For a long time I have loved the Macintosh and the Mac OS platform. It has just been difficult for me to ever justify owning a Mac because the work I do is all Microsoft Windows based.
Recently there has been a flurry of posts over at Digg and other technology news sites that discuss how to install the Mac OS on Intel hardware. This, of course, has been made possible first and foremost by Apple, when they released development computers to premium members of the Apple Developer Network, and then ultimately by hacker types in the community at large who were able to circumvent the security technology that was intended to keep users from installing the OS on any arbitrary Intel based hardware and then making available a disc image of the installation.
After reading several posts, I decided to try and see if I was able to get the Mac OS running on my own Dell laptop. The main site with information about the MacOS X86 port is of course http://www.osx86project.org/ , however, there are others. I found the necessary files and created the install disc. I then purchased a secondary hard drive and bay for my laptop and ran the install last night. It worked very well. Out of the box I had networking support and audio support.
Software such as most of the iLife suite has to run using a technology named Rosetta which provides an emulation layer. This makes it quite inefficient to use most of those applications since they are already resource hogs without the emulation, so I am finding that I can’t really see using it as a permanent setup. I will purchase one of the MacIntel computers when they are available, but this has been a great way to get to know the Mac OS.
I also plan to start learning how to write code for the Mac when I get some free time. This is a great way to do it without having to make the initial investment yet. The time will come for that and when it does, I’ll be ready to start building applications for the excellent Mac OS X platform.