It has been a long time since I last made a post for this blog. So it is high time that I get back to blogging here.
While the Hackintosh is still around, its days are numbered. Apple’s M1 Macs marked the beginning of the end for the Hackintosh era. These silicon chips give Apple complete control over the Macs. Apple has been transitioning away from Intel since the release of the M1s two years ago. And Macs with M2s have started coming out in 2022. Apple is expected to stop upgrading software for Intel-powered Macs in a few years or so. At that point, the era of Hackintosh will be officially over.
While my Hackintosh machines have served me faithfully, I decided to make the jump to Apple Silicon now. I didn’t want to mess anymore with all the work that was involved with the process of upgrading the OS from time to time. Since MacOS is my OS of choice, I wanted to keep on top of any security updates as needed. I want to spend less time tinkering with hardware and more time doing actual development work. So I retired my Hackintosh 2 and have replaced it with a Mac Studio. I got a Studio with 32GB of ram and a 512GB SSD. I wanted more memory than I could get with a Mac Mini. The studio also has more ports plus an SD card slot too.
This is my third Apple computer. The first one was a Mac Book Pro 15″ that I bought in 2007. And the second one was a Mac Mini that I bought in 2009. Both had been upgraded to run SSDs in addition to adding a second SSD to each one. I used drive adapters from OWC for both.
I cleared off everything that I could from the Hackintosh2’s boot drive, before I ran the Migration Assistant application to transfer my setup over to the Mac Studio. The transfer went very well. Afterwards I spent time upgrading any application that needed an update. I removed a number application too along the way. I added a few new applications that would be useful for my development work. I purchased one of OWS’s Envoy Express enclosures for extra storage. I had an WD Black 1TB NVMe that I put into the enclosure. The Mac Studio is pretty much all setup now. As for the Hackintosh2, I transfered all the data from the other drives to my TrueNAS. The Hackintosh2 will become my new Windows game machine. I will have to do a migration from my current Windows game machine (formerly my Hackintosh1) to the Hackintosh2 machine. I also have an RTX 3080 card to install in the machine as well. That’s it for now.