Last time we spoke a few weeks ago I had my new Hackintosh up and running, but only barely. The hardware was fine, but since Apple didn’t yet support the new chips and features it was a pale shell of the machine it wanted to be. Hacked kernel, no USB3, no power management. Basically, not quite ready for prime time.

Well on Monday, Apple announced their first Ivy Bridge based Macs in the form of the updated portable line. Theoretically, this included all the files the hackintosh community needed to finally get things working for me, but you couldn’t just grab the files off the drive of the new machines, apparently it doesn’t quite work that way. However at about midnight on Monday, Apple released a big 1GB update file for the new Macbook Pro Retina, which included new versions of all the necessary files.  You couldn’t just install the update, but people in the forums started pulling things like the new Mach Kernel and power management out and trying to install them to see what happened.

So I decided to throw caution to the wind and did some manual shenanigans to install Lion 10.7.4 with the latest Ivy supporting kernel and some other stuff and it worked well enough that I was about to write a little post giving my step-by-step process, gloating a little, and then recommending that you wait until the TonyMac guys get the final solutions out. Great plan, however while I’m writing, they did just that.

BridgeHelper 5 was just released and gives full ivy bridge support, with power management and USB3.  I plugged in my new USB3 drive dock and an ssd just to check and was getting 230MB/s reads (which is about the limit of the old Intel G2 drive I was using to test).

And perhaps best of all, the new machine sleeps and wakes up like baby, but without all the crying.  Seriously, it’s nuts fast.  Even booting from the Apple logo to login is about 5 seconds. I’m currently overclocking it to about 4GHz, but I’m going to shoot for a bit more as time goes by and I feel more comfortable with it.

The only little problem I’ve got at the moment is that one of my case fans is running at full speed though I’ve asked the EFI to slow it down.  I’ve got to look into that, but really, can I complain? Finally got my Ivy Hack up and running.  Moved my data drives over a few minutes ago. Let’s see how it feels in daily use.  More as I explore but follow me on twitter if you want to keep up, I’ll post and forward more there for little things.