Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the pystar-redux? dept.

El Reg reports:

An outfit called "Hacbook" is channeling Psystar, offering Mac OS laptops for US$329.

The laptops are actually refurbished HP EliteBooks, with a 14-inch, 1600x900 display, Sandy Bridge i5 CPU, 802.11 a/b/g/n, up to 1TB of disk, and 8GB of RAM. That's a spec Apple could have sold you in about 2013.

[...] The machines ship with no operating system but do include an installer its makers say "shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes to set up."

Jack Kim, one of the people behind the project, suggests you buy an OS X licence from Apple.

[...] "We're merely selling kits that users can then do whatever they want with afterwards."

"It's optimized to run OS X, but you can install Linux or Windows on it and use it however you want--that's completely up to the user. If Apple contacts us with concerns we'll work together to solve them."

[...] It's not the first time someone's run up a version of OS X on much cheaper hardware. Those with long memories will recall Psystar, which fell victim to Cupertino's lawyers in 2009.

I wondered if these things come with Secure Boot--which I prefer to call Crippled Boot (orig)
or Security Theater Boot (orig). One source said that HP's 8460p did not. (orig)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:50PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:50PM (#395937)

    I set up a Lenovo G500 with osx just to give it a shot a couple years ago. I liked it enough that it is the secondary boot on my desktop (which is unfortunately unavailable right now due to a lack of Nvidia 10X0 drivers). I could run in software mode or something like that, but meh.

    It's a whole lot of fucking around to get everything working, but it's usually pretty solid once you do. If you can get past the part where he does everything semi-for-profit (which a lot of people have significant issue with) the tonymacx86 site is pretty impressive on how far they've come with documentation and tools and what not.

    I would never attempt what these guys are doing here though. For one, the legal nightmare is a... well, nightmare, particularly since Psystar got slapped down for doing something similar (in spirit at least). For another, support would be a giant drain to keep up on. You'd almost have to offer none whatsoever. I got pretty good at solving hackintosh issues with they come up (barring the video driver thing) but it's not like you could just give one of those to someone and walk away forever. If anything broke, there'd be almost no one in the world you could take it to who would know how to fix it.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by dyingtolive on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:53PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:53PM (#395938)

    Also, yes, the Lenovo came with "Secure" boot. No, it wasn't as problem to get past. The hack I had to do to the bios image to cripple the wifi card whitelist (Burn in hell, Lenovo, you nasty assholes) was the only real bios level hurdle I needed to overcome to get full hardware functionality. The stock card was incompatible.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!