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My question is in regards to developing code for the iPhone / iTouch.
What with Apple's transition to the Intel platform for their chip, it is obviously now possible to run their OS on a PC.
So, with that, and my inherently cheap nature, I was wondering if it was possible to bypass the purchase of a refurbished Mac by running the iPhone SDK on a Hackintosh?
As I am more of a hobbyist then a serious developer at present, I'd basically like to get my feet wet before fully committing to this endeavor. In the long term I know that it would be better to purchase a Mac...
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The answer is yes.
On a $10 P4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, hackintosh works fine and xcode/iphone sdk works as well. Its a little slow, but stable, and a very viable option for someone looking to just test the water of iphone development, without committing the cash.
What are the benefits? The main benefit to using a Hackintosh is a much better cost/performance ratio compared to a real Mac. You can save a thousand dollars or more. Because you can use off-the-shelf hardware, you can in theory build a Mac-compatible computer that is more powerful than any Macs that Apple sells.
Being an iOS developer, you know that using Xcode (IDE), you will be able to develop iOS mobile apps. However, Xcode only runs on a Mac computer. Thus, you need different ways to develop iOS applications on Linux. For developing an iOS app on Linux, you need virtualization software.
Yes, it's totally possible. I developed my first app on a Dell running the iATKOS OSX patch.
Whether it's worth it or not really comes down to how difficult it is to get a hackintosh install (Kalyway / iATKOS) running on your PC. With some PCs it's trivial and everything works. For others it's a nightmare and your networking/audio/graphics will never work completely. If you need to run a patched kernel (e.g. you don't have an Intel Core 2 Duo chipset) things become really awkward.
Your best bet is to take a note of the hardware in your PC and do some research on the various OSX86 forums.
Assuming you get everything working the only future concern is software updates. iPhone SDKs generally require the very latest OSX update (e.g. 10.5.6), but installing updates on hackintoshes with patched kernels is a nightmare.
If you enjoy tinkering with this type of thing and are comfortable partitioning your HDD and playing with boot flags then I'd say go for it. If not, consider picking up a used Mac-Mini on eBay/craigslist or something. If you find out that iPhone development really isn't for you then you can resell it lose practically nothing.
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