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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

The fact that I don't use OSX has been a barrier to getting better at iOS development. Hackintoshing has proven to be quite elusive and the vmware and vbox USB layers in Linux don't convince virtualized OSX enough to transfer over apps to my iDevices. I'm not convinced you can get to high quality by testing strictly on emulators.

If anyone has an old mac that can run modern xCode (you probably know what this constitutes more than me) and wants to donate it to a dedicated open-source developer for completely unspecified future projects, feel free to email me at (my handle on hn)@(googles email service). thanks

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Xcode is written Xcode, not xCode. Thank you and good night. ps. if you have any friends who work in Apple retail, twice a year or so they have a big clear out of some of the internal use machines. You can pick up fairly good machines for very very cheap. They had 2009 white MacBooks for 170 bucks or so the last time.

This is a great tip. My main laptop is a 2009 white MacBook with an SSD I cannibalised from another old laptop. The only thing I miss is Civilization V, everything else is fine.

Doesn't Civ V run on Mac as well ?

Yes, but probobably not on a 2009 MacBook.

The cheapest official retail option is the Mac Mini for $499. It's not a laptop but it will run the latest Xcode. Might be just the thing you need for that first app that makes you a bazillionaire.

> Hackintoshing has proven to be quite elusive

I've been using a hackintosh since 2008. It's literally never been easier to get one up and running.

So many people report success but a half dozen attempts with 20 years of computing to back me up has been nothing but abysmal failure.

I don't know what kind of magical book of voodoo spells these people are using.

I wonder if the web is just biased towards success because generally the people who haven't succeeded have nothing to say.

If so, it would be nice to get insight on the whole picture here somehow

Skyline OS X is a great resource for getting a solid And simple Hackintosh install. I'd recommend trying the guides there.

http://skylineosx.com

If you have the right hardware it can work as good as a real Mac.

But some hardware is just not compatible and that's it, nothing you can do about it.

It's not hard. Apple computers are still using commodity hardware - that is, you can buy very similar parts off the shelf to build your own system. The closer you get, the easier it is, but there are forums revolving around tweaks and updates to make just about anything work. Even AMD CPUs, which Apple has never used.

It _does_ take some tinkering, though, and if you aren't comfortable with that (or if your time is valuable enough), you should invest in the real deal. :)

I have an old white Macbook running SL, but it won't run modern XCode. It's great for doing things like Python dev, though.

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