During a recent instant message session with Lance, one of my AIM buddies, said 'I'm going to see if i can install MacOS X on my Dell.' Lance is a knowledgeable PC guy who runs a web hosting service. He chats with me fairly regularly about a variety of tech issues. He knows I'm an avid Mac user. So when he made this comment I told him that I didn't think that it was going to be possible.

I said that trying to install Mac OSX on his HP personal computer would be a waste of time, it simply wouldn't work. I thought the installation process would be looking for certain hardware to ensure that it was being put on a Macintosh computer.

He looked up the specs on the 15-inch MacBook Pro on the Apple site which showed 2.2GHz or 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1. 'Thats an intel board!' he typed.

My doubting it could be done probably sounded more like 'I dare you' to Lance. So he simply went ahead and did it.

It didn't take long and I got a 'I told you I could do it' message from him. Here are the pictures of the installation process. I waited a couple of days to see if all was well with his experiment and he said that he is happily running Mac OSX without problems.

 

It worked mostly right out of the box. Afterwards we both wondered why we hadn't heard more about this and Lance found a small group of people at osx86Project through a Google search who are into this.

If you already have a lot of PC hardware then running Mac OSX might be worthwhile. You won't have any warranties from anyone but given the stability of Mac OSX it probably isn't a huge concern. A new PC laptop, core 2 duo, with the same specs as the Mac Book Pro goes for about $1,300. Apple's MacBooks and Powerbooks command a much heftier price tag. Laptops are generally less expensive in the PC world whereas there is not any real price advantage on the desktop lines over the Macintosh these days.