Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

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.

And:

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:

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.

There is so much more to this article, well worth the read. But it is interesting that Apple has allowed the Hackintosh universe to survive and even to flourish.

Also interesting is the thought of what form Apple’s coming Mac Pro will take. Will Apple build an upgradeable tower, one designed to last longer than a generation? Given Apple’s reluctance to update a machine with relatively low sales numbers, I think they’d do well to build something that they can release into the wild, let the user community update and upgrade with third party parts, with a nice long extendable life span.

A win for the “Pro” community (not sure of a better label here), a win for the small army of parts suppliers who will seize on the opportunity to sell parts and supplies, a win for the communities who will benefit from product produced using these ultra-powerful machines.