I have been known as a bit of an Apple fan boy in the past, as I am a massive fan of the software, which I think is hands down better than anything on the Windows platform. Now I am working, I thought it was time to buy myself a new laptop, as my current Macbook has seen better days. But when I looked at the newly released Macbook, it made me think. The newly released white Macbook, has gone up from £700 to £800, which is a bold move to make as we are in the middle of a recession and seeing that average prices on laptops have gone down from £600 to £300 in recent years.

This overpricing of hardware, is known as the Apple Tax. Apple tries to make it impossible to install their OS (OSX) onto other vendor’s hardware. But there are groups that are working on hacking the software to work on any hardware. These computers are called Hackintoshes. The first main stream hackintosh device, was the Dell Mini 9, which I know friends have successfully installed Mac OSX on. Since then a number of netbooks have been hacked to run Mac OSX. In my research for this post, I found an impressively detailed compatibility chart for hackintoshs. With this number of netbooks being able to run Mac OSX, the question has to be asked, how does the Macbook shape up to other laptops. Below is a table comparing the Macbook to one of the more expensive netbooks in the compatibility charts.
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