The ultimate hackintosh laptop - lenovo p50

[Calum MacPhail]

I used to have one but it never felt 100% reliable.

I would agree with you, to go down the hackintosh path you definitely need to be up for tinkering to run one on the regular. I've got various different systems, my main rig, which I find myself using more than my Mac Pro these days, works brilliantly and I've taken it with me multiple times to show projects to clients, without fear of it kicking up any problems.

Picking the right parts is by far the best step you can make, its hard to go wrong with Gigabyte motherboards for example. Theres almost always kinks in the beginning as you say and again I totally agree with you on the usb soundcard point.

I would say that for anyone that wants a powerful mac without the worry of Hackintoshing, for a reasonable price, look at the 2009 mac pro with two CPU sockets. With a firmware upgrade you can transform it into the 2010 model, allowing for faster ram and the ability to replace the dual quad cores, with dual six cores that still have significant wallop. 

In the end, Hackintoshing can transition into a slightly weird but enjoyable hobby. As I mentioned above, I hackintoshed a Surface Pro (that i picked up for 120 quid as it had a cracked screen), after fixing the screen, I now have a 1080p, i5 tablet with 128gb of storage, a usb3 port and a bloody fast card reader that is great for backing up and reviewing footage in the field. Kicks the shit out of the 11 inch air screen.

 

[Andrew Reid]

Nice idea for the Surface Pro!!

[Gokhan Guvenc]

So is Clover more reliable as well (assuming it is setup correctly of course)?

I don't know if one is more reliable than the other. Both should be same assuming they are set up correctly. Clover, however, provides a more native experience, a modern UI, faster boot times, iMessage/iCloud/Facetime support, on-the-fly kext patching for things like SATA, Graphics, Power Management, etc. General consensus is that if you have a newer configuration with a UEFI motherboard, you should choose Clover method.

I have been running OSX as my main OS since June and haven't had a single issue. I must admit that I never had any issues with Unibeast + Multibeast before that either.

By the way, you can install Clover on top of your current Unibeast + Multibeast system. No need to start all over from scratch.

[Andrew Reid]

Got a new install going from Clover now and it is indeed more stable.

Way fewer quirks to sort out post install.

The actual install went well once I deleted the old hidden EFI partition from my USB installer stick, which had the wrong config info on it.

You have to get the pre-install config spot on for your hardware, needs a lot of Googling.

[silvertonesx24]

Key hackintosh rules:

Have a separate working computer at your side for the Google searches you will be doing. Preferably a Mac.

Back up religiously.

Keep a log of what you did to get it up and running. There's nothing like installing a new GFX card or having some kind of freak accident, and having to rebuild your system after not having even thought about things like bootflags and kext files for the past three years. Basically it can be like starting all over again.

[marcuswolschon]

The Lenovo P70 can be purchased already and there is even a -10% discount (for a >5000eur laptop that's a lot of money).

No P50 yet.

Does anyone know first hand about the MacOS driver-situation yet? What parts work/don't work or are problematic?

Apple has not released Thunderbold 3 hardware yet, so there are no adapter to use existing Thunderbold 2 hardware on the Thunderbolt 3 ports.

[Mat Mayer]

Wow the 16GB version is £4,120 and I am sure they said it can go up to 64GB, so it is going to go even higher. Glad I didn't wait for one of these now. Got a 16GB MSI for a fraction of the price, which covers my 4K needs no problem. Horrific screen though and just a 1 hour battery, so I will be getting rid of it probably and going for an iMac. Nothing seems to compare to the smoothness and beautiful screen of OSX on an iMac.

[Ed_David]

The P50 is out in the wild and some users are reporting a string of bugs.

The bigger news for me now is the Nvidia M5000m 8gb mobile graphics card - only will be in 17' computers - but this will  be a beast.

the m2000m is in 15' computers, still seems pretty amazing with the new skylake processors and with thunderbolt 3.

Curious if Apple refreshes the macbook pro or mac pro - but I'm not really holding my breath.

Need to start playing with hackingtosh laptops to see how they do.

[marcuswolschon]

I'm planning on the P70 but instead of an unstable Hackingtosh, run MacOs inside a VMWare.

