Long story short: I recently put together a ‘hackintosh’ computer — Macintosh software on PC parts. It’s running OS X Leopard and cost me $325. I kept the price low by salvaging parts from an old PC. 4 gigs of RAM, duo-core processor, the whole deal. Fast. Cheap.
Hackintosh construction is a gray zone, no doubt about that. Info scatters across a handful of forums and sites. Since it involves shoehorning Apple’s operating system into a hodge-podge of PC components, everyone’s experience differs, and most of the online discussion is very technical, with lots of snippety moderators who have little time for folks like me who are in way over their heads.
I wouldnt (read: can’t) pay Macintosh hardware prices, so the inexpensive Frankensteined hackintosh was a fantastic option. I’m proud to say it runs smoothly (ok, the machine can’t “sleep”, but all else is stable and transparently Mac). Plus I get the pleasure of sneaking high-end software inside a banged up, taped-up, dusty, stained old PC case.
I did this primarily to use Logic 8, a nice piece of music production software that used to be for Windows and Mac, until Apple bought it and promptly discontinued the Windows version.
Logic is Matt Shadetek’s weapon of choice, and my other musical partner Andy Moor uses it as well, so I figured it was finally time to get on the same page as them to facilitate collabo.
If you’re curious, I found this overview to be quite helpful, and this page helped out immensely with my particular hardware combo. (I used the hackintosh-friendly Gigabyte G31M-ES2L motherboard and an nvidia 7300GT video card.)