Hello Mmes et Msrs,

I kinda need to acquire a basic knowledge of MacOS for work, so at first I had the idea of buying myself a MacBook -- expensive training, but anyway it'd be my first notebook and I have already at home plenty of PCs to play with Windows and Linux.

But then I said to myself, "hey, what about just buying the OS and trying to install it on a PC?"

Well, I wasn't the first with that idea, it seems they have been at it since around 2005:

and some others have been successful at installing Windows XP on a Mac:

and still other brave souls have been successful at installing MacOS on a laptop:

Have any of you guys got any insight on this?
Does it really work?

BRgds

Not a good idea until you are well experienced. Start with a laptop from the excellent Apple Refurbished computer department for your first one, then build up your knowledge before you get too crazy.

First off, you can't buy a version of mac os x that will install on non-apple hardware(retail copies of os x are for power pc cpus, not intel), so you'd have to get the leaked version off a torrent. This is piracy/stealing, and therefore illegal. Second, installing mac os x on non apple hardware in itself is illegal. If you want to use mac os, buy a mac(or borrow one if you can). If you're really on a budget you could try a refurb unit since they still have warranty. From what I've heard "hackintosh" requires a pc that has similar or identical hardware(graphics, chipset, etc), and even then doesn't run right. As you mentioned, the (intel) macs can run windows at native speed using apple's bootcamp bios emulation program. This works very well, and is easy to do.

Thnx raybay and vnf4ultra, good advice.

I just realized the implications of the links I posted (piracy) after the fact. I'll edit them out right away.

Thanks again.

If you are in the market for a laptop you can't really go wrong with a Macbook or Macbook Pro. They have very good hardware and the price for what you get is reasonable. With them you can run XP or Vista just fine as well as OS X. You will have a lot of problems trying to run OS X on non Apple computers, it can be done, but its ugly, I've tried and failed a couple times.

To answer the original question, there was a beta version of Mac OS X that was successfully installed on non-Apple hardware. But the unfortunate (for you at least) reality is that the OS X installer will check to make sure that it is indeed running on an Apple machine, even if it is of the Intel variety (contrary to what vnf4ultra said). To quote another person from this thread, as raybay says, the refurbished MacBook is a really great value, so that might be your best bet on an Apple notebook.