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Comment by samat | Hacker News Reader

iMessage (and more importantly, FaceTime) is the single most important reason why I buy apple devices for my whole extended family, so that we can communicate without ads, with privacy and with proper security in place.

So that's pretty decent market strategy on Apple's end, i'd say.

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I'd kill for a way to use iMessage on my Windows desktop, so Apple is doing a great, albeit frustrating, job selling the Apple ecosystem.

Wish I could at least use icloud.com. Even went as far as to look into how hard it would be to use VMWare to get a OS X desktop going. 4 GB and a processor core would be worth it, but unfortunately it looks difficult.

Well, yes and no. The iMessage app is really, really awesome when you’re sitting with your Mac. Until you want to message someone with an android phone. :p

If you enabled Handoff in your iPhone, you can text SMS numbers on your Mac.

but unfortunately it looks difficult.

More difficult than just getting the VM up and running, IIRC. Something, something, hardware security key to get iMessage working. Or something. Anyway, there are workarounds with which others report having success, but at that my point my interest ran out.

You could get an old macbook that still runs iMessage, hook a KVM switch up to it and use it as if it was local (through a connection over a VPN or something). It sounds like a lot of work, but if you really must have it...

In the most recent builds of Windows 10, there is a new Windows Phone app what enables you to link your iOS device. Not sure if that's exactly what you are looking for but you can use iMessage on your Windows Desktop. Good luck!

The Windows Phone app only works well with Android devices. Messaging sync with iOS is not supported yet according to their website, and I doubt the Windows can ever get the iOS API access needed to make it work.

> Wish I could at least use icloud.com

why can't you? or you mean for iMessage?

Oh yeah, sorry about the confusion. iMessage through iCloud.com

You can do it in virtual box but there's no graphics drivers, so it's not the most pleasant user experience.

You wanna buy my MacBook pro from me? Lol

I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.

What resolution do you run the VM at?

Also it's possible that El Capitan has graphics acceleration in VM's, whereas the later versions of macOS definitely do not

Bottom-end WiFi iPads are in the $300 range now. You might find one cheaper on swappable, ebay, etc.

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