Low End Mac's contributors recently shared their thoughts about
Hackintoshes and the tinkering community (see The Hackintosh Conundrum),
and it got me thinking back to my experiments with hacking OS X
onto a netbook (see The
HackBook Experience: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from early
2010).
When I first started looking into making a HackBook, my reasons were
fairly simple: I always like a challenge, and Apple wasn't serving my
needs in the ultraportable arena. Sure, there was the 13" MacBook Air, but it was
expensive and plagued with hinge problems and slowness. It was not an
obvious successor to the 12" PowerBook
G4 that, up until recently, was my perfect computer.
So I proceeded to find an easy-to-hack netbook that would fit the
bill. It had its problems, but for about six months, it met my needs,
and it was my main Mac. Later that year, I picked up a MacBook Aluminum Unibody (like
Charles Moore's)
and used the two in tandem for a while.
When I needed a disc drive and more graphics and computing power, I
used the MacBook. When I needed portability, I turned to to
HackBook.
And then, Apple came out with the 11" MacBook Air. With reviews
of its speed and light weight sweeping the Web, I knew this would be my
next Mac, and my days of using the HackBook were limited. I waited for
the graphics issues to be sorted out and for a newer generation model to debut
so prices would drop. Once all those milestones passed, a Late 2010 11"
Air was mine!
Since acquiring one when Apple had refurbs available
for $750, I haven't touched the HackBook, and I've mostly abandoned my
MacBook Unibody except for occasional iDevice syncing and DVD ripping,
both functions that the Air will serve creditably once I get around to
it.
One of my annoyances with the HackBook was its paltry graphics
capability; streaming video was noticeably choppy, about on par with my
12" 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4. The Air, on the other hand, handles streaming
video well from all the popular sources - Netflix, Hulu, YouTube. It's
also extremely quick about loading applications, thanks to the SSD, and
it's lighter than the Lenovo with about twice the battery life. Plus,
it has none of the annoying bugs that come with forcing OS X into
unsupported hardware.
The only obvious limitation is hard drive space with the 64 GB SSD,
but I've always maintained a redundant set of large-capacity external
drives for storage, so that doesn't bother me. As with the HackBook, I
don't plan on doing a lot of heavy computing with the Air. Unlike the
converted S10's 1.6 GHz single-core Atom processor, however, the
dual-core 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo in the Air does gives me the option of
doing heavier work.*
The seamless experience of using OS X on Apple hardware is what
drew me to Macs in the first place. I love that Hackintoshes exist and
give people the option of an affordable Mac experience, but now that
Apple has bridged so many of the gaps between OS X and Windows and
brought back the small portable form factor, I'm comfortable leaving
that particular tinkering behind.
