Six Months With a Hackintosh Netbook: It Ain't Pretty

[mouser]

One of Wired magazine's blogs has a brief write-up today on the unexpectedly unpleasant experience of trying to run Apple's OSX operating system on non-Apple hardware.

Found via a nice long write-up on OS News:

Over at Wired Gadget Lab, they're taking a look back at several people who've gone to a bunch of trouble to hack up and deal with the pitfalls of netbooks running OSX. As the story's title states, it ain't pretty. In a nutshell, they found that even if you load a nice OS onto a cheap, tiny computer, you still have to deal with the inherent downsides of a cheap, tiny computer, and when you run an Apple OS on a non-Apple machine, you'll have some software problems.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/04/six-months-with-a-hackintosh-netbook-it-aint-pretty/

[Ehtyar]

Mmm. We've done it twice at work (in an attempt to test sites on Safari) and it's an absolute nightmare. Eventually we just dragged an old G4 out of storage, installed 10.1.4 on it (came with it) and let it update for a year

Ehtyar.

[mwb1100]

Here's a blog entry that takes issue with some of the conclusions of another review of running OS X on a netbook:

http://blog.expandrive.com/2009/04/28/why-the-tuaw-dell-mini-9-road-test-is-a-fail/

The bottom line according to that guy - if you're using the machine within the realm of what you should expect to be able to do on a netbook (regardless of the OS), ie., that you take into account that a netbook is not appropriate for writing novels or doing heavy-duty development, then things are more or less fine.

[Ehtyar]

To be clear, our issues weren't usability issues, they were stability/compatibility issues.

Ehtyar.

[gwynevans]

Note that the blog author appears to have had one "software" problem, which might have been that his WiFi switched off and he didn't know how to re-enable it, while the other problems he writes about are pure hardware issues with his netbook's case - he doesn't really mention anything general ...