The Hackintosh Conundrum

Nearly the entire PC industry is based on cloning the work of others, starting with the Columbia Data Products, the first successful clone of the IBM PC. Released within a year of the first IBM shipments, its MPC 1600 "Multi Personal Computer" used the same off-the-shelf components as the IBM PC, but Columbia reverse engineered the PC's BIOS to avoid copyright infringement.

Unitron's Mac 512 clone.

The first Macs looked like this.

It's less well known that Apple had to deal with clones in the Apple II era, including some that duplicated its copyrighted ROMs rather than reverse engineer them. And within a year of the Mac's release, Brazil's Unitron, which had earlier cloned the Apple II, created the Unitron Mac 512, the first Mac - one that bore a striking physical resemblance to Apple's Macintosh 512K.

In the Mac's first decade (1984-93), clones were few and far between, with perhaps a dozen companies or less taking up the technical and legal challenge. If you wanted to make money, it was a lot easier to clone the IBM PC, buying compatible BIOS chips from Phoenix, Chips and Technologies, and other companies that had reverse engineered IBM's BIOS.

As we discussed in last week's round table, from early 1995 through mid 1998, Apple actually licensed the Mac's ROMs and the Mac operating system in an attempt to grow the Mac's market - a move that seriously undermined Apple's profitability and nearly drove it into bankruptcy.

With Apple's transition from PowerPC processors to Intel CPUs, it became possible for anyone with the right PC hardware to follow steps posted on the Internet and get Mac OS X running on their non-Apple computers. The hacked PC running the Mac OS is known as a "hackinoish", and they became especially popular during the netbook craze. Netbooks are extra-small notebooks designed for extreme portability and very low cost, which means small screens, less powerful CPUs, and often reduced size keyboards.

The first Windows netbook was the Asus Eee PC, particularly the two pound 7" model 701, which had a 900 MHz Mobile Celeron processor, 512 MB of system memory, a tiny 4 GB solid state drive (SSD), Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics, an 800 x 480 display, and a run time of about 2 hours and 45 minutes with a fully charged battery. In general, netbooks had low resolution 7" to 10" displays, energy efficient single-core processors, WiFi networking, low capacity SSDs, and keyboards ranging from 83% to 95% of full size, which could frustrate typists.

These are the kind of compromises Apple would never make, so Mac users who wanted a Mac netbook had to choose between a 13.3" MacBook or a hackintosh netbook, and compatibility charts became very popular resources as people tried to find a netbook that supported all the features important to them. Even if they had the hardware, their built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, ethernet, USB, audio, trackpad, or other features might not be compatible with Mac OS X.

Today some of our writers share their experiences with hackintosh computing, sharing it to their experiences on genuine Apple hardware.

Alan Zisman (Zis Mac): I'm not sure, but I may be the only person writing here with first-hand experience of both hackintosh netbooks and an 11" MacBook Air.

I've written about my efforts to "hackintosh" my now antique Dell Mini 9 netbook - at first unsuccessful, but finally triumphant in getting OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to load and run happily. I've also had long-term use of the first-generation 11" MBA, on review loan from Apple - I've written about my experiences with both of these on Low End Mac.

At first glance, they may appear to be similar: small, relatively lightweight, relatively low-cost systems running OS X and Mac applications. But really, there are more differences than similarities.

As the name might suggest, a hackintosh system is going to appear to "hackers" - people who enjoy computers and want to know how they work and push their limits. Hobbyists. Tinkerers. They may be willing to put up with some inconveniences - in the case of a hackintoshed netbook, perhaps a lack of drivers for the webcam or sound card, for instance - as a trade-off for making the system do something that it wasn't officially designed to do - in this case, booting to OS X.

The MacBook Air - like other Apple systems - on the other hand, is designed to work out of the box - simply, easily, and elegantly. From the original 1984 Macintosh - which was designed as sealed box put together with non-standard screws - through to current notebooks with difficult to remove batteries, Apple has tried to limit the ease with which hobbyists could hack the hardware or software.

Elegance costs. The 11" MBA retails for $999. Typical netbooks retail for somewhere under $500. My Mini 9 has a smaller and more awkward keyboard and pointing device and a lower screen resolution than an MBA. The case is plastic; the MBA's is sleek aluminum. And while the Mini 9 has smaller length and width than the Air, it is much thicker - and adding an optional 6-cell battery for longer battery life, much more ungainly.

Both systems boot up quickly - to a large extent due to using solid state drives. Newer netbooks typically ship with traditional hard drives, which provide much more storage than the humble 16 GB on my Mini 9's SSD. (The 11" Air offers a choice between 64 GB and 128 GB SSDs).

Bottom line - both a hackintosh and an MacBook Air can be highly portable Macs; but the potential user is very different. A hackintosh user is someone who has more time than money and is prepared to fuss around with her or his computer. A MacBook Air owner, in contrast, is prepared to pay more to get something that is elegant, easy to use, and works right out of the box.

