Thursday, November 20, 2008

Seeing leopard prints through a window

Barely two years ago, I came across a site/forum that claimed that they were able run macOSX software on the PC. At first I wasn’t that interested, because I already knew that you can indeed run macOSx on a PC thru a software, but what caught my interest was the claim that they can run it natively[1] on a PC and that it was giving the Macs a run for their money, even in terms of performance[2]. Dubbed as the Hackintosh[3], the project boasts of an almost seamless integration of the Mac OS on the PC.

The idea of having both a Mac-based and Windows-based system in a single machine was too hard to resist.

Initially I thought that it was not-so-legal to perform such a project. But after countless hours of browsing the forums, I was quite shocked to learn that Apple in fact grants license (through a developers kit that can be bought from their site)to developers and enthusiasts , allowing them to legally install a copy of the Apple software in a PC.



[1] Without the aid of another software

[2] Based on benchmark tests performed by the development groups

[3] A pun on the words “hack” and “Macintosh”

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