The adventures of the FrankenMac
Darkness crept over the land, and a feeling of fear filled the people hearts as the FrankenMac was born. Yes, that’s right- ordinary PC laptops and desktops are changing into Macs and some crafty geeks are building their own out of generic parts; much like the monsters in the story by Mary Shelley.
Since Apple introduced Macs with Intel processors (the same processor that lies at the heart of every Windows PC) hackers have been fiddling with Mac OS X and have been successful in getting it to run on homebuilt or off-the-shelf PC’s that would normally run Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Psystar is one company building and selling these FrankenMac’s. Their cheapest “hackintosh” goes for about $599 and has similar specs to a late model iMac at about a third of the cost.
The average profile of a FrankenMac is to cultivate the choicest parts, from the motherboard to the graphics card and get them to run Mac OS without bugs. Now some may enjoy these changes and even encourage Frankensteins to roam the land, but Apple isn’t happy about it. They are currently suing Psystar for distributing their operating system on unsupported software.
