“Building a Mac seems like a crazy enough idea. Throw in Intel hardware and the men in white suits should be rounding the corner. Yet the unfortunate leak of an early developer build let anyone do just that—anyone willing to risk the wrath of Apple’s famous lawyers, that is. We risk it for you, and weigh the new platform’s pros and cons,” Jamie Lendin writes for ExtremeTech.
“The [Mac] OS X for Intel build looks for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a chip included with the Intel-based machines Apple sent to developers with the software. Without this chip, the build won’t run; Apple clearly doesn’t intend to have its OS run on non-Apple machines. But hackers are a wily lot. They’ve pooled their funds, signed up for the license, easily cracked the built in protection, and a copy of this build is now making the rounds on the Internet. In fact, the hack’s ease led to speculation that Apple doesn’t mind all that much (at least with regard to early developer versions),” Lendin writes. “In short, you aren’t supposed to own a copy of the OSx86 build unless you’re a registered developer with Apple. And we’re certainly not going to tell you how to get hold of the image file. But just for a moment, let’s say you do happen to have a copy of the build lying around. Obviously it works only on certain PC hardware. Could we build a PC using inexpensive parts that would run it cleanly and reliably?”
Full article here.
Advertisement: The New iMac G5 – Built-in iSight camera and remote control with Front Row media experience. From $1299. Free shipping.
Related articles:
How Apple can win the OS war – October 19, 2005
Intel’s built-in virtualization tech could be one way to run Windows on Intel-based Apple Macs
Intel-based Macs running both Mac OS X and Windows will be good for Apple – June 10, 2005
Why buy a Dell when Apple ‘Macintel’ computers will run both Mac OS X and Windows? – June 08, 2005
Windows users who try Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger might not want to go back – June 07, 2005
Microsoft: The safest way to run Windows is on your Mac – October 08, 2004
uh oh
my shoebox mac could use an upgrade…..
I expect we will see a lot more of this happening. It will be interesting to see what effect it has on the market.
“Drivers”
They are the key to the whole platform switch. Just as a modem can work on Win95 but is unrecognized with Linux, so too can the hardware cease to even exist in the mind of the OS without the appropriate drivers.
The number one reason for buying a “real” Mac won’t be the cool hardware or legality, it will be to ensure that all the components are properly supported by the OS. They installing 10.5.2 update won’t blow out your monitor’s resolution or turn your DVD burn into an expensive cup holder.
MDN word: lead
Free advertising for Apple.
But i’m still wondering about SJ’s offer to give MacOS X away on the $100 notebook computer. Obviously that wouldn’t be a Mac. That’s counter to Apple’s statement that they won’t allow MacOS X to run on a computer other than a Mac. Either Dvorak is right and Apple really doesn’t care, or SJ must have known his offer would be rejected.
How to get sued
Omigod. That article is an unintentional laff riot! The 1337 H4XX0RZ on Slashdot and other sites gloat about how “simple” it is to crack OS X and run it on a generic PC. “Simple”? Did you read all the hoops they had to jump through to load the OS on their Frankenbox? It’s not like you can just download a CD image off BitTorrent and pop it in the drive.
Apple has nothing to fear. Running Mac OS X on a generic PC is already beyond all but the geekiest of the geeks, and Apple will certainly lock down the ship even harder for the official release. No one is going to that much trouble to build a box that Apple won’t support anyway.
Let me get this straight, they aren’t even running 10.4.2 or even 10.4.3 — they were unable to get that running? They’ve had a month to get the latest update working and they can’t.
There’s little to no hope for the pirates when the real deal comes around. The real Intel motherboards and chips will have much greater security and will not be using BIOS.
It’s really amazing how people think that Jobs spent many years in the bowels of Apple’s labs working on how he can change to the intel platform only so people can put his OSX on any clone PC. If this is true, Steve Jobs must be a very stupid person and should not be the CEO of Apple.
Dudes, 1, maybe 3 pages tops. I hate having to review an endless stream of pages for such a small payoff.
You could do all the steps in this article or just get Mac Mini for $499 and spend your time using OS-X rather than hacking it.
Yawn
This is of course a nerd thing – the challenge. Much more interesting is the comments about the cool things OS X offers, the lust for a cool OS… They’ll switch soon…
Funny how it is probably cheaper to buy a proper Apple machine than build your own. Why bother? Get the real thing.
Apple, I think, is going to sell a bucketload of intel-chip machines if they price it slightly below current price points. You basically get a two-in-one machine, capable of running OSX and Windows(if you choose to).
Does anybody really think the released OS X for Intel Macs will have the same weak TPM as the early developer release?
Apple is not stupid. My bet is the final TPM will be extremely strong. Hackers might have a nearly unlimited amount of time, but Apple has a nearly unlimited number of places to tuck TMP code. It’ll make for an interesting arms race.