January 17, 2008

Hackintosh in the air

Update: Lifehacker posted this a few weeks later: OS X on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required, and No Film School is still interested in November 2010 in How to Build a Hackintosh.


Reposting something from November in honor of the new Apple laptop -- and the $400 ASUS subnotebook. But the hack is hardly headache-free. If you "don’t have SSE3 and/or recent Intel chipset, my understanding is the EFI hacks at the moment do not allow you to run an unpatched kernel, hence no updates." There can also be sundry system errors from driver malfunction, so no fancy Final Cut setups are safe, according to sources sighted at Macworld...

Actually seeing the new Apple Air does make you soften somewhat because it is nice, but Tech Thoughts hasn't touched it yet and has some good comments. Henry Norr, the former editor at MacWeek who took a brave stand at the SF Chronicle, has more thoughts. \\\


Hobbyists might enjoy building a Hackintosh -- in the sense discussed here, a PC running Mac OS assisted by "OSx86" technologies that evolved from developer kits for transitioning from the G5 to MacIntel. It seems akin to cloning the BIOS of the original IBM, and not quite the same as running a virtual machine like VMware.

Lifehacker has a walkthrough on how to Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800, and UNEASYsilence does the same for the $300 ASUS subnotebook in Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC.

I'm not sure why someone doing video would spend too much time on this, but I keep hearing about it because of the low cost of building a PC Frankenstein. You might remember that Victor Frankenstein shirked responsibility for his actions and rejected the creature out of fear; only after this neglect did the creature became a monster.

2 comments:

  1. Why would someone do this?

    Because the choices in PC hardware far, FAR "blow away" what Apple itself offers. Just because we use Apple's tools doesn't mean we want to have to choose between a $700 Mac Mini and a near $3000 Mac Pro.

    A shuttle-sized PC would serve a great potion of mac users, but Apple dos not see fit to give users what they demand, only what "amazing" and "unbelievable"gadget they want to make.

    Apple has forgotten the Mac's roots- to enable to the user to use the Mac as a tool to make something else, not to be cool itself.

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  2. Agreed. But I've been burned by Shuttle itself and wouldn't recommend them again now. Motherboards seem non-trivial.

    You're right though, Apple does seem to be aiming to be an accessory with the Air notebook.

    rich

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