Apple and Pears

I had a couple of chaps turn up for a meeting yesterday from a certain UK Law Enforcement Agency and due to a crackingly sunny day were able to sit in a pub garden for a late and leisurely lunch. Anyway, thats not the point!

One of the chaps, Simon, pulled a little Netbook PC out of his bag and low and behold it was running OSX. It was really impressive to see such a tiny machine, designed for Linux or Windows to be running, very successfully, OSX in all its 'never crashing' glory. Being very small and light its essentially a MacBook Air but about £1000 cheaper.

I guess because I'd never gone to look, I did not know that since Apples move to Intel chipsets there has been a huge amount of effort in the hacking community (I use the word hacking in its proper sense) to get OSX successfully working on PC architecture. The Netbooks with their Intel Atom processors are, apparently, perfect.

Wired magazine wrote about it late last year (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/10/os-x-running-on.html) with similar results, although they noted that some elements such as Wifi and Sound fail to work on some Netbooks including the one they tried.

A very good list of Netbooks with the elements that work or do not can be found at http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/12/17/osx-netbook-compatib.html. It appears that the Dell Mini 9 is perfect and virtually anything can be made to work.

It is worth noting that although a great fun project, by loading OSX onto a 3rd party piece of hardware you are breaking the Apple licensing agreement, really fancy getting a Dell Mini on order though :)