Ron Schenone

Mac OS X Leopard On Your PC ?

Posted by on Oct 29, 2007 | One Comment

Disclaimer : XXXxx-XXX does not encourage piracy so please go and buy yourself a copy of Leopard legally rather than being a cheap dumbo.

These were the words on a Web sited I visited this morning in which they have posted two links to pirated versions of Apple’s newest operating system Leopard. There were also links for information on how to hack Leopard in an attempt to install it on a PC. Apple’s licensing agreement specifies that the software is designed for labeled Mac systems only and no others.

I’m not trying to be a goody-two-shoes here, but it seems to me that by placing a disclaimer like the above, may make the web site owner feel self-righteous, but does little to prevent piracy. By providing two piracy links it appears that they do condone piracy and are trying to benefit by increasing their site visits by offering the links. I seriously doubt they are doing this as a public service. I will also venture a guess that Apple may be contacting these people and asking them to withdraw the links.

What is humorous about the situation is that most sites that have provided access to the link for the ‘hack’ to install Leopard on a PC, also have another disclaimers of sorts:

Some system preferences, like Sound and Network, may never work.

Without network support means no Internet. Sound would be nice as well. But since Apple doesn’t produce PC related drivers for every hardware under the sun, I would venture another guess that the words may never should be replaced with will not.

Wouldn’t it just be simpler to go out and buy a Mac instead of trying to turn a PC into one? I guess the question I have is why? Why would you want your PC to run on Mac software? Or why would you want your Mac to run Windows?

Comments welcome.

[tags]apple, pc, leopard, hack, download, piracy[/tags]

  • marc klink

    Some want a Hackintosh because of the bragging rights. I haven’t personally seen one running OS X past 10.1 – the people I know had everything working on that machine, but then it was basically all the Intel and Nvidia parts that were in the Macs then. From what I’ve been hearing, the TPM now used on the Apple legitimate motherboards is necessary for everything to work.

    It is too bad that Apple has not seen the light – give the people what they want. Publish a very restrictive HCL and sell OS X, with the caveat that anything not found on the HCL will not be supported.

    As for stealing the OS itself – I don’t know of anyone who does it, as they don’t feel that Apple is ripping off its customers.

    It’s also too bad that Darwin was stopped – the open source was getting too good at working on PC parts, and Apple used the developers and users as the best testers anyone could ever find – they were well motivated.