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Comment by lorenzopicoli | Hacker News Reader

If it's a killer idea and can be monetize why don't you consider invest on it? You can't create iOS apps without a Mac. You can try to do a hackintosh but its a pain if you don't de right hardware.

Another option is to create using HTML 5 but its no the same as a native app.

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I'd invest on it if I had money to invest. Perhaps I can get hold of an old Mac, what's the oldest vintage that would work well enough?

Sorry, I don't know... Maybe this can help you, but its about the cheapest new Mac http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190662/whats-the-cheapest...

It has to be after they started putting Intel processors in. If it is a PowerPC, it will not work for iOS dev.

Older Macs won't support the latest OSX and XCode.

I'd look at MacinCloud or something similar if you have good bandwidth. $50 / month for 24x7 online access to a Mac isn't bad at all and they have pay-as-you-go for about $1/hour. I haven't tried them, but I think I've even seen people claiming to do iOS development there using an iPad (+keyboard) as their physical interface. You can get a few friends with iDevices to join Testflight for free physical testing.

http://www.macincloud.com/pricing/ http://XCodeClub.com http://virtualmacosx.com/

You can run OS X vm in vmware player. If you have a decent desktop box it can be quite usable. This probably violates apple's TOS, but whatever.

I had the chance to do this 1 year ago and it's usable (not as good as a real computer) but I think it would be a pain (not worth) to develop an app in a Virtual Machine

Having looked in to the possibility of virtualising - ie Hackintosh running on virtualbox - it seems it works but you need an Intel processor (with VT-x) in the host machine.

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