Ghk...that...is not how you do...reflections! o_O

People pay money for ringtones? When did this happen?!

...Sometimes. After the update, it newly "recognized" a photo of rippled beach sand as my mother's face. :)

Don't bet on it. Macs use EFI, which is reason enough for everyone else in tech to avoid it like the plague, rationality be damned.

So...wait. If Windows 7 is 6.1, what'll Windows 8 be? The actual Windows 7?

Oh, I dunno, they seem to be plenty numb to that fact already. :)

@[Highest Ranked] No argument there (and I have been drooling, however futilely, over that 27" iMac). All I was saying is that in this economy, people are generally less likely to have such means, which makes the "good enough" mindset more prevalent. Rather than imagining how much better OS X might be if they had a Mac, they might just be glad it works well enough for day-to-day use and leave it at that. There will certainly be people who know they can safely take the plunge, just not as many.

@[Highest Ranked] Only the ones that could afford Macs in the first place. A lot of the appeal of a Hackintosh is that it costs far less than the real thing.

After the better part of five years using a PowerBook G4, I bought a desktop Hackintosh off a guy on Kijiji for $350. It has a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2.5 GB of DDR2 RAM, a 100 GB hard drive (which I've supplemented with my spare 80GB drive for XP and Ubuntu), 8 USB ports + 2 FW400, included a passable 19" LCD, and I was able to add a nice cheap GeForce 9500 GT after the fact with the help of a new power supply and some EFI wrangling.

OS X doesn't run as tightly here as it would on an equivalent Mac (which would cost me several times more): USB devices are sometimes reluctant to be recognized, and it can't resume from sleep (which just means I power off when I'm done), but there are no show-stopping problems, and for the price, it gives me a pretty awesome "Mac" which I now use as my main machine for work and play.

Don't get me wrong, I'd still buy the real thing, for the sake of saved trouble and better support...IF I had that kind of money. I don't, nor do many others who might otherwise consider a Hackintosh merely a stepping stone on the way to a Mac. The halo effect doesn't quite cover this one, I think.

@daytripper This has nothing to do with "hacking OS X" in the sense you're referring to. If they'd managed to patch the kernel of one machine over a local network (or, god forbid, the internet) from a separate machine, then your comment would make far more sense. This isn't exploiting security holes like you would to jailbreak an iPhone; this is making changes to an (open-source) kernel and replacing the existing kernel on your own computer which you already have physical access to.

@Elliot120 Like Boot Camp? You mean, like, with every other dual-booting setup that came before it?