The Latest Macintosh: Macintosh or Hackintosh?

Hacking has been there from the first days of computer software and obviously it is illegal and most of all, unethical. If someone spends time, effort and money developing software, we all must respect it and if we are interested using it; we should use the software in a legal way. Like for all other software available in the market today, it is applicable for Apple Mackintosh as well. In this short entry I’m trying to talk about old news: Running Mackintosh on your Intel PC. Yes, I know, if you were unaware of this, you may raise your eyebrows.

As we all know, until recent days, Apple’s Macintosh ran only on Apple’s G processors manufactured by Motorola and IBM and available only in Apple manufactured computers. This way, it was very hard to run Mac on an Intel PCs and various methods such as virtualization was used (PearPC) to accomplish this task. But these solutions were not effective as they also bring various performance issues where working in a virtualized environment becomes almost tiring. The hackers who kept an eye on Mac received a wonderful opportunity with the release on Mac OS X 10.4.1. For the first time of Apple’s history, Apple CEO (Steve Jobs) announced that future Mac releases would be based on Intel processor architecture for better performance. This made the history for hackers and enthusiasts who were looking for an Intel version of Mac OS X.

Even from the official release days of OS X 10.4.1 which was Intel compatible, hackers received information of upcoming revolution and also developer’s versions of the OS X distributed at a software convention. But there was a catch: although Mac OS X was running on Intel processors, Apple has a special hardware chip implanted in the Mac machine which is required for OS X to run. Ideally, no one can run OS X in their personal computers as they didn’t have the chip supporting OS X. But some smart hackers managed to bypass this by emulating lot of restrictions including the hardware chip, so people could just download these hacked versions from P2P (peer-to-peer such as torrent) network and install on PCs.

We’ll discuss some of the latest developments of Hacked Macintosh in later entries.