How to build an Intel Mac

20 years ago

“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.

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