An Xbox Hackintoshed — Meet the OS Xbox Pro

As a blogger, it’s hard to know quite from just what angle I should tackle modder Will Urbina’s utterly wonderful but certainly unholy amalgamation of a Xbox and a Hackintosh.

Should I describe it as a hideous, pupal cocoon that has been secreted by Microsoft to encase the imago of the Macintosh struggling to free its wings within? Or is OS X just the magic employed a soul-devouring hag, who — once bedded — lets the charm drop and reveals herself as the uggo she is?

Either way, Urbina’s creation is probably a psychoanalytically diagnosable incubus in the mind of Steve.

Called the OS Xbox Pro, Urbina’s project takes a translucent Microsoft Xbox chassis and crams it with Hackintoshable guts, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT GPU, 8GB of RAM, a 16GB solid state drive, and four additional hard drives. One drive boots Windows 7, the other OS X Snow Leopard (retail bought, Urbina assures), with two other hard drives for video editing. The end cost was $1500 for component from New Egg, which is just a little bit less than the cost of a 27 inch iMac.

The impetus to Urbina’s profane cross-breed case mod? Although he prefers Windows, Urbina needed a work machine to use Final Cut Pro.

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The end result is sure to have Cupertino weaving a circle around it thrice and shutting its eyes in holy dread, but personally, I just can’t think of a better use for an old Xbox than to make it into a Mac.

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • Church of Apple

    Wow.
    Respect.

  • Fuzzypig

    If nothing else, I have to respect someone with that much time and dedication to something.

    Very nice indeed!

  • Kevin Wildes

    Ok, the use of an XBox case for an OS X box is questionable (like combining a Ford and Mercedes Benz) but the video is outstanding! Nice camera work and editing!

  • themark

    It is a very clean build, and hats off to him for showing us all how he did it in such a great video, but lets be honest, it’s only 1/4 Mac, it also has 2dedicated Windows HDDs and a Linux HDD inside.

  • http://www.mr2.org.nz John

    Nice build. Interesting to go to such lengths to customise an xBox case when an old mac pro case could be just as easily modded 8)

  • imajoebob

    Isn’t the Xbox built on PPC? And an ironic impetus for the Intel Mac? Could you just make it into some sort of “clone” rather than worst-of-both-worlds hack?