Way back in 2009, I ran OS X Leopard on a Dell Mini 9 netbook, after screwing around with it on an HP Mini 1000. When I gave up on the project, I think I just assumed Hackintoshes weren’t really a thing anyone cared about.
I’ve seen articles here and there over the last few years about running Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, but it seems that it’s actually pretty easy to get a Hackintosh up and running. Here’s Mike Rundle:
A few weeks back, I was at a baseball game with a bunch of my wife’s coworkers when I started talking to a developer named Ian who said he just got done building a Hackintosh and it was amazing. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the Hackintosh community in years, I actually forgot it was still a thing. Ian said the community was now organized around a website called TonyMacx86.com and it had hardware guides, build tutorials, forums, lots of updates, and had been extremely lively in the past 18 months or so as it’s now easier than ever to build a Hackintosh. When he told me how fast his custom Mac was (faster than any iMac and most Mac Pros), and how little it cost (around $1,200–1,300) it struck me as impossible.
The hardware Rundle lists is impressive. His box is a legitimately powerful computer.
Like with my netbooks seven years ago, running OS X on something without an Apple logo on its case comes with problems. Graphics drivers can bring down a system, software updates are the enemy and some services like iMessages are very tricky to get running on non-Apple hardware.
As long in the tooth as most Macs have become, I totally understand why someone may build their own box. $1200 goes a lot farther when it comes to custom parts than a Mac mini. None of this is to mention how much fun tinkering can be.
All that aside, this is a young man’s game. My MacBook Pro may have outdated Intel silicon, but I know that it was all designed to work with the software it runs. That still counts for a lot in my mind.