As you may have realised by now, I don’t actually own a Mac, or even have easy access to one. Sure, we have the lab computers in college, but with my coursework and studying and stuff taking up most of my day, I resort to doing my coding at night! And Macs in a lab several miles away are not exactly ideal.

So….what am I gonna do about it???

Well, after a little bit more research, I have stumbled into the dark, murky underworld known as HackintOsh!! So what exactly is it…?

Well, as you may or may not be aware, Apple used to run their Macs on IBM PowerPC CPUs. The MacOS was then built around this type of chip, which is incompatible with your standard PC chips, like Intel Pentiums, and AMD Athlons etc etc. Recently (in 2006), Apple decided to move over to Intel chips in their new Macs. This opened up the world to Hackintosh. You see, by Apple moving over to Intel based processors, they now share a common architecture with your standard PC. So now, if someone changes a few things in the Mac operating system and tweaks it a little, in theory, it should work fine alongside a regular PC. Whereas previously, when Macs were IBM based, that would be impossible!

So in a nutshell, a hackintosh is basically a PC running MacOSX. This also means that anything you can run on a Mac, you can run on your own bog-standard PC….including the iPhone SDK.

Of course, the legality of this is in question. I’m not sure Apple appreciate losing potential customers, who don’t need to splash out on a Mac anymore, either! I managed to find a MacOSX Leopard DVD for roughly €30, so it’s not a bad start to development on a budget.

EDIT: I have run into some trouble with this. I forgot that my current PC actually has an AMD processor. According to a few sites online this is manageable, though, with some different drivers, or “kexts”.