An Xbox Hackintoshed — Meet the OS Xbox Pro

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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.

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