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 possibl

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

Yes you. right now I am learning iphone app development in a Hackintosh (iATKOS S3 version2).

See http://wiki.osx86project.org/ and http://insanelymac.com/ for any problem with installing hackintosh

Answer 4

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 5

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 6

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.