We’re building a Hackintosh

Have you read the biography of Steve Jobs?  I’m not done (or even close), but the first few chapters got me itchin’ to build some electronics.  I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with computers and was becoming anxious to build one from scratch.

I’ve toyed inside Apple’s famous machines in the past doing:

• I replaced a dying hard drive in my 17″ MacBook Pro
• I installed and configured an Optibay in my new 15: MacBook Pro (and did the same for my buddy, Cebo.

Reading about Job’s and Woz’s adventures in sketching out circuit designs and assembling little blue boxes – I wanted to give my hand at it.  And seeing that I love Macs and loath Windows, I figured it would be fitting to build a Hackintosh.

What the heck is a Hackintosh?

What is a Hackintosh, you may be asking?  Well, as you may or may not know, building a Windows or linux based computer is seemingly an easy (and can be a very cheap) task.  If you have a little bit of savvy, you can hand pick your components based on a mixture of performance and budget and essentially build what you want.

With the Apple OSX operating system, just picking out your parts at NewEgg and throwing it all together won’t work.  You see, Apple is not only a software company, they’re a hardware company.  This is actually the fundamental difference between the Windows world and that of Apple – and what drives the religiously adamant conflicts.  It’s anti-open-source.  But it’s also why they are the most valuable company in the world today.

Putting philosophy aside, I love Apple products.  I’ve often been accused of being a fan-boy.  I have several authentic macs, several iPhones in the house, an iPad and I probably always will.  But I wanted to build a computer, and I loathe PC – so a Hackintosh seemed like the answer.

What we’re going to build.

So, spending days researching parts and pieces, I decided that the first version was going to have nothing integrated so we can upgrade easily in the future, but that we were going to buy amongst the cheapest parts, just to get started.  Incidentally, we’re still building a pretty beefy machine for a fraction of what it would cost in the Apple store.

I wanted to put together a machine that was easily upgradable.  Next summer I’ll want to put in an i7 processor – so all I need to do is buy the processor and swap it out.  I’ll want to double the ram — again, all I’ll need to do is buy the ram and slip it in the motherboard.  When I want to increase our graphics capability, all I need to do is buy the card and install it in place of the old one.  Get the picture?

Here is our shopping list.

• motherboard — – $115  – — – bought 12/17/11
• i3 cpu — – $135 – — – 65w
• graphics card — – $55  – — – 350w
• case — – $50 — – — bought 12/17/11
• ram (8gb) — – $46 — – — bought 12/17/11
• power supply — – $70 — – — 600w
• 500gb hard drive — – $50
• optical drive — – $21
• keyboard — – $50
• mouse — – $40
• screen — – use my Asus and buy a new one for me.
• pci wireless network card — – $20
• Total — – this is a semi-pro rig — – — $682

We chose our parts based on a list of compatible parts we found on the tonymacx86 blog.

We got the case in today – the ram and motherboard should be in later this week or next.

Since we’re on a tight budget, and don’t have a lot to spend, we’ll be buying the parts over the next couple months, documenting the progress here.

Keep an eye on this category for updates on this project.