An Xbox Hackintoshed — Meet the OS Xbox Pro
12:19 pm, December 1st, 2009, John Brownlee
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.
Posted by John Brownlee in OS X, Web | Comment on this article











Wow.
Respect.
Church of Apple, on December 1st, 2009 at 1:09 pm
If nothing else, I have to respect someone with that much time and dedication to something.
Very nice indeed!
Fuzzypig, on December 1st, 2009 at 2:29 pm
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!
Kevin Wildes, on December 1st, 2009 at 8:19 pm
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.
themark, on December 1st, 2009 at 9:31 pm
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
John, on December 2nd, 2009 at 1:09 am
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?
imajoebob, on December 3rd, 2009 at 12:10 pm