Building a “Hackintosh” Mac Pro clone – Part 1 – The History

This is really a story of two companies and a few really innovative, intelligent men who saw the future and changed the world.

Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak effectively created Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, with the release of the Apple I, and incorporated the company on January 3, 1977, in Cupertino, California.

The history of Microsoft began on April 4, 1975, when it was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque.

These two companies began a bitter and just-about legal rivalry that spans the past 35 years to win the hearts, minds and loyalty of the world. The world would quite literally never be the same again.

Both companies have had major ups and downs, successes and setbacks, interlocked but seperate, dependent but rivals and competitors. Together, they have literally definined much of what our lives have become today.

The two companies have crossed paths in a tangled web many times over the past two decades, which I won’t write about here, but it really is very interesting reading.

Wikipedia recalls one of the most important events to take place in 1997:

At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well a US$150 million investment in Apple. It was also announced that Internet Explorer would be shipped as the default browser on the Macintosh. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared at the expo on-screen, further explaining Microsoft’s plans for the software they were developing for Mac, and stating that he was very excited to be helping Apple return to success. After this, Steve Jobs said this to the audience at the expo:

“If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again.”

Today, Apple Inc is the worlds second largest company next to Exxon Mobil.

However, some things never crossed lines until far more recently, and that brings me back to the subject of this series of posts, we’re talking here about running OSX on x86 hardware.

The early days – pre Intel (PowerPC G3/4/5 emulation)

The first time I successfully installed Mac OSX on a x86 platform it was not far off brain surgery. There was a decent community on the internet and while there were various PPC emulators in development, the best by far in my experience was something called PearPC – http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/ If you visit the project there you can see it harks back to 2004 with the latest posts dating back to 2005.

Most of you reading this who have heard the term “hackintosh” have only come across the concept long after Apple decided to switch to Intel x86 architecture which was first announced by Steve Jobs in 2005 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). In fact the fact that one can assemble a purpose built Apple Mac clone has only become general public knowledge for the past two years or so.

Of course Steve Jobs would rather you didn’t. There is for instance a “Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext” located /System/Library/Extensions on the volume containing the operating system. According to Wikipedia:

The extension contains a kernel function called page_transform() which performs AES decryption of “apple-protected” programs. A Mac OS X system which is missing this extension, or a system where the extension has determined it’s not running on Apple hardware, will be missing this decryption capability, and as a result will not be able to run the Apple-restricted binaries Dock, Finder, loginwindow, SystemUIServer, mds, ATSServer, translate, or translated.

However, this was never a matter of stealing for stealing sake. This was an outrage that the majority of personal computer users in the world were forced to choose between Microsoft Windows or well, a different flavour of Microsoft Windows. I’m not purposely ignoring Linux here, but let’s face it, only recently have there been Linux options on the table that are beginning to look like real alternatives.

Those of us PC lovers who hated Windows 98, didn’t think much of XP and wished we could have the swish new OSX without the proprietary Apple hardware and price tag would go to great measures to make our Intel hardware pretend it was PPC.

Looking back, it was awful, low level nuts and bolts tinkering and it never really worked, while you could convince OSX to install, there were features that didn’t work, convincing audio and video hardware to play along with the charade was a nightmare. Forget about actually running any Mac apps, it was enough just to run the OS, and even then your mouse cursor moved literally a second or so after you actually moved your mouse. It was a dark dark age indeed for would be Apple lovers without an Apple.

Rumor had it that there was a mysterious Apple project code named “Marklar” whereby Apple had x86 systems natively running OSX, but it was all deeply locked somewhere inside Apple’s laboratories with security rivalling a nuclear missile silo.

Still it was enough to know firstly that it could be done, Apple were doing it, and secondly Apple must have enough reason to bother with it in the first place.

That reason was simple enough, the PPC architecture was quickly reaching a dead end, and Intel were starting down the warpath to 64-bit multi-core domination. The early Xeon platforms, and more importantly, Intel’s technology roadmap into the future were potent enough to convince Steve Jobs to make the switch.

That switch changed everything.

I happened across a beta version of Apple’s x86 version of OSX as you do… okay maybe I didn’t just find it… I probably spent a good amount of time looking for it from dubious sources, but in any case, with far less tinkering than any of the emulators I had OSX installed on my Dell Inspiron laptop with sound and almost full video card support.

I found that without the geek factor challenge, without much actual interest in Final Cut and without owning any hardware that would really properly work with OSX, I dropped it for a while, hearing and reading about others building full component for component clones that would function exactly as the real thing.

Now I have a need…. the time has come for me to delve into Final Cut Studio, I cannot continue professionally doing what I do without it. Also I have abandoned my dreams of running a fully equipped Assimilate Scratch DI suite for Da Vinci Resolve instead. Yes, the time has come to build my dream “hackintosh”, and I will share my own recipe and experiences with you as well as a running total of cost and savings compared to going with Apple hardware.