There are only two things of value in the world, time and money. This is true for anything you want to try to evaluate. If you don’t get paid much, you might very well have lots of time on your hands (notice, I didn’t say enough, and this is assuming that you are not putting in free work). If you turn to computers, you can buy an $800 machine, but you will likely have to put in a good amount of time minding it and jigging it to run the way that you want. With a $1500 machine, you are likely going to have more time to spend using the machine because you’ve put in your money.
So this leads me to the my next project, building a Hackintosh. Why? Well I used to be really into building PCs, and while I never built from the ground up, I helped others do it. I am also interested in seeing what component technologies there are out there now – many of them are changing even before the article is posted to the ‘net. Finally, I am a MacHead, and while it used to be fun to keep up with what Apple was putting into the new revs of any given machine, now that is more or less gone as refreshes are ho-hum. It also used to be that use a Mac was to have some extra knowledge about your machine or OS, and that is now evaporating as well.
But the Hackintosh community seems to be a way to get back into the innards of the system and the appeal of building my own MacPro (less the case) for $800 and a fair amount of sweat and brain equity is appealing, when you consider the MacPro that I want is about $4000 and the iMac would be at least $2700. Looking at the cost difference of at least $1900, and valuing my time at $100/h, if it takes me more than 19h to get the machine up and running, then it would have been cheaper for me to get a Mac. I don’t think it will take that long as I plan to do my research and get parts that are known to work well with good support from the community.
So when am I going to do this? January 2010. Why? i7, SSHDD and other technologies will be out there and economical by that time.
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