The current Clover-based solutions do modify the system, except it's done on the fly, so that no patching of install media is needed, and you could essentially boot from a working OS X drive taken from Apple hardware. The hackintosh VM will require a small EFI drive with Clover on it to boot from, and then can use most any OS X system partition to successfully boot.

Still, the hardware integration sucks. I thought that Dell would be better than the Asus ROG I had. Sorry to say, in terms of integration of basic soft controls it still sucks. I'm afraid that somehow only Apple got it right till now.

I think that this is just the design being incompatible with learned habits, not somehow inherently broken. My kid has gotten used to it. Now she dislikes touchbar-less machines. But it took some adaptation time.

I use a hackintosh as my main dev and engineering machine and it's just fine. It's currently on OS X 10.10.5, but I will be updating it soon to 10.11. With modern Clover the set-up is not a big deal anymore - it does require some hardware-specific tweaking, but once it's done, it's done, and then works fine across the given minor OS version. IOW, stock Apple install images work for me. So I don't quite see the reliability ever being a factor. It's not as if the whole thing somehow randomly crashes any more often than it would on well configured Windows 10. My desktop's current uptime is 32 days.

How is something being soldered on a problem? You essentially insist that the most advanced tool used in repair should be your hands and some screwdrivers. No miniaturization is possible that way. Rework stations are a thing. It's 2017, replacing BGA-packaged assemblies is not advanced dark magic anymore.

To be completely frank, the only tightly integrated PC hardware comes from Microsoft in their Surface line. Those are indeed the only machines that have the Apple-like integration where everything in the hardware works cleanly and without disruptions. Every other notebook I try, and I try them just about every 2 weeks, has some hardware integration issues on the side Windows side of things. I refer to all the idiotic hundreds-of-megabytes-and-more hardware support packages that pretty much are there just to support the custom keys and controls, take ages to start up even from SSD, don't work before login, etc. Just a shitshow, and anyone who pretends that these problems aren't there clearly doesn't pay attention to what's going on. Say, like Asus gaming notebooks that consider it user-friendly not to offer keyboard backlight when you're supposed to type in your fine bitlocker password. I mean: what the fuck? This actually has never happened to me on a MacBook, and neither has any of the other fuck-upery that is commonplace in OEM integration drivers/software on Windows. Heck, there are now mainstream PC laptops that have better enthusiast-developed OS X hardware integration than the OEM provides for Windows!!

I use a hackintosh at work. I rely on lots of Unix tools and workflows, so it's just easier that way. Solid Edge runs just fine on Windows in a VM. The mac-PC distinction is blurry at best. It's obvious that people who need to run Windows can just start up a virtual machine and call it a day.

Perhaps causality is only a characteristic of our Universe. Perhaps, elsewhere, it's optional, and if you think it up, it becomes. Who knows and, frankly, who cares.

It's also pretty cool that you can mix and much open-source and closed components quite well. No such thing from MS on their OS front so far.

Yep. Piracy is usually a criminal offense. Copyright infringement is usually a civil matter.

Exactly. Witcher was a freaking awesome value for the money, and it was done by real craftsmen and artists, not some corporate slaves who're just about ready to jump off a bridge. You can really tell whether the team working on a game enjoys themselves or not. Most of them seemingly don't.

Hey, maybe we could slashdot his store and make him sell out :)

Perhaps LAN parties attract a particular kind of a pirate and you suffer from selection bias.

My anecdote: last time I was at a LAN party was in high school quarter of a century ago. Games back then were priced well out of the range of what a high schooler could afford in Eastern Europe. These days I don't pirate for the simple reason that it makes 0 sense: it costs me more in my time to pirate than to get a legal download. If need be, I'll make an "illegal" copy through a HDCP stripper and watch it in the format I want and on a device I want, plus I can keep a backup that way, but I still own the original, so that's not a means for e.g. ripping stuff from the library.

> Do you have IP, which is to say, creative works protected by Copyright?

We all do. Almost everything original you write down is automatically protected by Copyright. Every single picture you take, with very minor exceptions, is protected by Copyright. Every answer on stackoverflow. Every nontrivial comment on any social site. Pretty much all of the Tweets that are full-length. Etc.

The widely spread myth is that Copyright is something special, only applicable to works made with a "purpose". It's not, and no matter what kind of work you create, if it's copyrightable at all, it doesn't require any special action to be protected. In the U.S., registration of a work (could be your kids' scribbles on a piece of paper) with the relevant office gives you a bit more financial return in case there's a case for infringement, but is not necessary for a work to be protected.

The entirety of your comment is protected by the copyright law. So is mine. We both gave slashdot users a license to use it, but we retain the rights in spite of that.

The "chip" thing is a term getting long in the tooth. Nobody is changing any chips anymore. People refer to firmware reflashes as "chips" because the car world is slow to adapt.