Apple whacks the Hackintosh

Those of you running a Dell Mini Hackintosh, Apple would like you to know that you are not a Mac.

The trend of using non-Apple computers to run Mac OS X has been increasing alongside the prominence and availability of netbooks, a category into which Apple hasn’t forayed. Poor people, plebians and tightwads have been flouting Apple for a while, running Apple’s precious shiny silver operating system on Dells and HPs, but it looks like Apple’s planning on throwing a wet blanket on these shenanigans.

OS X Daily reports that Snow Leopard update 10.6.2 is going to prevent it from running on computers that use Intel’s Atom CPU. If that turns out to be the case, then most netbooks will essentially be rendered incompatible with the update. Although it’s not clear that this was necessarily Apple’s intent, it will certainly solve Apple’s Hackintosh problem.

While blogs and commenters bicker about whether Apple should be all up in this or just leave people alone and try to make money off everyone who wants to run Apple software, this dude offers the following advice for Hackintosh upstarts:

A) Stay with Leopard 10.5.8 (10.5.9 might have the same effect as 10.6.2)

B) Stay with Snow Leopard 10.6.1

C) Upgrade to 10.6.2 and use either the stock 10.0.0 kernel or use modded Snow kernels

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