I would like to develop an Iphone application, but I do not have a MAC. I would like to find out if it is possible to rent a virtual machine with a MAC OS so that I could develop on that machine. Does anyone offer that service? would it not make sense because I couldn't connect my phone directly to that machine?
Or perhaps I could rent a mac.
Or option three is to run Mac OS in a virtual machine on my windows laptop. Is that possible?
A Mac Mini is a cheap solution and will let you to develop your apps.
The current Mac Mini uses a dual-core 64-bit "Penryn" Intel Core 2 Duo processor that runs at 2.4 or 2.66 GHz.
No one is going to recommended you a hackintosh.
Its probably better to just fork out and buy a mini-mac, then you can use your existing monitor,mouse and keyboard and its pretty OK price wise. Especially since doing an app often means also maintaining it in the future.
It's illegal to install MacOSX on a non-Mac hosted virtual machine. I think you'd get yourself a Mac, remember Mac can install Windows natively (BootCamp). So you are really buying a Windows machine and Mac machine.
If you are ready for getting your hands dirty. You could install Mac operating systems on VirtualBox. VirtualBox doesn't officially support it because it is not legal. Google and follow the instructions.