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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

In terms of "other people's computers" it seems to fit well. Nice to be able to build/CI test against macOS without having to provision and maintain apple hardware.

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You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed.

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

It's against Apple's T&Cs, though. If you're doing it at home by yourself, who cares. But a company that's interested in automated testing etc. isn't going to see it as an answer.

Get an old old old Mac pro from ages ago. Upgrade its motherboard. Then upgrade its RAM. Then upgrade its hard drive. Then upgrade its power supply. It will still be an "Apple-branded computer" because of its case. It will just have received a bunch of upgrades. Big "haha" to them.

(Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)

That sounds like a waste of time and money.

Definitely not a waste of money. Apple charges $1200+ for a soldered-in 4TB SSD that I can buy for $400 and upgrade in the future.

IMO their price gouging is ethically much worse than someone making a hackintosh and using it to enrich the MacOS software ecosystem.

Shortcut: Build a hackintosh, then stick it in an Apple case. Profit.

You “can”, in a technical sense, but not legally—Apple’s licensing for macOS only allows it to be run on Apple hardware. (You can run a macOS domU on another OS’s hypervisor, but that hypervisor has to be running on a Mac.) This matters when you’re a corporation.

You can't really test apps if there's no graphics acceleration. If you want graphics acceleration, you'll need to run a macOS VM with GPU passthrough using virtio or Proxmox. I did that for a bit until I just gave up and bought a Mac.

Your legal department is going to be stoked when you try that at work.

They will never know if you don't tell them. Copenhagen interpretation -- if it isn't observable it doesn't exist.

Highly recommend not hiding legal issues from your company's lawyers. That's a good way to get fired.

And sued.

This works if you aren't successful. If you are, it will get out.

People pointing out that this may be against ToS. But that might not be the case depending on which country you're in.

I don’t know about the legalities, but according to Apple you are only allowed to run macOS on real Mac hardware. Anything else is probably an EULA violation or something.

As an aside, in the script you link to is this line

> VBoxManage setextradata "${vm_name}" "VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey" "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"

I think that’s Apple’s way of reminding you about their rules regarding host machines.

You will get your Apple Developer account terminated if they ever find out.

Live by the walled garden die by the walled garden

Screw the walled garden. Build web apps.

If you're making an awesome app that many Mac users use and depend on, they would be stupid to terminate your dev account.

Epic Games would beg to differ...

Travis CI offers MacOS runners out of the box.

Now anyone has MacOS runners mostly out of the box.

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