Apple is working on new desktop Macs, including a ground-up redesign of the tiny-but-controversial 2013 Mac Pro. We’re also due for some new iMacs, which Apple says will include some features that will make less-demanding pro users happy.

But we don’t know when they’re coming, and the Mac Pro in particular is going to take at least a year to get here. Apple’s reassurances are nice, but it’s a small comfort to anyone who wants high-end processing power in a Mac right now. Apple hasn’t put out a new desktop since it refreshed the iMacs in October of 2015, and the older, slower components in these computers keeps Apple out of new high-end fields like VR.

This is a problem for people who prefer or need macOS, since Apple’s operating system is only really designed to work on Apple’s hardware. But for the truly adventurous and desperate, there’s another place to turn: fake Macs built with standard PC components, popularly known as “Hackintoshes.” They've been around for a long time, but the state of Apple's desktop lineup is making them feel newly relevant these days. So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used—and what they'd like to see from Apple.

A brief history of the Hackintosh

Back in 2005, Apple did the unthinkable: it announced that it would be abandoning IBM’s PowerPC CPUs for its Macs. Starting in 2006, all Macs would be powered by the same Intel CPUs included in regular old PCs.

The Intel transition removed the single highest barrier to running Mac software on regular PCs: the hardware platform would now be much more similar than dissimilar. And amid the initial rending of garments from longtime Apple fans about the move from “exotic,” “special” PowerPC hardware to Intel hardware (it all seems very melodramatic in retrospect, frankly), there was already speculation about running Mac OS X on regular PCs. Hell, Apple’s first developer hardware for Intel Macs was just a Pentium 4 in a Power Mac case.

Further Reading Picking up the pieces: John Siracusa mourns the Power PC

Once the Intel hardware actually started launching, “OSx86” projects began to crop up in earnest. Early efforts were pretty buggy and nasty; few GPUs were actually supported, it was almost never possible to apply system updates without breaking everything because you had to rely on custom OS kernels, and you had to hack around the fact that most PCs were still using BIOS firmware instead of the Mac’s newer UEFI.

That has all changed now. Thanks to more modern PCs, a wider install base for Intel Macs, and dedicated enthusiast communities and forums like TonyMacx86, it’s not too hard for anyone comfortable with PC building to assemble a Hackintosh using off-the-shelf parts. Community-developed apps and tools streamline the process of creating install media and setting up drivers, and while you’re probably going to have to do a little bit of Terminal work getting everything to function perfectly, most major setup problems are easy enough to overcome for anyone who has been building and maintaining their own PCs for a while.

Technically against the rules, but Apple doesn’t seem bothered

At this point I should mention this article is in no way intended to be an install guide or an endorsement of Hackintoshing. Today, as has always been the case, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a violation of Apple’s licensing agreement. And in fact, I would even dissuade more technically inclined users from building Hackintoshes at all (for reasons we’ll get into a bit later).

That said, Apple has done surprisingly little to shut down the Hackintosh community. When companies attempt to commercialize PCs running Mac software, as a long-gone company called Psystar briefly did back in 2008, Apple shuts them down swiftly and decisively. But macOS itself doesn't do more than a surface-level check for genuine Apple hardware—the underlying hardware needs to be close-ish, and special bootloaders spoof things like the model, firmware information, and serial number. These OSx86 enthusiast communities have existed for years without so much as a cease-and-desist. Contrast this with Apple’s much more stringent approach to iOS jailbreaking: the company releases new updates to disable old jailbreaks pretty quickly, at least in part because these jailbreaks rely exclusively on serious security flaws to work in the first place.

This isn’t to say that Apple invites people to build Hackintoshes. It’s more likely that the Hackintosh community has such a small effect on sales of actual Macs that it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort it would take to develop and maintain new hardware checks as quickly as the Hackintosh community could work around them. Poor-to-nonexistent driver support and power management mean that laptops make terrible Hackintoshes, and laptops account for 80 percent of all Mac shipments. They just don't threaten Apple’s business all that much (though I do think catering to these users with real Macs that met their needs could be good for the company's bottom line).

Listing image by Dan Counsell