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Comment by billyjobob | Hacker News Reader

On the desktop we can install OS X on non-Apple hardware to make Hackintoshes. So far this is just a kernel port with no graphics, but will it lead to installing iOS on non-Apple phones in a similar way? 'iClones'?

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Hackintoshes are largely possible because it's possible to get almost the same components used in Macs on regular PCs. It might be a little more difficult to get your hands on the chips Apple uses in iPhones/iPads (not to mention cobbling them together). Not that doing so wouldn't be pretty awesome.

No, this is Darwin which is the open source part of iOS / OS X. I would imagine iOS looks for some pretty specific set of things from the chipset it is running on and there is no "generic ARM phone".

iOS also depends on high level user/kernel components such as IOMobileFramebuffer. I am personally not interested in pursuing graphics.

What is your end goal with this?

...Good question, it's mainly an OS for myself. (As a fun side project.)

I have nothing better to do in high school. (Being 17 sucks.)

Well, good for you. It's nifty.

Good choice of projects. Every age sucks for something, the fun comes in being able to do the cool stuff, looks like you found that.

It beats JavaScript projects, right? ;)

Yep, plus you made HN.

Keep doing it! The main idea behind Raspberry Pi is to bring young people back to the core/kernel/assembly/hw parts, and you've succeded on your own. This is a great accomplishment.

You're 17 ? Boy, times sure are a' changin'.

I can't help but think about the hours of your life that an autodidact like you are wasting on school when you are capable of something like this. They should just give you a list of things they want you to know, give you a year to do all 4 years worth of worth and let you move on your merry way to bigger and better things.

Any way to get out of there early? Maybe apply to a solid CS program at MIT or Carnegie Melon and get out of there ASAP?

Who knows. I know that through doing my own projects instead of school, my 'grades' suffered.

I gain far more fulfillment through my own projects than anything else. (And I have to find university CS programs that'll be willing to accept me (along with ones I can afford...)).

When you apply, try contacting some of the CS professors directly showing your work, like this Github project. If you impress a professor at a department at a university you'd like to attend, you may be able to get a recommendation letter from them. If you do, you can then ask to get in contact with the people in the career center for their College/School at that university, who may be able to advise you on scholarship opportunities specific to that School/College.

You'd be surprised what's out there if you ask the right people instead of going through the normal "big pearly gates" known as standard university admissions.

The other option is to go apply to companies you'd like to work with now. Many workplaces with lots of young people in a major city with disposable income can give you a lot of the same positive experiences that you'd get at college? Would you be interested in this? I know we just hired a brilliant guy who dropped out after his first year of CS because industry had better problems to work on. My email is in my profile. I'm at Famo.us and we're doing some RTOS and scenegraph work across DOM, Canvas and WebGL in case that interests you.

But you're winocm. You're famous, dude. Just show a link to your github page / contributions to the iOS jailbreak community and I'm sure you'd get a fat scholarship.

But then again, how can I say something like that when I dropped out of school myself? :P

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