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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Apple actively takes measures to prevent MacOS from running on foreign hardware (including virtual machines) really annoys me. If I want to publish a cross-platform app for iOS, I literally have to buy a device just for compiling and uploading the archive. That's not the case for any other mobile platform I've ever seen.

This is even more ironic considering the good reputation of being open that Apple has for some people, and tries to promote through marketing.

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The fact that Apple actively takes measures to prevent MacOS from running on foreign hardware (including virtual machines) really annoys me

I tried a Hackintosh VM in VirtualBox recently, just to play around, and it was surprisingly easy. AFAIK all that distinguishes "non-Apple" from Apple hardware is an "SMCDeviceKey", a short identifier in the BIOS, and a few other (mostly cosmetic) version strings. With a VM, all you need to do is set those and boot from an ISO --- there are instructions around to create one from the appstore package. No modification of the OS itself was needed; it thinks it's running on a real Mac.

> I tried a Hackintosh VM in VirtualBox recently, just to play around, and it was surprisingly easy.

I'm sure people (I) will appreciate some links. Thanks.

Here's one that I use: https://github.com/AndrewDryga/vagrant-box-osx/blob/master/R...

https://techsviewer.com/how-to-install-mac-os-x-el-capitan-o...

Yeah, I did it too a while back. I don't remember the details, but some changes on the VM were required. Even if fairly minor, it was quite clear they were necessary solely because MacOS actively checks for those flags and refuses to boot otherwise.

Apple's a hardware manufacturer and one of its USPs is the software that it bundles withg its hardware. It's sad that you're annoyed. But not sad enough for Apple to change its business model.

Or alternatively... think of the Mac, not as a computer, but as a dongle.

Which raises an interesting question....this may sound extremely farfetched, but what if we took the "dongle" concept to its logical conclusion? The Intel Compute Stick already exists; what if Apple sold its own compute sticks with macOS installed on them so that way one could have a portable macOS experience?

In a way, we already have this, already in a much less compact form: the Mac Mini. Ever since its introduction in 2005 the Mac Mini has been marketed as a device where you "bring your own keyboard, display, and mouse." It was always intended to be a drop-in replacement for a PC, kid of like today's Intel Compute Sticks and Intel NUC's. A PC "dongle", if you will.

But imagine if this "dongle" could be connected to a PC that could boost the power of the Mac Mini, which is necessary for some users since the Mac Mini is (sadly) not user-serviceable? If it's possible to offload the computation of a Mac Mini to a PC, then it's possible to treat the Mac Mini as a macOS dongle. It may not be the ideal solution, but I'm sure that Apple would charge near-Mac Mini prices for licensing macOS to PC users if Apple ever opened to the idea.

It's a farfetched idea, but it may provide additional options for macOS users who don't want to switch to Windows or Linux.

Apple doesn’t want its software running on hardware it doesn’t control, period.

My dream product from Apple would be a bare "Mac" in the form of an mATX motherboard paired with a macOS license. They could even make it very clear that they won't offer AppleCare or full Genius Bar service for it—a product for developers, hackers and gamers who are willing to self-support.

I'd like that too.

Thing is, how does Apple prevent something like that from cannibalizing their other sales?

The most obvious choice would be pricing them high enough (think: nearly as much as full Mac) so that nobody could profitably build and sell Mac clones.

The second most obvious choice would be to release them in such low quantities that nobody could base a Mac clone business upon them. But that would just result in them going for a billion bucks on eBay and you'd probably wind up paying more for one than if they just picked the first strategy.

The third most obvious strategy would be to cripple them in some obnoxious way so that they couldn't compete with Macs and were useful only as hobbyist devices... limiting them to 1GB RAM or something.

All those strategies would suck for, well, you and me.

One posssssssssible option would be to release a hobbyist iOS board. Sort of like all those hobbyist Android boards from China. It's a lot less likely that you'd be able to craft a "hobbyist iOS board" into something that could possibly compete with an iPhone.

One way to restrict sales would be to require the sale to be performed via the Apple Store app on the customer's iPhone, with a limit to the quantity purchasable on a per-iPhone-per-year basis.

Not offering any kind of general product support (other than required for warranty support) would also be a significant inhibitor for many people.

In the G4 days you could do that through authorized distributors who would sell you the boards directly as “replacement parts”. It was completely possible to build your own beige box Mac running on a real Apple board.

I think the logical conclusion is that your iPhone becomes your portable mac desktop. iOs is a modified version of macOS, there are rumours of Apple potentially switching MacBooks to Arm, along with the "merging" of macOS and iOS apps that's also apparently in the pipeline...I can't see how Apple isn't planning to offer a phone that can connect to a keyboard/mouse/monitor to offer a desktop experience. I'm sure it will require a very expensive dock, maybe even with some computing offloaded to it (eGPU, extra cores, etc), but I'm confident it's coming!

> licensing macOS to PC users

Never gonna happen. Mac's are very secure, performant and polished exactly because Apple controls its hardware. Done right because they can. Amen :)

> That's not the case for any other mobile platform I've ever seen.

Try to target Windows devices from other OSes, or getting console or embedded OEM compiler SDKs for anything other than Windows.

But you don't _have_ to buy a Windows device, and may just use a virtual machine.

Yeah, plus maybe GGP has never _seen_ a Windows mobile :)

I've used Windows Phone and Windows Mobile, and published for both. While you still need Windows for compilation and packaging, you can at least do so in a virtual machine quite effortlessly, as rhaps0dy pointed out.

Whilst macOS requires an Intel chip to run you can still create a VM easily enough, just as long as the host is Intel. The license, however, says you aren't allowed to do this.

No: you can do so on a Mac.

I don't think Apple cares. To block hacks is super easy, just check serials or block kexts, yet here we are running them.

Well, there is a kext called DontStealMacOSX that does rudimentary decryption…

Lol, I bought Snow Leopard CD back in the days $30 something :))

Have they renamed it since Sierra?

I was on mobile, so I didn't get the exact name right. It's actually "Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext".

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