call the situation great.
On Apple and Nvidia, it's a long story. They were in good terms, until the Metal transition where they cut ties in a very messy way, and we're all assuming there was a lot going on behind the curtain.
> macOS 10.14 Mojave required metal-compatible GPUs. At some point, during the macOS Mojave beta, Apple pulled Nvidia's ability to sign its code, which ended Nvidia's support for macOS in one spiteful, anti-competitive move. In order for GPUs to be Metal compatible, they needed drivers, and Nvidia wasn't able to release drivers.
> Nvidia publicly announced that it had working metal drivers on its forum, but Apple had revoked its developer license leaving the blame squarely at Apple's feet. Nvidia even called out apple on his support page but has now since modified it.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html
people really think bumpgate was about some issue that also affected AMD too and not closing the door on NVIDIA building a platform inside Apple's platform and shifting the balance of power?
you've been reading way too much semiaccurate lol
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html
like, we have the benefit of a decade of retrospect and watched nvidia do exactly the thing that apple refuses to let their partners ever do (namely: wear the pants in the relationship), and you're still taking charlie's takes at face value. Do you really think it's the bumps and not Apple taking action to protect themselves and their future products against the threat of competitive lock-in posed by NVIDIA and CUDA?
it is just amazing that people continue to take the guy seriously. How is that "NVIDIA is 4+ years behind AMD in the mid-term, and GV100 and GP100 are bumpgate 2.0" working out for you? Was ~2015-2020 a good period for Radeon…
There are a few examples / anectodes:
The first is MS' trouble with the original Xbox (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ati-to-provide-chips-for-future-xbox-products - not a great example (20+ year old articles are hard to find) but mentions the issues MS had with Nvidia)
Then there's Apple's drama, which involved warranty claims for laptop parts that led to them being AMD only until the Arm move (https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html)
Sony only went with Nvidia for the PS3, but that may be more about AMD's APU offerings than Nvidia's shortcomings.
Whether these are signs of a trend or just public anecdotes is in the eye of the beholder or kept away in boardrooms.
> Then there's Apple's drama, which involved warranty claims for laptop parts that led to them being AMD only until the Arm move (https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...)
It’s second-hand info so take it with a grain of salt, but I read somewhere that there was a lot of friction between Apple and Nvidia because Apple likes to tweak and tailor drivers per model of Mac and generally not be wholly dependent on third parties for driver changes, but that requires driver source access which Nvidia didn’t like (even though they agreed to it for quite some time — drivers for a range of Nvidia cards shipped with OS X for many years and those were all Apple-tweaked).