Alex Kidman ponders the murky waters surrounding efforts to run OS X on PC hardware. A good idea, or will combining the two worlds ruin the beauty of the Mac experience?

Lots of interesting stuff comes out of Miami. Oranges, Neon Lights, Cocaine and my favourite NFL team, for a start. In the past two weeks you could add the name "Psystar" to that list as well; they're a small computer company operating out of (it seems) several addresses in the Miami area that's gained a fair bit of notoriety for offering up barebones PC systems -- there's nothing too surprising in that -- running a pre-installed copy of Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.

It remains to be seen if Psystar's efforts will come to anything -- or even, indeed, if any actual machines ship out at all. As I write this, Psystar's Web site is still accessible, and it appears they're extending their "Open Computer" prospects with an OpenPro model. I wouldn't be putting my money down any time soon, though.

Psystar's opened a particular can of worms -- how much you can flick the V's at Apple before it descends with an army of pitchfork-wielding lawyers -- but realistically it's an issue that's existed ever since Apple made the switch to Intel hardware, and the first "Hackintosh" versions of OS X started wending their way around the torrent world. Apple's largely ignored the issue for the most part, save for releasing patches every once in a while that break the Hackintosh hacks, but commercialisation of the Hackintosh concept is something they've pretty much got to fight -- as a commercially listed company with stockholders, they'd be in a world of legal trouble if they didn't.

Enough of the legal side though. Is OS X on commodity PC hardware a good idea?

I'm a touch mixed on the subject. I've got a certain amount of admiration for the logical hacking behind the idea, and undeniably some of it has been done "because they can". I've even seen instructions online for getting an Eee PC to "run" OS X, although "run" in this case is something of an optimistic position.

I don't have any major philosophical problems with the operating system being run on other hardware, as long as the software's been paid for -- and, in fact, there's an argument that Apple's EULA allows for "Apple Labelled" machines to run OS X. Curiously, the Leopard box comes with a couple of Apple stickers. I'm not sure why they do that, or whether it would stand up in court if Apple did pursue you on those grounds.

OS X is an elegant and modern operating system, and while I do hold the view that any computer is ultimately just a tool for getting a job done, I'd certainly rather run OS X than Vista for my day to day computing needs, but part of the reason for that is that it runs smoothly (for the most part) on rather specifically chosen hardware. Yes, it's largely commodity Intel hardware that's not that different from what you get in a PC, but it's a tightly optimised system within a walled garden.

OS X does run on other hardware with hacks, but even the Wikipedia page notes that "many users experienced problems getting Leopard to work completely." For the purposes of giggles, OS X will operate to a certain degree, but if you want to run OS X as a useful and ongoing operating system, you're in an Apple world, for better or worse.

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