Building a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard for $900

Fans of Apple’s computers tend to disagree, but the facts are there… Macs are expensive. Go to Apple.com, and find their least-expensive Mac offering, then compare the individual parts at a site like Newegg. You’ll not only wind up with a more customized computer, but you’re likely to build a faster one as well. That’s the idea being the “Hackintosh”… a custom-built Macintosh.

The process of building a faux Mac has gotten a lot easier over the years. Even just five years ago, the process was incredibly difficult, and the end result was something more of a gadget to goof around with rather than a usable machine. But the move to Intel’s architecture blew the doors wide open, and even Apple themselves likely didn’t expect Hackintoshes to grow in popularly so quickly.

So what does it take to build your very own Mac computer? Well for the most part, building one is quite similar to building any other computer, but there are many little steps that are required to get things up and running, thanks mostly due to OS X, which is an operating system that knows what it wants. If your hardware doesn’t match up, it doesn’t want to run, and that’s half the fun of such a build.

Adam Pash at Lifehacker put together a rather in-depth guide on how to build your Hackintosh, from start to finish. There is one thing I noticed though, that I find rather interesting. When Hackintoshes first came to be known, the required hardware was rather limiting, and it looks like that hasn’t changed. Even the motherboard is similar. Then there’s the graphics card… a now phased-out NVIDIA’s 9800 GTX, which course has been replaced by the faster GTS 250. I have to wonder if the newer card simply wouldn’t work? If so, then it seems even Hackintoshes limit your choice of hardware!

Either way, this is a great guide for anyone looking to get this done. And I can’t imagine a much better feeling than knowing that you built the equivalent of a $2,000 Mac for under a thousand.

The most expensive iMac, by comparison, has only a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory for $2,200 ($1,300 more than my build, but it is built into a monitor), while the cheapest Mac Pro has a single 2.66GHz Quad-Core processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 640GB hard drive-and it costs $2,500 ($1,600 more than mine, though it’s a different and better processor and DDR3 rather than DDR2 RAM). In short, my $900 “Hack Pro” sports nearly as good or better hardware than any Mac that Apple sells short of the $3,300 8-Core Mac Pro (which can, incidentally, get more expensive, but it won’t get much better).