Tuesday, June 25, 2013

What is Hackintosh? - Tech Tuesday

Hey all my dear friends! :D How are you doing. Posting at 11:00 pm? not my style, I know but it was long tiring day!



Maintenance of blog is going quite cool. I spent 2 hours today to make the banner exchange page look better. Trying to make lengthy pages appear a bit smaller, and decreasing page load time, etc. Phew, this blog optimization is a tiring work. I also accepted a few pending 'adult banner exchange' requests. I was reluctant to add those not so work friendly banners on my blog till now. But somehow I thought I should approve them. The request has lingered quite long :/ And of course as I was adding any other banners, not accepting those was not a cool idea. Let's leave this, and come to our topic of discussion.


And just to keep the article going I would first give a one line definition of Hackintosh - ahem, ahem! "Running Mac OS on any Hardware/Software environment that is not Apple Computer."

Do you know Macintosh(Mac)


I know you are wondering it to be a bad question, LOL! I know you all know the world renowned Apple Inc. Operating System, Macintosh? Rather "The Macintosh" :P But there are a few things not everyone knows, since they don't own it. Of course these are common things that mostly people know, but those who don't think about those extremely expensive products hardly care to add this to their knowledge. Instead of touching upon many of those and losing the essence of the article completely, I'll discuss just one that we need to know for our topic of discussion right now.


Apple does not license OS X for use on non-Apple computers


Yeah, the truth and rather the bitter truth. If you like that ultra bright looking UNIX based operating system and are fascinated by it but don't have the money to purchase that ultra-expensive Macbook, you certainly wished to use Mac. Else, there was some real cool app that runs only on Mac and you cry out loud thinking why you can't afford a Macbook. Then you rush to a nearby store and purchase a Macintosh OS disk(Not sure if they are this easily available to buy! LOL!). Just then you realize that whoa! money burnt! My too good to be bad PC can't boot that damn setup! >_< The problem is Apple doesn't want you to use Mac on anything other than what Apple sells >.> Of course this sounds disgusting, but well that's their rule, if you break it you are doing something illegal then how so much you fight later about it.


Solution - Hackintosh


Recently, I was reading the Mac OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion License Agreement. Yes, I do read license agreements before blindly clicking I agree and proceed since I don't trust the companies and why should I? If they have made a clause that should have been paid attention to, but wasn't gievn much attention, the company might exploit such ignorant users later. So my advice, if not always, when you have time read the terms and conditions of use of those software. Anyways, we were talking about Hackintosh.

We already discussed Mac won't install in your machine directly and hence you need to do some tweaks. The Virtual one is an easy catch, but the real on requires careful selection and is advisable in 2 cases:
  1. You have a lot of money to burn, or
  2. You are buying a new PC


Why advisable in these two cases only? Because since Apple doesn't licenses you to use Mac on any other system so you need carefully selected hardware. The choice of your processor is also quite rigid that makes the choice of motherboards too thin. So building a hackintosh is no child's play.

I have found some nice articles on how to build your own hackintosh, and would share the guides with you all soon. But for this post let's keep ourselves just to the definitions, and this post then can be referenced in any post relating Hackintosh later, right? :)


Although here I gotta contradict what I said. Actually, building a hackintosh—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware—used to require extremely restricted hardware choices and quite a bit of know-how. Now your options are vast and the installation process is fairly simple. But that is all in comparison to the earlier versions. The process is not as simple as getting the Windows work! :)

Why would you need a Hackintosh?

  • Mac is quite expensive, so cost is a very big reason to go for a hackintosh
  • You have fun playing with your computer! :D "GEEKY STUFF" haha :D
  • Do I need to buy Mac? I'm not sure it's worth. So just to get rid off these confusions, you can try a virtual hackintosh and see if you would like to buy a Macbook :)
  • I don't want to buy Mac. I just want to use that good looking app designed for mac! A good reason to go for a virtual Hackintosh, or a real one if you like to spend more :)

So in summary hackintosh is just running Mac OS on non-Apple Computer. When talking about Virtual Hackintosh, which most people suggest because of costing, etc. issues, I would say it is very easy to build one with a correct set of guidelines. Booting the Vanilla Installer directly is quite a pain in the, *ahem!*, so many HackBoots are available to get through. Sounds all illegal stuff, right? From Apple's point of view, yes illegal, but from a tester point of view it is better to be sure of things before buying the actual stuff, and that too something which is this expensive!

I know I touched the definition of Hackintosh a little, but seriously the article won't have been more than a one-liner if I just shared the definition and walked away. I hope you all like the information I shared with you all. Stay tuned, I'll share the guides of building your own Hackintosh within a week or so. See you all soon again. Good Night for now :) Training tomorrow and also further maintenance work here on the blog. Phew! As the blog gets old the maintenance becomes more and more time consuming, especially when it is done once in a lifetime! LOL!!

Have a great night! :)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Kindly keep the comments clean and make quality comments that would be worthy in making this blog better! :)