iPhone Development on Hackintosh

Question

My question is in regards to developing code for the iPhone / iTouch.

What with Apple's transition to the Intel platform for their chip, it is obviously now possible to run their OS on a PC.

So, with that, and my inherently cheap nature, I was wondering if it was possible to bypass the purchase of a refurbished Mac by running the iPhone SDK on a Hackintosh?

As I am more of a hobbyist then a serious developer at present, I'd basically like to get my feet wet before fully committing to this endeavor. In the long term I know that it would be better to purchase a Mac...

Answer 1

It's possible. But you are restricted to the choice of hardware for the hackintosh. Even if you get it right, no one can guarantee everything will work (sound, lan, etc.). If you can run the OS, you can run xcode with the SDK. But I don't think you'll be 100% satisfied with the end result.

As I see it if you want to run os x it's better to invest in a mac mini than in hardware for a hackintosh. Asuming you'll be buying all the components for the hackintosh.

Answer 2

Save yourself some time and pain. Pick up a Mac mini or an iMac.

Answer 3

I was in this dilemma recently, and decided to go with a real Mac rather than a Hackintosh after hearing the stories of my friend (who is doing it specifically for iPhone development). He was able to get iPhone development working, but his hackintosh is always having one issue or another; the most recent one was a constant boot cycling, wherein the machine would immediately reboot after loading the OS.

Look on the bright side: Apple products are popular and easy to sell. If you get one and sell it before the next generation comes out you can get most of your money back - money that would have been spent anyways on a new hard drive (to quarantine your hackintosh, heh) or OSX (assuming you meant to get the software in at least a remotely legal fashion).

Answer 4

Yes, it's totally possible. I developed my first app on a Dell running the iATKOS OSX patch.

Whether it's worth it or not really comes down to how difficult it is to get a hackintosh install (Kalyway / iATKOS) running on your PC. With some PCs it's trivial and everything works. For others it's a nightmare and your networking/audio/graphics will never work completely. If you need to run a patched kernel (e.g. you don't have an Intel Core 2 Duo chipset) things become really awkward.

Your best bet is to take a note of the hardware in your PC and do some research on the various OSX86 forums.

Assuming you get everything working the only future concern is software updates. iPhone SDKs generally require the very latest OSX update (e.g. 10.5.6), but installing updates on hackintoshes with patched kernels is a nightmare.

If you enjoy tinkering with this type of thing and are comfortable partitioning your HDD and playing with boot flags then I'd say go for it. If not, consider picking up a used Mac-Mini on eBay/craigslist or something. If you find out that iPhone development really isn't for you then you can resell it lose practically nothing.

Answer 5

If you have so little belief in yourself that you feel the need to save a couple of hundred dollars by hacking a pseudo-Mac together just don't bother trying in the first place.

Furthermore you will pretty certainly fail (or spend so much time trying to succeed you'll have wasted vastly more time getting things to work than you saved on cost). The two clinchers are

1. You have to run code on a iPhone or touch, because the emulator is not perfect and will mislead you without you even being aware of it - I have code that runs on the emulator but not as expected on hardware

2. Apple's key signing is hard enough to get working with the real thing, it took me a couple of hours and I'm not alone - there's a great many posts out there on development forums from people having difficulties managing it. Getting it working on a Hacked machine - well you may be lucky, but are you prepared to gamble?

Answer 6

One problem I see with the Hackintosh approach is that if you get it working now, you are not guaranteed to have the same machine working when an update to Mac OS comes out in the future, and this could be especially important if the iPhone SDK and/or developer tools that you want to use are hosted only on the next generation of the system software.

In the long run, I think it'll be better to go with a cheap (and even a used) Mac of some kind, like a mini or a MacBook.

Answer 7

Yes, you can. I have. But is it worth it?

If you are doing it for fun it's worth it.

If you are doing it for a real, useable Mac it's not worth it.

Now you will have a billion guys come down on me for saying that because some guys have built some truly impressive rigs but they are missing the point of a Mac. Macs just work well and are a pleasure to use while PC's just get stuff done and you probably secretly hate it.

I did it just for fun but I ended up spending more on a Hackintosh than I would have if I just bought a Mac Mini. Of course my computer is 4x as fast but it's just not the same as a real Mac. On Mac's everything just works... it's really nice. But on my Hackintosh nothing works without direct intervention on my part... not very nice.

I always planned on using that computer for windows development anyway so it wasn't a waste but otherwise it would have been a HUGE waste.

Answer 8

On a $10 P4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, hackintosh works fine and xcode/iphone sdk works as well. Its a little slow, but stable, and a very viable option for someone looking to just test the water of iphone development, without committing the cash.

Answer 9

You can do it. I have 3 hackintoshes that we develop on, but at the end of the day you will need a real mac to be an apple developer.

Answer 10

Rumor has it Microsoft/Apple will be announcing that Visual Studio 2010 will have native Objective-C support for developing iPhone/iPad applications on Windows.

Answer 11

You can do it, I started learning iPhone/Objective-C/Cocoa development using a virtual machine and an image of OSX (it was a pain to setup though and I think I could only use OSX 10.5.2)

It's just not worth the hassle, in the end I just stumped up £365 or so for a second-hand 2007 model MacBook off eBay and it's been smooth sailing ever since.