Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.
It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.
It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.
Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.
It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.
Gilbertson’s machine is an ASUS Eee PC 1000H. It has a 10-inch screen (1024×600), 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1-GB RAM, and a 80 GB Hard Drive (there’s also a solid state model — not recommended). It runs OS X like a champ, Gilbertson says.
“Performance is on par with my MacBook,” says Gilbertson. “Benchmark-wise, I think it comes in around the equivalent of a G5.”
By contrast, the standard MacBook Air has an Intel Core Duo processor, 80GB drive, 13-inch screen (1280×800), 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth. Apple claims 5 hours of battery life, and it starts at $1,800.
The Eee PC comes with Windows XP Home, but Gilbertson, a writer for WebMonkey who lives in Athens, Georgia, loaded it with a hacked Leopard distro readily available using BitTorrent.
Here’s the instructions for installing OS X on an EeePC.
The install took about two hours. The EeePC has no internal optical drive, so Gilbertson had to buy an external DVD from Best Buy (returned the next day). Gilbertson burned the install disk on a Windows PC. Macs don’t work well for some reason.
Everything on the OS X EeePC works except for sound; there’s no audio out. This may seem like a biggie, but Gilbertson says he keeps a copy of Windows XP on the machine in case he wants to watch a movie on the plane. He simply boots into Windows instead of OS X.
The machine also refuses to remember WiFi passwords. He uses some crappy crappy third-party config tool.
Slick though Gilbertson’s hacked EeePC is: the MSI WInd is more popular among OS X netbook hackers, resulting in fewer driver issues, Gilbertson says.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
2 responses to “Get a Slick Mac NetBook For Less Than $600 (Not Strictly Legal, Of Course)”
i love how the comment has been made that it might not actually be legal to put the OS on this machine but in the instructions they make a huge point out of buying the copy you are going to (possibly illegally) install cause it isn’t nice to steal it off bittorrent and the like.