If you did it right it was like having a Mac except you had better specs and it was more customisable while costing much less to build.
For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
Exactly this. There was a point in the late 2000's / early 2010's where Mac's were very overpriced relative to the hardware they were selling.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
loading story #50389362
Usually the way is to favour the competition instead, all those arguments are known to me.
Maybe it helps that in my part of the globe Apple was largely irrelevant until they manage to survive bankruptcy with the iPod, and iMacs.
Getting to play around with new GPUs was one of the things that kept me excited.