frankenmac
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The Frankenmac is alive
Thanks to the seemingly dubious prospect of a Mac OS X-ready PC from Psystar, running Mac OS X on gear not made by Apple has gotten the Macweb all aflutter this week. Rob Griffiths of Macworld and MacOSXHints, not content with Apple's lineup of Macs, or waiting for some random company to make a clone, has created his very own Frankenmac (hence my lame Photoshop attempt to the right).Rob documents the reasons why someone might want to run OS X on non-Apple hardware, and lists some potential pitfalls (like updates not working correctly, or hardware/software incompatibilities). Please note that Rob's article isn't a How-To on building a Hackintosh, but rather a look at why some folks find the idea so appealing, and what the drawbacks are.
First commercial Hackintosh announced by Psystar
As noted by some of our tipsters last night and published today on Ars and MacRumors, a company called Psystar (site currently down, for legal or technical reasons, who can say?) is offering to sell you a $399 "OpenMac" Core 2 Duo minitower that is ready to run Leopard, and for $554 you can get it with a retail copy of Mac OS X preinstalled. With specs blowing well past the base Mini configuration and the expandability of a tower config, such a machine would be appealing to hobbyists and developers... exactly the sort of folks who would be likely to roll their own.The concept of the Hackintosh, while appealing from a technical standpoint and certainly a draw for the budget-minded, always seems to fall down for me when it comes to software updates (you can't), compatibility (it's not), and support (there ain't none). If a central value proposition of Mac OS X and the Macintosh ecosystem is that the OS and the hardware are designed in parallel to work as seamlessly as possible and provide an optimized user experience, then what does a homebrew clone get you but bragging rights and a degree of aggravation? Sure, getting an Asus eee booted into Leopard is pretty cool -- but having owned a legitimate Mac clone back in the Power Computing days, I can vouch for the fact that there's no substitute for the real thing.Thanks Roberto
