On June 6, 2005, Apple announced its plans to transition to Intel x86 processors at their Worldwide Developers Conference and made available a prototype Intel-based Mac to selected developers at a cost of $999 (equivalent to $1,390 in 2021). The company has said it will eventually stop supporting the Intel64 architecture. In 2020, Apple began to move to ARM64-based Apple silicon processors.

While commercial circumvention of the methods Apple uses to prevent macOS from being installed on non-Apple hardware is restricted in the United States under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), specific changes to the law regarding the concept of jailbreaking have placed circumvention methods like these into a legal grey area. Notably, companies such as Psystar have attempted to release products using macOS on non-Apple machines, though many Hackintosh systems are designed solely by macOS enthusiasts of various hacking forums and communities.

Īpple's software license for macOS only permits the software's use on computers that are 'Apple-branded.' However, because modern Macintosh computers use Intel-based hardware, there are few limitations keeping the software from running on other types of Intel-based PCs. Hackintosh laptops are sometimes referred to as 'Hackbooks'. macOS can also be run on several non-Apple virtualization platforms, although such systems are not usually described as Hackintoshes.

Benefits cited for 'Hackintoshing' can include cost (older, cheaper or commodity hardware), ease of repair and piecemeal upgrade, and freedom to use customized choices of components that are not available (or not available together) in the branded Apple products. Since 2005, Mac computers use the same x86-64 computer architecture as many other desktop PCs, laptops, and servers, meaning that in principle, the code making up macOS systems and software can be run on alternative platforms with minimal compatibility issues. 'Hackintoshing' began as a result of Apple's 2005 transition to Intel processors, away from PowerPC. A Hackintosh (a portmanteau of ' Hack' and ' Macintosh') is a computer that runs Apple's Macintosh operating system macOS (formerly named 'Mac OS X' or 'OS X') on computer hardware not authorized for the purpose by Apple.

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