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Get a Slick Mac NetBook For Less Than $600 (Not Strictly Legal, Of Course)

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Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.

It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.

It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.

Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.

It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.

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Gilbertson’s machine is an ASUS Eee PC 1000H. It has a 10-inch screen (1024×600), 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1-GB RAM, and a 80 GB Hard Drive (there’s also a solid state model — not recommended). It runs OS X like a champ, Gilbertson says.

“Performance is on par with my MacBook,” says Gilbertson. “Benchmark-wise, I think it comes in around the equivalent of a G5.”

By contrast, the standard MacBook Air has an Intel Core Duo processor, 80GB drive, 13-inch screen (1280×800), 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth. Apple claims 5 hours of battery life, and it starts at $1,800.

The Eee PC comes with Windows XP Home, but Gilbertson, a writer for WebMonkey who lives in Athens, Georgia, loaded it with a hacked Leopard distro readily available using BitTorrent.

Here’s the instructions for installing OS X on an EeePC.

The install took about two hours. The EeePC has no internal optical drive, so Gilbertson had to buy an external DVD from Best Buy (returned the next day). Gilbertson burned the install disk on a Windows PC. Macs don’t work well for some reason.

Everything on the OS X EeePC works except for sound; there’s no audio out. This may seem like a biggie, but Gilbertson says he keeps a copy of Windows XP on the machine in case he wants to watch a movie on the plane. He simply boots into Windows instead of OS X.

The machine also refuses to remember WiFi passwords. He uses some crappy crappy third-party config tool.

Slick though Gilbertson’s hacked EeePC is: the MSI WInd is more popular among OS X netbook hackers, resulting in fewer driver issues, Gilbertson says.

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About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

15 comments

    [...] Settembre 7th, 2008 Molto interessante questo post di Cult of Mac nel quale Scott Gilbertson racconta come ha trasformato il suo Eeepc 1000H in un “MacBook [...]

    i love how the comment has been made that it might not actually be legal to put the OS on this machine but in the instructions they make a huge point out of buying the copy you are going to (possibly illegally) install cause it isn’t nice to steal it off bittorrent and the like.

    [...] Гилбертсон (Scott Gilbertson) смог установить Mac OS X на ASUS Eee PC 1000H (по данным «Яндекса» стоимость [...]

    [...] Get A Slick Mac Netbook for Less Than $600 [Cult of Mac] [...]

    [...] different enterprising hackers have posted how-tos on hacking your own Mac NetBook. The first one uses an EeePC, and these hacking instructions to run OS X for $550, including hardware. The second [...]

    [...] done than said. The staff of The Cult of Mac is probably going apeshit over their newest toy, an Asus Eee PC 1000H that runs on Mac OS X. [...]

    [...] different enterprising hackers have posted how-tos on hacking your own Mac NetBook. The first one uses an EeePC, and these hacking instructions to run OS X for $550, including hardware. The second [...]

    [...] done than said. The staff of The Cult of Mac is probably going apeshit over their newest toy, an Asus Eee PC 1000H that runs on Mac OS X. [...]

    [...] Ein Erfahrungsbericht zur Mac OS X Nutzung auf dem Eee PC 1000H (nach dieser Anleitung) findet sich hier. [...]

    [...] the same path you can get the instructions here, and you can read the cult of mac article about him here. Share and [...]

    [...] like someone at Cult of Mac has OS X running on an Eee PC 1000H for $550. It is said to run as fast as a MacBook. It would have [...]

    [...] Many have mentioned getting the Acer Aspire One line of netbooks but I’ve played around with it instore and I’m not a fan of the 8.9-inch screen and the cramped keyboard.  In my opinion strikes me as a better machine, but what really caught my eye about this machine is the fact that you can run Mac OS on it, as that is what Scott Gilbertson did with his.  [...]