For my 2023 Christmas present, I settled on a ten-year-old graphics card. I’m certainly not a big gamer or 3d modeller, so the lack of megaflop processing around 2013 isn’t a major concern. My interest is focused almost entirely on the thorny business of compatibility: in particular, which PC graphics cards can you put in your Mac?
Plenty of immediate and wrong answers are available. Some people say it’s none, others say all, and a third group makes a lot of money by mastering a procedure that reflashes the card BIOS from the PC to the Mac version, for a rare and shrinking subset of the available stock of cards.
Because of the unique way in which Apple works, this isn’t a straightforward discussion about technology. It’s about hackers, legal retribution (or the lack of it), the international geopolitical impact of selective tech support, and karma. I am thinking in particular about the strange relationship between Apple and the globally distributed, fearsomely inventive cohort of techies responsible for the Hackintosh.
Don’t think you know the Hackintosh story because (like me,
