Mac ultraportable laptop, $399 with effort and a good lawyer

Oh the irony. Late last night I was reading Adam Pash's awesome tutorial on how to install Mac OS X Leopard on a PC for around $800 when I got a note from Dan at UNEASYsilence. Dan just turned his Asus Eee PC into what I think is the smallest, lightest and cheapest Mac OS X-totin' laptop! He shares his adventure with everyone and surprisingly, the little Leopard performs acceptably (but a wee pokey) on the 900 MHz Celeron with a scant 512 MB of memory. I mentioned to Dan that folks are getting XP to recognize 2 GB in the Eee (Linux will only use 1 GB, from what I hear), so I recommended he shove a 2 GB SODIMM in there. Gently of course.

Maybe we don't need Apple to make an ultraportable after all, since Asus and Dan beat 'em to it! Of course, the legality of patching an OS X build and running it on non-Apple hardware is another story for another day. Gee, I was all excited because I got VLC in Linux up and running on the Eee last night. I think Dan just one-upped me by leaps and bounds. In my defense, those Apple QT Movie Trailers look real purty on my Eee. ;)

Comments

[Mike Cane]

HOLY BLEEPING BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP!!!

That has GOT to be Hack of the Year!!

[Ron]

Asus! Tablet version, PLEASE. Hell, I may swap out my C110 when the 8GB/10" version comes out anyway but I really, really want a tablet version.

[Dan]

I ultimately went down to 10.4. Leopard isn't soooo stable yet... Need to play with the KTEXTS some more.

[cr0ft]

I've played with OS X on PC's before; it's pretty easy to install in a virtual machine in VMware Server for instance. Doesn't run all that snappy there either since it's a VM and no specialized drivers to speed things up exist for it, but it's still pretty cool to be able to give it a whirl.

Hacking it onto an Eee has to be a fair bit more challenging though, very cool.

[Mike Cane]

>>>Asus! Tablet version, PLEASE

But... Apple doesn't provide drivers for touchscreen with their OS (yet?). (Hmmm... has someone ripped out the MultiTouch drivers from iPhone's OS X?)

[Guthrie]

Wow, I'm buying one now. Fantastic.

[Patrick]

Hey Kevin,
Any chance in giving us a tutorial on how to get vlc (and maybe other linux programs) into the eee? I've got one, but its so frustrating to be limited only to the programs that are available in the device, and those provided by Asus.

Help!