Virtual Mac?

Question

I’m thinking about trying some development for the iPhone, is it possible to install Leopard inside VMWare? I already have a pretty high spec PC with a comfy setup that I’d like to use, or do I need to buy a real Mac?

Answer 1

It is legal to run Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine on Apple hardware. All other forms of Mac OS X virtualization are currently forbidden.

Answer 2

We are in no way affiliated with any of the providers below. We have tried many virtual cloud mac providers including:

• Mac in Cloud
• virtualmacosx.com
• xcodeclub

By far the best support we got was from xcodeclub. Daniel (the owner) personally provisioned a trial virtual machine and allowed us to see if our programs ran before purchasing the service. Java 7 ended up not working on virtual Mac due to some graphics drivers issues but Daniel spent over an hour of his personal time helping us. Now that is how customer service should be like. We highly recommend his service.

Answer 3

You can rent a virtual Mac with a service like www.MacinCloud.com.

Answer 4

Legally, you need to buy a Mac. It is "possible" to run (at least Tiger) in VMWare -- the experience is not optimal, but you can do it. It's also possible to run OS X on PC hardware; however, it's an exercise in illegal software and hacks.

Answer 5

I've run OSX under VMWare, and I can tell you with confidence that it is not an environment that you would find comfortable for developing applications in. It was barely (not really) usable for testing Mac specific browser bugs that couldn't be reproduced in Safari on Windows.

On the other hand, if your hardware is supported by OSx86, you can run it natively at reasonable speeds, and I would expect it to make a fairly nice dev environment.

For all cases, I'm going to assume that you have a legal OS X license, and don't mind the legal ambiguity of running it on hardware which the license explicitly forbids (the legality is unclear, imo, but I really think you'd be ok as long as its not a pirated copy).

Answer 6

Unfortunately, there's no legal way to run OS X in a virtual machine.

For developing iPhone apps you probably don't need a particularly beefy machine, so maybe look into grabbing a mac mini? They're the cheapest Macs you can get, and should probably be just fine for doing iPhone work. Plus, now you have a mac that you can use for testing other things too! :)