Post Production Specialist and long term Windows advocate Alan Sallabank explains why he has decided to ditch his Hackintosh and has bought a refurbished Mac Pro 6.1.

By the time you read this, I will have handed over, what I feel to be an unreasonable amount of money, for a refurbished 2013 MacPro 6.1. “WHAT?” I hear you cry, “Mr ‘Everything Is Better On Windows’ is buying an actual Mac, albeit it a second hand one?”

I’m afraid it’s true, and in this article, I’ll explain why…

Why Did I Bother With A Hackintosh In The First Place?

I covered this in detail in my Plan B article, but to cut a long story short, at the time, I really did not have either the budget or the inclination to invest heavily in Apple hardware, which for me by its very nature had issues with user repair and upgrading. The lack of PCIe slots was also a major issue, as was the inability to upgrade key components easily, such as the system drive or RAM.

Support Issues

When you run your own Hackintosh, it is the epitome of “self-support”. True, there are many forums out there to help, but the experience is incredibly inconsistent. There’s a good reason for this - Hackintoshes suffer from the very same Achilles heel as Windows systems - the almost infinite variety of hardware possible. True there are certain restrictions - any Hackintosh build has to use hardware compatible or at least equivalent to, the hardware used by Apple themselves.

But it wasn’t just a lack of any formal support from Apple or the online community that was the issue. Software and third-party hardware developers were having a hard time. At least one leading audio interface absolutely would not work on my Hackintosh, my expensive AJA video interface didn’t entirely work correctly and a leading piece of software wouldn’t work to its full potential. As soon as any developer heard I was running a Hackintosh, they withdrew support.

Don’t Go Breaking My Hack

With my Hackintosh, I was beginning to dread seeing this nagging message from Apple. One part of me wanted to keep the system up to date and secure, but the last time I tried it, everything broke and suddenly my system wouldn’t boot properly, or if it did, the screen was a complete mess. This is because “Hackintoshing” involves digging down deep into MacOS, and fiddling with the core code - the “kexts”. This is all deeply techy and despite me being a massive nerd, filled me with dread every time an update came along.

Dolby Atmos

Unfortunately at present, the Dolby Atmos Production Suite is only available on Macs, despite its older sibling, the Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite, being developed exclusively for the Windows platform. There’s a very simple reason for this - Dolby and Avid have not managed to find a way to replicate the Core Audio feature on Macs that the Dolby Audio Bridge relies on to get audio to and from the Dolby Atmos Renderer software. When I looked into being able to do Dolby Atmos mixing on Windows, the only way is to purchase Avid HDX cards, Avid MADI IO or the MTRX IO, and then also a separate Windows machine to host the Mastering Suite Renderer. This is massively costly and also removes any “in the box” working, which makes it a lot harder to transport mixes from one studio to another. Dolby Atmos is the future for post-production sound, and not being able to run it natively is a severe limitation for any post-production studio nowadays.

I’ve Got The Power, Now.

Although my Hackintosh was fully capable of running the Dolby Atmos Production Suite, as well as many other third-party pieces of software, actually running them simultaneously with Pro Tools Ultimate was proving to be very taxing on my system, resulting in numerous error messages. I decided the solution was to take on the old saying, “Go Big Or Go Home”, so plumped for the 12 core Xeon E5, with 64GB of RAM.

In my Plan B article, I explained that my Hackintosh registered 49% system load when running my own stress test session - a 7.1.2 Atmos mix. My ‘New’ Mac Pro 6.1 now registers 18% for the same sequence. Given that the Mac Pro has double the amount of cores and RAM than my Windows system, you’d expect a better result. By comparison, my main Windows system registered 21% for the same sequence. However, I need to declare that with my Mac Pro trash-can, I was also running the latest Dolby Atmos Production Suite and Video Slave 4 simultaneously, which accounts for only getting a slight benefit compared with my Windows system.

How Much Did It Cost?

I managed to get this top-flight Mac Pro 6.1 for well under £2000. Which when you compare to the original price and the proposed price of even the entry-level new Mac Pro 7.1, is incredible value for money.

So am I now a “Born Again Apple FanBoy”? Absolutely not! I’m still going to be using both my WIndows main system and my Windows laptop for anything that doesn’t require Mac-only software, but I’ve now come to the end of my Hackintosh adventure. There are still many things that I deeply dislike about the Mac Pro 6.1 - I’ve already hit issues with having my usual three monitors, and the tangle of Thunderbolt and USB cables and external peripherals is ridiculous, but that’s where I’m at. I’m going to have to learn to live with it, or not be able to accommodate the future of post-production sound mixing. So, don’t expect me to back off advocating Windows anytime soon.

What Do You Think?

Are you a Hackintosh user who’s facing the same issues and difficult choice? Let us know in the comments section.