If you build yourself a PC and add a Mac OS have you basically got yourself a Mac?

Yes, but good luck getting the OS image!

Oh, and drivers. Drivers, drivers, drivers…

You’ve got the same thing except you don’t have the fancy little apple logo and you have couple hundred dollars extra in your pocket.

It’s known as a Hackintosh

Especially since nowadays apple uses run of the mill pc hardware anyway. at double the price.

@the100thmonkey can you not buy copies of Mac OS’s as you do with Windows?

Ignore this, I just read the link on @uberbatman post

There is slightly more to making a Hackintosh than that, but the real problem is that it’s illegal, and Apple is rather protective of it’s copyrights and patents. Simply put (for those that didn’t follow the link), the OS X EULA specifically prohibits running OS X on any non-Apple hardware.

~But Apple is so great and awesome and affordable that why would you want to?

Note that there are thinks like Mac4Lin and MacBuntu that give you the same interface running over a similar kernel. OS X’s main strengths (and selling points) under the hood are due to it being a derivative of UNIX, but there is already a UNIX-oid OS out there that can run on PCs legally and for free; Linux. Same interface, same virus-proofness, same many other things except price and legality.

Here’s a helpful link: Lifehacker – The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Building a Hackintosh

@jerv ”...same virus-proofness…” I don’t think it’s possible for any linux distros to run Gatekeeper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeper_(OS_X). You’ve got to remember that there is a hell-of-a-lot more to OSX than UNIX and the GUI. UNIX is the foundation/bedrock, but there is a massive operating system stack built on top some of which has been around since the NeXT days in the 90’s.

@gorillapaws Gatekeeper is irrelevant as package managers generally require the same explicit permission to install from a given source/repository. By default, every distro I’ve used only gets stuff from a restricted repository akin to the App Store, requires changing settings to add more repositories, and makes installing from third-parties non-trivial enough that you cannot do anything inadvertently. To me, it sounds like you are saying OS X is superior to other OSs because it uses a GUI.

As for your other point, Linux has been around since 1991, and is very closely related to GNU (to the point of controversy) which started development in 1983. I would say that they have a head start actually, since OS X is such a departure from previous versions that it’s not unfair to say that Apple got to the UNIX-like party a little late. But at this point, both have had plenty of time to mature, so it doesn’t really matter who started first (aside from disproving that Apple is the only mature OS in existence) unless Apple decides that they want to sue for patent infringement.

@jerv Gatekeeper is more than just about requiring permission to install software. It prevents apps from accessing the filesystem, hardware (such as the built-in camera), network connections, etc. unless explicitly allowed. In other words if a user has “app-store only” selected, and downloads a calculator app that is later found to be exploitable, because it won’t have permission to access any of those features of the OS, there is very little harm that can be done.

I’m not arguing that any one OS is superior to others, they all have strengths/weaknesses, but I think your comments trivialize how significant the OSX codebase is relative to the UNIX codebase. There are tens of thousands of API’s in OSX, dozens of frameworks, and much of this stuff goes way back, is well-tested, and rock-solid. The point is that there is a lot more to OSX than just the GUI.

@gorillapaws And my point is merely that you are trivializing/ignoring what people outside of Apple have done. I maintain that they do not have a monopoly on good ideas. Nor are they the only ones that were doing the computer thing since way back.

Apple may be the most commercially successful, but that doesn’t mean that they did everything first, do everything best, or are the only ones that do certain things.

let it not be forgotten that osx is actually the least secure of the big three

“Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town.”

Priceless.

@ragingloli I’m not trivializing UNIX at all. Like I said, it’s the bedrock of nearly all operating systems out there. I do think Apple does many things better. They have a 333 page document known as the HIG the human interface guidelines that meticulously works through the usability/user interaction issues that software designers will face. It is why many of Apple’s interfaces are so elegant (some of the skeumorphism is obnoxious admittedly, but it also makes things appear familiar, less scary and encourages interaction, while marrying the user’s mental model of the real life object to the software interface). I think one of the best examples is Automator. It allows someone with no coding experience to visually assemble very complicated scripts. The interface is discoverable, accessible and still powerful without overwhelming the user with thousands of small shortcut buttons in ribbons all over the screen. On other platforms you will see the Cockpit UI scheme all too often.

@ragingloli It’s funny that you’re using a source from 2011. If you look at the results from the 2012 competition you will find that OSX is much more secure (as I said it was above):

“At Pwn2Own, Chrome was successfully exploited for the first time. VUPEN declined to reveal how they escaped the sandbox, saying they would sell the information.[41] Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 was successfully exploited next.[42] Firefox was the third browser to be hacked using a zero day exploit.[43]”

”Safari on Mac OS X Lion was the only browser left standing at the conclusion of the zero day portion of pwn2own. Versions of Safari that were not fully patched and running on Mac OS X Snow Leopard were compromised during the CVE portion of pwn2own. It should be noted that significant improvements in the security mitigations within Mac OS X were introduced in Lion.” (emphasis added)

I find many of the things I do to be either no easier, a bit harder, or outright impossible on a Mac. Then again, I suppose the HIG was written with normal people (complete with aversion to learning) in mind. Not exactly belittling what they’ve done, merely their insistence on hobbling those who don’t need training wheels and get claustrophobic in walled gardens. Windows offers no training wheels while Linux allows you to peek under the hood if you want but doesn’t require doing so the way Windows does.

Automator may help someone like me who knows logic but lacks the linguistic aptitude to actually code, but rather wasteful since Apple’s target audience is either too illogical to use it even then, or more artistic than autistic. In that, it’s rather subjective which is better unless you look solely at commercial viability; I am not part of “the rest of us” that their old ads referred to.

On thesecurity front,agility matters. Antivirus companies do daily updates. TheLinux community also responds quickly to patch flaws; often within hours. By comparison, both Apple and Microsoft are slow. Apple moves better whenthey move though.