Is a hackintosh illegal or just against Apple's terms & conditions?

Golf1.6 · 1 Jun 2015 at 14:15

Just want to know where we stand if we were to build our office computers as hackintosh's instead of buying macs which are too weak these days.

We do video editing and need a powerful machine to do the rendering, I'd like to build the biggest, baddest hackintosh but worried about the repercussions to my employer.

Can the company be taken to court and sued or is it a general T&C violation which won't have any serious consequences?

Rroff · 1 Jun 2015 at 14:17

As a company your in much more of a potentially dodgy position than as an individual - whether they have a case or not Apple could take you to court over the licensing.

lamboman · 1 Jun 2015 at 14:51

The latest license agreement states that you can only install OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 on an Apple-branded computer. See "2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions."

Take what I say with a pinch of salt here, however from a legal standpoint you're probably not going to be found to be breaking the law - the majority of issues come from copyright, sale and distribution of Hackintoshes etc. Strictly speaking, it's a grey area. However, as Rroff said, regardless, do you want the potential hassle? Sure, it's an unlikely scenario but a risk nonetheless.

A more pressing issue is, who will support the machine, and are you willing to put up with the problems? Apple's releases have been pretty buggy as of late, let alone the addition of incompatibilities of running OS X on unsupported hardware. Both are fine for a home user, but a business is a different matter.

If your company is serious about this, they should be willing to splash out on a supported solution, or switch to something else. Also (and again, no expert), if this is strictly a rendering machine surely it doesn't need to be a Mac? Of course, if it is a video editing machine (more likely) then that's a different matter (anybody willing to switch away from FCP?).

slinxy · 1 Jun 2015 at 15:49

It is both Illegal and against apple's T&Cs...

lamboman · 1 Jun 2015 at 17:47

slinxy said:
It is both Illegal and against apple's T&Cs...

As above, false. Against the T&Cs (strictly speaking, the Software License Agreement) yes, illegal, it's not as simple as that.

DirtyJester · 1 Jun 2015 at 17:55

J1234 said:
Any threads or posts in here discussing how to do anything that is against Apple's EULA will be removed and repeat offenders will be punished suitably.

These type of posts include:

Installing OS X on a PC (hackintosh)