DescentBB

I was curious about building a Mac tower for myself. What would keep me from doing it? That is, to buy all of the parts seperately and then installing Mac OS. I realize many of the parts are proprietary and hard to get, but if one were to have all of the mac parts, what problem would there be in building one's own machine?

Assuming you have all genuine Apple parts it shouldn't be a problem to put them in a tower. But that means you need everything. Generic mobo won't work. If you get PowerPC parts there's pretty much no doubt they'll be genuine Apple, but you can't just go out and buy Intel parts that match the specs of the Apple ones. The OS is dependent on things like the TPM module and certain EFI firmware.

Apple is the only supplier of parts for a Mac that runs a legal copy of OS X.

That being said, what makes a Mac a Mac is OS X. The only way to get OS X legally is to buy a Mac.

All modern macs are Intel based machines, so its pretty easy to get similar hardware outside of Trusted computing platform chips that OS X requires to run legally.

if you had all the mac parts, by logic then you must already have a OS X cd.

You can buy a copy of OS X seperately, so assuming you do that and put together all the proper parts, i don't see why it wouldn't work.

fliptw wrote:Apple is the only supplier of parts for a Mac that runs a legal copy of OS X.

Well, within reason. Specifically the logic board and the processor have to be Apple products. You can stick any drives or PCI-express cards into a Mac Pro that you want.

That being said, what makes a Mac a Mac is OS X. The only way to get OS X legally is to buy a Mac.

Not really. The stipulation in the EULA is that you can only run OS X on a Mac. So you can walk into an Apple store and pick up a copy of Tiger and toss it on a salvaged machine, as long as you don't have to circumvent any of the kernel's hardware detection to install/use it. It's perfectly legal to scrap together parts from dead Macs and install a copy of OS X.

In fact, you'd be safest going out and buying a copy of Tiger regardless of whether you can find one. It's the only way to ensure you're compliant with the EULA, and the version that comes bundled with new machines will only install on that variant (you can't use the install CD that comes with an iMac on an Xserve, for example).

So, here's what you'll need, assuming you're going to build an Intel Mac:

1. Genuine Apple Mac Pro logic board
2. PSU
3. Optical drive (try to get a Panasonic)
4. Hard drive
5. Mac Pro tower (logic board has non-standard form factor)
6. USB keyboard and mouse
7. Retail copy of Tiger
8. DVI monitor, or else DVI/VGA adapter

Boot off the Tiger install CD, open Disk Utility, repartition the hard disk with one HFS+ Journaled partition, and install away. Should take about an hour, give or take.

If you're just looking for a Mac to do simple stuff, you can pick up a Mac Mini for cheap.

DCrazy wrote:You can stick any...PCI-express cards into a Mac Pro that you want.

This isn't quite true. Depending on the card, they might need EFI-compatible firmware to work properly in a Mac. With EFI starting to become more and more common in PCs, this should start becoming less and less of a problem.

Another thing too is that, to the best of my knowledge, you can buy the Intel version of OSX through retail channels just yet. What's being sold is the PowerPC version. The only way you can get the Intel version legally is to buy an Intel Mac. Leopard will change this but that's not due out until October.

If you're just looking for a Mac to do simple stuff, you can pick up a Mac Mini for cheap.

This is probably the best way to go. Depending on exactly what you want to do, you can pick up old G3s and G4s relatively cheaply these days and they're still more than capable of handling the basics (provided you load them up with RAM).

Admiral LSD wrote:Another thing too is that, to the best of my knowledge, you can buy the Intel version of OSX through retail channels just yet. What's being sold is the PowerPC version. The only way you can get the Intel version legally is to buy an Intel Mac. Leopard will change this but that's not due out until October.

I've seen and purchased 10.4 Intel at the Apple Store. It's still not legal to install it on anything other than an Apple machine, but it is sold.

Not sure how you'd get the mac iAntichrist drive installed. Don't think they run with out it.

At least try to keep the comments neutral people.