Dan Bashur (Apple, Tech, and Gaming): Nothing against hackintoshing, but it's just not a Mac. With that said, I do agree that hackintoshing a netbook or a Sony Vaio laptop has always intrigued me. Both of these products offer something that Apple missed out on. The former is a very inexpensive version of what Apple offers in the MacBook Air, but typically without the speedy SSD and with smaller keyboards. Netbooks may even cost just half of what Apple charges for an entry level iPad! If you are willing to accept the cheap feel and smaller keys, a netbook could be an inexpensive solution to the problem of going Intel from a 12" PowerPC based PowerBook G4 (such as the 1.5 GHz unit I'm typing this on) while keeping size to a minimum. A used 13" MacBook Pro or a used 11.6" MacBook Air could also fit those needs, but expect to shell out 2-3 times the cost of a brand new netbook that is conducive to hackintoshing.

While on the subject of hackintoshing a netbook, I also wanted to throw in the latter of the two (a Sony Vaio) due to the multimedia capabilities that Apple continues to miss out on with the MacBook Pro. The Sony Vaio laptops are truly amazing machines, typically with built-in Blu-ray drives, 1920 x 1080 HD screens that have come in 16.4", 17", and 18.4" sizes. Throw in Windows Media Center (with IR remote control), remote access connectivity to the Sony PlayStation 3 through the "Remote Play" feature, a proprietary video conversion utility that makes transferring anything to a PSP quick and painless, along with built-in TV tuners and AV inputs on some models, and you've got a machine that can truly do it all. Some of these models have been known to work quite decent as hackintosh machines, so being able to do everything mentioned above, along with running variants of Mac OS X, could really make a Vaio the best machine to have if you already own a PlayStation 3 and PSP.

Someday I plan on experimenting with these hackintosh theories, but for now I'd rather stick with what is known to work best running Mac OS X - a real Mac.

Dan Knight (Mac Musings): I just want to share a new product I read about, UniBeast. This program is designed to let you create a bootable 8 GB USB flash drive for installing OS X 10.7 Lion on PC hardware. The author of UniBeast also makes iBoot + MultiBeast, tools for installing OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on PC hardware. These two programs could really open up hackintosh computing to non-hackers.

Allison Payne (The Budget Mac): The UniBeast bootable drive seems very similar to the USB installer I made for my S10 hack (see The HackBook Experience: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), but more versatile for different hardware. I seem to remember OpenMac or some other Hackintosh seller of dubious legality trying something like that. I can't remember how that panned out.

On the subject of Hacks vs. Macs, I'm still firmly in the "a Hackintosh may be good enough, but you get what you pay for" camp, and I would choose a real Mac every time. Case in point: Now that Apple is making a laptop in my preferred form factor - the utterly delectable 11" MacBook Air - a HackBook's only substantial advantage is the lower price tag and perhaps storage space (less important these days with the prevalence of the Cloud). The MacBook Air outstrips any Atom-based netbook in speed, battery life, video playback, and weight.

Dan Knight: The best thing about Apple migrating to Intel CPUs is the ability to run Windows on Macs without the need for expensive third-party performance-sapping emulators, which I'm sure has been a huge factor in the ever-increasing Mac unit sales since 2006. That said, the flip side is that going Intel made it possible to run Mac OS X on PC hardware, something that has had minor impact on Apple's hardware sales while giving Mac geeks the opportunity to build their own hackintosh desktops as well as getting OS X running on standard Windows laptops and netbooks.

As a longtime Mac user whose first Mac (the Mac Plus) had no internal hard drive bays or expansion slots, second (a Centris 610) had two drive bays on one processor direct slot (PDS), and subsequent SuperMacs and Power Macs have had multiple PCI slots and several drive bays, my greatest disappointment is that I can't get that kind of expandability in Apple's Intel Era without buying a Mac Pro - even used they are way out of my league.

I have a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo 2007 Mac mini upgraded with a 7200 rpm 320 GB WD Scorpio hard drive and 3 GB of system memory from Other World Computing. It was horribly slow running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard with its stock 80 GB 5400 rpm hard drive and 1 GB of memory, but it's quite adequate since the upgrades. That said, upgrading would have been easier and less costly if it had two internal 3.5" hard drive bays instead of a single 2.5" bay for a notebook drive.

Hackintosh gives us the opportunity to build the Mac we want using standard PC components, although you want to be sure those components are compatible with OS X (Apple only has to support the limited range of video cards, etc. used in its own computers, unlike the world of Windows and Linux where support is expected for anything and everything). Not to say that I don't love my little Mini and how easy it is to take it into the living room and hook it up to the TV, but as a practical work machine, I'd rather have the flexibility of extra drive bays and expansion slots. My next Mac could well be a hackintosh.