Cheapest laptop with most functionality

[niba10]

Hi all hackintoshers,

I look for the cheapest laptop for functionality what is important to me: trackpad that works flawlessly with all gestures like real mac.

good - excellent display, fanless or silent fan, monitor size should be max 13inch, any other is extra.

what you could recommend?

[Hervé]

With a trackpad that works flawlessly with all gestures like real Mac, how about a pre-owned MacBook or MacBookAir?

 

Coming back to reality, Dell 12" Latitude laptops are usually pretty good though built-in LCD aren't that great.

 

I would not recommend anything older than IvyBridge these days but an E6230 is dead cheap on the 2nd hand market (<200$/€) and everything works; you can even fit a real Mac wireless card in it.

 

Then there is the Haswell E7240 model but I've no experience with these.

 

Broadwell E7250 are now available in the 200-250$/€ price range and fully supported too though wireless slot is a tiny 2240 M.2 slot so choice is limited. There are 2 x screens available: a basic 1368x766 or an excellent IPS Full HD touchscreen. The i7-5600U with HD5500 graphics and 8GB RAM is a pretty cheap and decent laptop. Whilst they come with mSATA SSDs, the B-key M.2 slot supports NVME SSDs. I can't remember if it can boot from it but I think it can boot from SD card which can be a nice bootstrap alternative. I recently used one and loved it; probably my next purchase.

 

These models are fitted with an Alps TouchPad which is pretty well supported with DrHurt's VoodooPS2Controller version R6 and you can have several gestures, not just scrolling or single-tap clicking.

 

Skylake and later 12" Latitude models will come at a higher price and not everything works, especially as later models come with I2C and poorly supported TouchPads. I understand they also have a tendency to heat up a lot.