However I don't know yet if I can forward Thunderbolt devices to the virtual machine yet.

Resolve, Openoffice, Firefox, Thunderbird,... run natively on Windows and FCPX/Motion5/Compressor inside the VMWare then.

Could this work?

 

Intel still has major problems with the Skylake drivers on all platforms. My guess it that that's what Apple is waiting for to present Thunderbolt 3.

And only when Apple has released them will there be Adapters to us existing Thunderbolt 2 devices on the Thunderbilt 3 ports.

[marcuswolschon]

Okay....aparently you can't run OS X on non-apple hardware and thus VMware doesn't have accelerated drivers and thus FCPX won't work in a VMware.

On the other hand a P50/P70 hackingtosh requires drivers for the large NVidia cards, TB3 ports, USB3 ports, Intel Chipset,.... all extremely new and not seen in any Macbook yet.

[Joya2islam]

On 9/6/2015 at 10:47 PM, tupp said:

I have never been impressed with Apple hardware (nor software), and I am all for hackintosh projects.

 

However, exercise caution when using Lenovo products -- the company has a history of installing spyware in the firmware and OS of their machines.

Thank you for your reply. Would you please suggest me the best hackintosh laptop under $300.

[Kisaha]

After so many issues with Adobe Premiere, especially tragic bugs and terrible programming from 2015 amd onward, I am considering try final cut again, after so many years.

I am considering 2 options.

On a Xeon 3.2(or something)MHz,old GTX660 etc

Or on a laptop with i7-6700 and 1060.

Does any one have any experiences with this kind of hardware? I would rather experiment on my old PC, rather the laptop!

[hijodeibn]

On 11/2/2015 at 10:20 AM, Andrew Reid said:

Got a new install going from Clover now and it is indeed more stable.

Way fewer quirks to sort out post install.

The actual install went well once I deleted the old hidden EFI partition from my USB installer stick, which had the wrong config info on it.

You have to get the pre-install config spot on for your hardware, needs a lot of Googling.

I have a hackintosh since 2012 and now running OS Sierra and everything is working fine, USB 3, sound card, wifi....the only issue is that now I have to upgrade the video card to get more rendering power in DaVinci, but I have to say, it takes time to learn how to do it correctly, and you always must have a backup of your important data, anyway, I did the right choice in 2012, I first loaded Mountain Lyon, then try to land Yosemite in a another partition but never really worked well, then went for El Capitan and that worked fine for some time, then I had issue with the motherboard and El Capitan stop working, now I moved to Sierra and has been worked better than ever. 

I am using Unibeast and Multibeast, from Tonymac, and depending of the parameters you can get a very stable hackintosh, I am running Mountain Lyon, Sierra and Windows 8 in the same computer in different partitions. Until now, everything I need.

[Don Kotlos]

@Kisaha While FCPX is great if you own Apple hardware, I have had a very hard time getting the Quicksync to work in any of the hackintoshes that I have built. 

Stability is great if you get most of the drivers right, and for a laptop that is not always the easiest task but might be worth trying. The community in tonymacx86 is huge and you can get a lot of help. 

With the Xeons it depends on the version. For example, I could not get any of the X99 Xeons to work but I am guessing older versions that exist in the mac pros might work out of the box.  

Definitely try the desktop first to get some experience and once you feel more comfortable try the laptop.  

[hijodeibn]

1 hour ago, Don Kotlos said:

@Kisaha While FCPX is great if you own Apple hardware, I have had a very hard time getting the Quicksync to work in any of the hackintoshes that I have built. 

Stability is great if you get most of the drivers right, and for a laptop that is not always the easiest task but might be worth trying. The community in tonymacx86 is huge and you can get a lot of help. 

With the Xeons it depends on the version. For example, I could not get any of the X99 Xeons to work but I am guessing older versions that exist in the mac pros might work out of the box.  

Definitely try the desktop first to get some experience and once you feel more comfortable try the laptop.  

Totally agree, laptop as the first hackintosh is a very bad idea, to be honest I will not even try, desktop is the right way.....later probably a recommended laptop already 100% proved to work OK as a Mac....