Return of the Hackintosh?

While studying experimental music, I started using Macs at university in 2009. I then bought a second-hand iMac in 2010 followed by a second-hand MacBook in 2011. With Apple moving arguably more towards the consumer end of the computer market with more compact and non-user upgradable devices, in 2012 and 2013 I decided to invest in a Mac Mini and a non-retina MacBook Pro. With Apple’s announcement yesterday of the new, ultra-slim yet vastly underpowered 12” MacBook Pro, and the inevitability that sometime in the next three years I will need to update my hardware again, I have begun hypothetically considering what direction I would explore.

Image courtesy of 9to5Mac.

For real-time audio and video performance, I decided over four years ago that I would prefer to utilize the OSX operating system due to its rock-solid stability. Call me old fashioned, but I have no desire to purchase a laptop that one cannot even upgrade the RAM or Hard-Drive in the future due to them being soldered into the motherboard, while the need for an expensive cable to utilize USB ports or display output on my machine isn’t practical. As I have no desire to return to Windows and unfortunately switching to Linux would require me to fundamentally reconsider my performance system and rule out further software development for iOS and Mac, I am thus stuck with using the OSX operating system.

Hardware and software, however, are two very different things, and although OSX is designed to be installed on Apple-made hardware, it can, in fact, be installed on PCs. This process, as you’d imagine, is somewhat complicated, very hardware dependent and prone to instability, but the way that Apple is taking their ‘pro’ laptop products, I may be forced to seriously consider this option in the future. Could this be ‘Return of the Hackintosh’?