Photo courtesy of Mancio
September 21st, 2009 – I know that not everyone who reads this site runs a Mac, but since a significant amount of people are finding this site through the hackintosh post from last year, I figured I’d link Lifehacker’s new article updated for Snow Leopard.
One of the arguments against Mac hardware is that it’s expensive. This is absolutely true; for a PC with exactly the same hardware, you could expect to pay half the price. While having a desktop or laptop with finely tuned aesthetics may be nice, not all of us can afford to pay that premium.
The big draw to Macs for me is the operating system. Getting used to it coming from a PC background took some acclimatization, but I quickly picked things up and never looked back. Those of you looking to interact with your computer at more than the superficial GUI level, will be happy to find that OSX is based upon Unix, allowing you to use Terminal if you so wish. Of course, this means Linux users will also find themselves right at home.
Since Apple switched the chip architecture from PowerPC to Intel, the homebrew community has been hacking OSX to work with generic hardware. Their efforts have provided laymen the ability to make a rock solid hackintosh box.
The main problems that affect hackintoshes are driver-based as OSX is built to support only hardware that Apple sells in their machines. This allows OSX to remain stable and quick because it doesn’t have to deal with a lot of different hardware configurations, but at the same time, it makes hackintoshing a tad more complex. Essentially, if you want to build a hackintosh, you will have to buy hardware that is known to be compatible.
Adam Pash of Lifehacker has been putting together fantastic step by step hackintosh guides for a few years. His latest guide details the install of the new Snow Leopard on hackintoshes. When I get back from vacation, I’m definitely going to build a machine with similar specs to his. An Apple machine is 2.5 times more expensive than Adam’s build. Those are some serious savings.
I should also note that while other DAW’s and music software may not yet work with Snow Leopard (although they will all support it shortly), Logic 9 runs without issues.
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