T470 Hackintosh Review

About the Title

Actually, the laptop wasn't seriously damaged. To be more precise, it became abnormal, shall we say?

Reconstruction of Events

Considering that my ThinkPad T470 first arrived in Korea from eBay in a broken state, this isn't surprising. One morning while opening my laptop, I suddenly felt the hinge wobbling(?)... Sensing something had gone wrong, I started thinking that if I didn't tighten the hinge screws soon, the display would probably detach before long. Since I was doing online classes, it was the perfect time to do something reckless, so I made this plan in my head:

1. Disassemble the laptop and tighten the hinge screws.
2. Retry the Hackintosh installation that failed last time due to the SSD issue (pm981)!
3. Unlike the previous 2 attempts, successfully reassemble the bottom panel without breaking the plastic!

That was my plan, and the Hackintosh plan came about because I happened to have a spare compatible 128GB m.2 SSD. If it worked well, I was thinking of buying an SSD and playing around with Hackintosh..

Some parts of the plan succeeded and some failed. The Hackintosh succeeded, but items 1 and 3 failed. After just changing the SSD, the Hackintosh worked really well. Even though it's an Intel chip, WiFi connected and even iCloud integration worked beautifully.

Excited that it was working well, I searched for nvme SSD products of at least 250GB that would work well with Hackintosh. I found that WD's SN750 model works well, and the price was fortunately lower than expected.

Now all I had to do was fix the hinge and reassemble, but this is where a serious problem occurred. The hinge screws were worn and wouldn't tighten, and the bottom panel screws were also worn so they couldn't be reattached—an unprecedented situation. On top of that, I made the mistake of completely destroying the bottom panel's plastic clips. This makes it the 3rd time..

Cost Summary

The costs for the laptop are now divided into 3 main categories:

1. WD SN750 500GB or 250GB for Hackintosh
2. m.25 * 4 size flathead screws for the worn hinges
3. Costs for repairing the destroyed plastic and bottom panel screws

Adding it all up, the minimum cost becomes around 130,000 won, which is unmanageable. My allowance is 50,000 won and I have 60,000 won saved, so assuming I live like a pauper for a month, I'll be able to use about 110,000 won on September 1st.

Therefore, I need to postpone something, but if I disassemble again after reassembling, additional costs will definitely arise. The SSD and hinge screws need to be procured before assembly. However, if I prioritize item 2 above, I'll have to use the laptop with an incompletely assembled bottom panel potentially until next month...

Conclusion

Honestly, I don't know what to do either. When I organized it, the lowest cost and most urgent thing is the hinge screws, so I'll prioritize that. Since I probably won't use Hackintosh much anyway (actually, you can't even build Linux kernel on Mac~) If I just do the screws + bottom panel repair, I could actually order them right now!

But still, should I really give up on Hackintosh on the T470 forever..? You're going to use Linux or Windows anyway.. I'll think about it more and decide.