Hackintosh: reverse bootcamp

[StuJohnston]

I was recently in the market for another apple computer, but the same concerns came to me as usual. Mostly that I want a computer that doesn't come with a monitor (got one) that is more powerful than a mac mini (no discrete graphics?) and less expensive than a mac pro. As it turns out, with the new haswell chips and the latest OSX, you can make your own 'macintosh' pretty easily. I would maybe not recommend this to someone who has never built their own computer, but if you are confident and don't give up easily it would be fine.

Basically, this was all I used, I went to this site, http://www.tonymacx86.com/398-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-november-2013.html and picked out the stuff that I wanted and then used http://www.tonymacx86.com/374-unibeast-install-os-x-mavericks-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html and that was basically it! I did go searching around after the install for a few things like how to get the sound to work, but that only took a few minutes. It took me far longer to get my XP vm updated after installing it than it did for me to install osx.

It's also possible to put OSX on a prebuilt system and older hardware, but I wanted to make sure that I wouldn't have any hiccups and this seemed like the most fool proof route. People have even been successful putting osx onto dell minis!

My specific build was basically the CustoMac mATX with the 4770k and a geforce gtx 650. never had an ssd before, wow. I also grabbed the iogear bluetooth adapter that's listed and it worked out of the box.

[cclaud3]

I just went through the same process. Had 27" iMac that was about 4 years old and priced the latest version at $2900 with just a couple of add ons. Used Cyber Monday as my excuse to go through with it. I built one with the Haswell 4770 3.5 (running at 3.84), 3GB GeForce 780, 32GB ram, 27" SRGB ASUS monitor (@ 2560x1440), 128GB SSD for boot/operating, 1TB SATA for job files (and of course power supply, motherboard, case, etc) for $2100. I'm using the tonymac setup for dual booting into 10.9 & windows 7.

So far so good. Only thing that I find doesn't work is the Preview app in 10.9. NBD on that one.

[balloonguy]

I did it on a real cheap notebook a few years ago. It worked perfectly. I seem to remember that I was not supposed install the OS updates though.