Building the Hackintosh, a Preface
I remember my first Apple computer purchase like it was yesterday. In the year 2000 I purchased an 2nd Generation iMac DV Special Edition, which, at the time was a great leap forward in the world of personal computers. Apple had been gaining ground in the home PC market since the release of the original iMac, and here was a computer specifically geared towards the budding filmmaker. To include DV (Digital Video) in it’s name guaranteed my interest.
Of course, the machine was horribly underpowered. Running a 500MHz G3 processor, a 30 GB hard drive and a measly 512 MB of RAM, it barely had the power to run the earliest version of iMovie, let alone Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. And this is before the release of Mac OS X. But to put that functionality into a computer and advertise it as an affordable solution for simple filmmaking, you can see an incredible amount of forward thinking on Apple’s part. Five years before Youtube existed, Apple was trying to get people interested in media production on a budget.
Since then, a lot has changed. Now any new computer, Mac or PC has the processing power to capture and edit video and upload it to any one of a number of video sharing sites. We’ve moved our focus from burning DVD’s of our home videos to streaming and sharing with friends and family using social media. And high end video has only become better and cheaper to produce.
Over the last 10 years I have owned and purchased over two dozen different Mac computers for myself and for family and friends. My first real editing rig was a Powerbook G4 667 which lasted a good 5 years, only to be replaced with a Macbook Pro in 2007. Since then, the rise of HD video has made the need for faster computers and large amounts of storage space ever the more important. It’s in that respect that I began to think about building a new system, rather than going in the direction of a new laptop.
I knew that I wasn’t interested in any of Apple’s all-in-one systems (the iMac or any new laptop). My MacBook Pro from 2007 is still fast enough for day to day tasks and light Photoshop work, but it’s simply not up to the task of editing the latest types of HD video. That and an all in one system affords no internal expandability. Being realistic about it, I also knew that I could never afford to buy a high end Mac Pro. Apple prices their high end rigs out of the range of most freelance/amateur filmmakers, even at the entry level. And for what you end up getting in terms of specs you are drastically overpaying. Buying top of the line equivalent PC parts and building your own windows machine would end up saving you a little more than half the price of an entry level. Of course, there is the obvious difference in that out of the box you can’t run Mac OS X on a custom built machine with PC components. That’s where the hackintosh community steps in to save the day.
Since Apple switched to the Intel architecture for their computers, OS X has, through various methods, been made to run on standard PC computer parts. It’s to the the point today where it’s just as easy to install Mac OS on a PC as it is Windows on a Mac. So, with that in mind, I set out to thinking about my first new system in 5 years.
Before I begin to discuss the build, it should be said that building a hackintosh means that you will end up violating Apple’s Terms of Service. Or you may. See, I’ve never actually read all 908 pages of the terms of service so I wouldn’t know even if I was violating them, but I can’t imagine Apple wants you doing this, so take that for what it is. If there were any other way to install OS X on non-Apple hardware, I would have taken that route, but until then, we have to tread in dangerous waters.
To Be Continued.
-P
