Every year as my seven year old daughter starts school and we meet the teachers I always have to ask if she needs a Mac. I have always wanted to try using a Mac and as a tech guy you would think I would have a closetful. truth is I have never used a Mac for more than 5 minutes.
A couple of years ago Apple announced and then moved over to the Intel platform, a platform that PCs use and now that there is familiar and easy to get hardware the computer modders of the world started getting to work to build a Mac out of generic hardware instead of buying a Mac made by Apple.
The modded PC hardware that turns into a Mac is called a Hackintosh, literally a Hacked Macintosh
I was alerted to a couple of places where you can get hardware specs and instructions on how to build a Mac at home and even over the last couple of months this Hackintosh Mac has gone from a difficult job for an experienced computer tech to being a very easy job that only costs a few hundred dollars at most.
One problem with the Hackintosh is that you can not really go out and buy a full install of the Apple Leopard software so people download (steal) copies to install on their new PC Mac.
If you have a bit of a skill and a knowlege on how to use Bittorent there are a couple of guides that you can use to create your Hackintosh, first one at LifeHacker for a Hackintosh under $800and then another at a anonymous type site with one that costs only $400 and it really small. This last link uses a Shuttle SD30G2 which is a really small computer.
