How desperate are you for a Mac netbook?

November 4, 2009 9:55 PM

How desperate are you for a Mac netbook?
The Askme question about a hackintosh netbook a week and a half ago got me interested in making one myself. So I bought a Dell Mini 10v and made my own. This is a 3,400 word blog post about the advantages (some), disadvantages (many), and why the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for some people and not others. In addition, it's compared to a real Macintosh and is used as evidence for why I've come to believe that Apple's unlikely to ship a Mac netbook any time soon.

I tried to keep the post understandable by anybody who's comfortable using computers but don't consider themselves computer geeks. Hopefully it's useful for people who are curious about hackintoshes or are planning to use one themselves.

posted by ardgedee (3 comments total)

This post saved me three hundred dollars and many hours of busywork. It's also fun to read and informative. If I were in the market for a secondary machine rather than a primary one, I'd jump on this, but as it stands, I'm glad to know what I'd be in for. Much more helpful and worthwhile than the Gizmodo post, which makes this setup sound like all things for all users, which even the polished Apple products themselves are not. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting, ardgedee.
posted by cgc373 at 11:07 PM on November 4, 2009

This is delightfully written and taught me some things. I especially love this set of sentences.

"This hack violates both Apple’s and Dell’s warranties, might have broken some intellectual property laws, risked wasting my money and time, and put my computer in the hands of people I don’t know who wrote applications that have access to data I store and transmit. The less you know about what you’re doing, the less you should take this lightly, even if you have money to burn.

Every change to the software or hardware is unsupported by everybody."
posted by jessamyn at 8:19 PM on November 10, 2009

For those who read the original post a while ago, there is now a followup with some thoughts on the much-noted disabling of support for the Atom CPU in OS X 10.6.2, and notes on two weeks spent using the Dell Mini 10v as a Mac netbook. And this is as much as I intend to write on the topic; other sites will better serve those people who want ongoing tech updates or primary news sources.

Thanks for the positive feedback.
posted by ardgedee at 9:31 AM on November 20, 2009