How To: Buy a Sub-$300 Mac Laptop

Let me begin with a few disclaimers: Building a “Hackintosh” is a violation of the Apple Terms of Service; be sure to buy a full licensed version of Mac OS before downloading a Hackintosh version. This post is in no way sanctioned by my employer—I’m simply posting this as a guide for family and friends. And finally, this is very much a DIY project, so please don’t try this at home unless you know what you’re doing.

With that out of the way, yes, it really is possible to build a slick Apple netbook for under $300. If Apple had a netbook of their own, I’m sure I would have lined up to buy one the day it was released, but alas, they don’t. To get started, purchase a compatible netbook (see compatibility chart here)—I used a refurbished HP Mini 1000 with 10.1-inch LCD, 1.6 GHz Processor, and 1GB RAM, like this one on Overstock.com, but with a 32GB SSD. Next, find an unpatched iDeneb 10.5.5 image, and download using a torrent application, such as uTorrent. (If you have absolutely no idea what the heck that last sentence meant, then please stop here and I can help you out.)

Once you have the image (mine took literally two weeks to download), you can either burn it to a DVD and use a USB DVD drive to install, or create a .dmg of the .iso image and “restore” it to an 8GB flash drive using Disk Utility (recommended). You may need to scan the image before restoring—simply highlight the .dmg image in Disk Utility and select “Images” and “Scan Image for Restore.” If you choose the latter option, which I would suggest since netbooks don’t have DVD drives, then you need to follow a few more steps to make the drive bootable; namely steps 1 through 5 under “Format and partition your thumb drive” on this site. Then, select the USB drive as the primary boot drive on your netbook, and follow steps 3 through 12 on this page. You may need to use tab and spacebar to select invisible menu options since the netbook’s resolution is too low to display all of the installer screens (this takes some trial and error). If you follow those instructions to a T, then you should be good to go. Everything works on my Mini 1000 besides the audio, though I’m currently working on a fix for that. I know all of this sounds intimidating, so if you happen to live in NYC, let me know and I can try and hook you up with a flash drive. Enjoy!

P.S. As far as I know, you can’t update to a newer version of Mac OS X using Software Update, but please correct me if I’m wrong. Also, I attempted installing Snow Leopard by patching my own image, but I don’t have the background necessary to do something like this from scratch.

Time Required: 2 weeks (to download torrent) + 2 hours

Update: I was able to get the audio to work. Simply remove the AppleHDA.kext file from the Extensions folder (in System –> Library) before adding VoodooHDA.kext using the Kext Helper.