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Comment by chrisshroba | Hacker News Reader

One guess: if macOS could be virtualized, it would be even easier to run things like Messages, FaceTime, and Photos on non-Apple hardware, which reduces some of the lock-in effect that keeps people from leaving the ecosystem (i.e. Green Bubble Effect)

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Not necessarily. iMessage & FaceTime AFAIK are cryptographically locked onto Apple HW. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that each piece of Apple HW ships with a burned in unique private key that Apple records the public key of in it's internal database. That private key would be missing in a VM context.

It's possible my data is out of date though because iMessage spam is real & I'm not sure how that's done if it needs a valid private key that Apple can ban.

I haven’t looked at this in detail in a while either, but I don’t think the claims here are correct.

It is true that Apple employs some efforts to prevent/discourage you from using those services illegitimately, but using iMessage and FaceTime from a Hackintosh has been possible for years, largely without jumping through any hoops.

As far as I am aware, you need at least one Apple Device to get it started on a Hackintosh. So you might still need one iPhone and then also receive iMessages on a Android by using a VM in the background. And this sounds so complicated, that I would doubt that more then a handful of people world wide would do it.

Yes, and would lead to iMessage spam and FaceTime robocalls.

Would it?

Have a crack and you can probably get a macOS VM running on whatever hardware you have in short order.

There's ton of other instant messaging apps that can run on anything or even have an API. I use some of them and weirdly spam is not a problem at all.

Also you can run iMessage without mac if you really want to.

> One guess: if macOS could be virtualized, it would be even easier to run things like Messages, FaceTime, and Photos on non-Apple hardware

I can be and it’s not hard to do. I assume your referring to breaking the licence agreement?

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