Remember the Hackintosh? Mostly consisting of modified netbooks running Mac OS X, the movement became fairly popular until Apple stepped in with the iPad and then MacBook Air to effectively redirect everyones attention back to official Apple hardware. But the hackintosh community isn’t dead – far from it – in fact you can still build a really powerful hackintosh for just about $600. If you want to build your own unofficial Mac, here’s what you’ll get:
$600 Hackintosh Build Hardware Specs
- Core i3 3.06GHz
- 4GB RAM
- 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive
- nVidia GeForce GT240 with 512MB VRAM
- DVD burner
Not a bad machine at all, especially when you consider the current Mac Mini costs $699 and is stuck on a boring old Core 2 Duo CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB drive.
Lifehacker borrowed the infamous TonyMacX86 walkthroughs and updated it slightly into a single page of easy to follow instructions, they even included a video (embedded below) showing exactly what to do in the BIOS which makes it even simpler.
Oddly enough the guide was published just weeks before Mac OS X Lion arrives, so you’ll probably have to tweak a few things in the near future if you want to run Lion on the machine. Nonetheless, TonyMacX86 is usually on top of all this stuff pretty quick, so you can almost certainly bet that Lion will run on the machines.
If you’re going to be building a PC in the near future anyway, why not build one that is Hackintosh compatible? Add it onto your list of geeky Apple things to do this next weekend.
Check out LifeHacker’s easy to follow guide and make one yourself
Via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/osxdaily/~3/yBPDygxLMcs/
