I know that the shift from Intel chips will eventually put an end to setting up a Hackintosh, but people will still be doing it for a while. Is there any idea on what percentage of the Hackintosh setups are for people that will be actually using them as an alternative to buying from Apple? There are probably some that are doing this just to explore/tinker to see what they can do, but I have no idea what percentage of the builds that represents.
I would say a very small percentage. OSX is amazing at low power consumption but let's be honest, most of Apple's sales come from marketing and fashion trends. I have a MacBook and could throw OSX on my PC, but I like Windows. There's really nothing it can't do that a Mac can that I need. OTOH, I can do much more with Windows, especially gaming, than I can with OSX. So Hackintosh is great for reviving old Intel hardware, but I wouldn't say it creates a much higher usage rate of OSX.
Hackintosh is dead. Bootcamp is not supported with Apple Silcone and Apple is basically done with Intel (The new OS features stuff that can't be run on Intel Macs). Apple will be done with Intel totally within 3 years. I don't know why you would even make the effort. The M1/M1 Pro/Max chips are better than every mobile Intel and AMD process when comes to performance and efficiency. If you want to run MacOS....buy a Mac.
Most professionals are going to buy the "real" thing of whatever they want, but from what I recall reading there were several people out there building Hackintoshes and running legit software on it for "serious" purposes like video editing and whatnot. But since the number of Hackintoshes out there is such a small percentage of people, the ones using them as a primary pc is obviously even far smaller. Like the other guys said, Hackintosh for now is probably a dying breed. I'm in the camp that actually still can't find a reason to get a Mac over a PC, so I never put a Hackintosh together although I thought about it. By the time they became popular, I stopped caring about chasing tech. lol. As it stands, if I go Mac, I may just get one of the new laptops, and even then it'd be for giggles. I have basically the same use-case and reasoning as Xerobull up there. There's really nothing the Mac does for me that I can't do on Windows and the Windows platform has the added benefit of gaming and software availability for me. Thanks to the supply-chain and shortage issues, the prices of pc and pc components have shot up, though, so that's stopping me at the moment from even building a new pc and relegating myself to considering buying "off-the-shelf".
I like MacBook Pros for the hardware (retina, touchpad, backlit kb) rather than the os. I get the latest from whatever place i work and the os is more a convenience i learned to appreciate, but I've bought used mbps now that corporate management tools have caught up with windows and also because they're still reliable years after to make it worth it. Not sure if I'll jump to glorified iPad Pro cores anytime soon but they seem serious to the point where every 9 months has a leap in performance. The running gag has been if you're savvy enough to run and do a hackintosh setup, then you most likely run Linux on your preferred box.
