Building a mac pro at home

Nonagon

I was directed here by Ron DMC :

Hi all,

I was looking at this website-DIY Hackintosh Tutorial: Build a Mac Pro for Cheap -
and now the exams are over am trying to build a mac for cheap as a project over the summer. This is a real for dummies job as I am a complete newbie-- any and all help greatly appreciated, there are a lot of tutorials out there but which ones are good?


The Nonagon.

Solitaire

For the most part building a Hackintosh is the same as any PC build. The only catch is that you are limited to certain parts (those that are known to work with OS-X thanks to identical or passing-similar drivers - or hacked ones - to what components you get in a "real" Apple) and there's a bit of mucking about with the install process (partially depedent on the above point) as you may have noticed from some of those tutorials.

So, the first question is: Exactly what do you intend on doing with this Hackintosh? Because that will determine what kind of performance and components you'll need. And the second and opposing question is: what's the budget?

Wcool

Custom PC UK magazine, now on the shelves, has a guide how to build a (CHEAPER) Mac.

Also check out this link:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21564/Building_a_Hackintosh_Apple_Can_t_Sue_You_For

It's using an open source boot loader first to make it completely legal to install OSX and you can get your updates from Apple

Solitaire

There's no question that Darwin is the way forward; it allows you to install off-the-shelf Leopard rather than 'jacking a hacked OSX install disc off the web via the wonders of P2P, which for some reason is frowned upon by most governments. However, this does not make a Hackintosh legal. Although Darwin allows you to use retail OSX it does not get around the fact that Apple's EULA/TaC expressly forbids installing OSX on any machine not built by Apple itself.

That said, Apple rarely pursues individual Hackintosh end-users, but it does routinely sue every Hackintosh builder out there, Darwin or not. I don't know if they'll survive; the biggest Hackintosh company actually counter-sued Apple over its EULA/TaC being against fair trade laws and its tied all parties up a fair bit :P

But if you (or any end-user) are personally going to build a Hackintosh yourself and use Darwin to get a retail copy of OSX installed on it then I somehow doubt Apple is really going to notice

Wcool

Solitaire wrote: »

....
However, this does not make a Hackintosh legal. Although Darwin allows you to use retail OSX it does not get around the fact that Apple's EULA/TaC expressly forbids installing OSX on any machine not built by Apple itself.
....

Well, that is a very interesting question, apparently the EULA talks about an "Apple labelled computer".
This is debatable of course. From the article on the same link:

The only possible problem here is the EULA, which forbids installing Mac OS X on hardware that is not "Apple-labeled". I solved that issue by placing an actual apple on top of my machine, and I've got various Apple stickers here as well which could solve the problem in a more permanent fashion (I ate the apple...).

Kind of neat interpretation