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Has anyone seen any good examples of notebooks turned into hackintoshes? I've seen a chart of netbooks and the compatibility of their various parts with making them into hackintoshes or Macbooks/Pros, but they all seem to be from more than a year or 2 ago.

The sites I've looked at, tonymacx86, wiki.osx86project, and insanelymac, all seem to have rather low amounts of traffic and aren't kept up to date.

Does anyone have any other sources one might want to browse?

tonymacx86 is probably the best resource when it comes to notebooks, but unfortunately as you've seen notebook support really lags. They've been all about the HP ProBooks with Sandy Bridge for a while now. Lots of people can get nearly any notebook or desktop with a modern Intel processor to boot the installer and even boot into OS X but without working power management you're kind of stuck. Even on the desktop, Hackintoshes suck down more power than the same hardware running Windows by default and getting it to work is tricky.

Yeah, your observations match what I've seen. And it makes it a question for me whether it's worthwhile doing, rather than just picking up a MBP and Parallels or some such. The Retinas are at such a premium though, and the older versions seem so comparatively crappy in vertical resolution that it makes it somewhat difficult to contemplate doing. Ah well...

Thanks for the reply.

Ran across this chart the other day. It has some Ivy Bridge laptops, so it sounds newer than the chart you described. Looks like an active site, too.

http://www.osxlatitude.com/edp/compatibility/

Ragnar Dan wrote:

Yeah, your observations match what I've seen. And it makes it a question for me whether it's worthwhile doing, rather than just picking up a MBP and Parallels or some such. The Retinas are at such a premium though, and the older versions seem so comparatively crappy in vertical resolution that it makes it somewhat difficult to contemplate doing. Ah well...

It's really not worth it. With the work that goes into these systems, you could be running a Linux distro like Slackware, Arch, or Gentoo which would require about the same amount of work, but the OS won't be an unwilling prisoner of the hardware. The might be the odd piece of hardware that isn't recognized, but nothing is going to break because of it.

The MBPw/R are really high-end pieces of equipment. Only the Dell Precision M3800 gets close, but even then it's missing the PCIe SSD, Thunderbolt, and Apple Trackpad. I bought my wife a 13" MBPw/R for Christmas, and it is a really nice piece of kit.

You could go the refurbished route. That's how I got my 12" Powerbook all those years ago.

Yugiyurigyu: That chart had a few interesting items in it, but I'm more or less decided to go the quick & lazy (and more useful considering I may have access to a warranty) route at this point, like Flatland_Spider advises, and get a used model, since I've found one locally at a decent-seeming price (won't know for sure until I see it in person, of course).

Thanks for all the responses. I'll try to reply here again after I finish the purchase and get things installed on it, in case anyone cares why I did it (a dubious proposition, to be sure ).