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Microsoft’s My Documents Folder Makes Triumphant Return – On iPad

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Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.
I read that [...]

Top 5 Things To Check Out at Macworld 2010

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the [...]

Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

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The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset [...]

In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the [...]

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.

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 Brownlee

John Brownlee has 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 Berlin with a charming girlfriend against whom he is currently enjoying a thirteen game cribbage winning streak, and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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6 comments

    Wow.
    Respect.

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

    Very nice indeed!

    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!

    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.

    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)

    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?

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