[uuid]

As someone who ran a hackintosh for over a year, here's the summary:

CON - even if things work now, they can and will break in the future (removed hardware support etc)

- every update takes time and work

- don't even think about running it on the hardware you already have - only use specifically built systems (such as those linked)

- backups aren't as nice as on a mac (disk cloning, time machine)

PRO - you get a lot of harddisks (internal, cheap and fast ones)

- it's almost stupid not to use a raid setup (such as 10)

- serious GPU power is affordable, but OSX is picky

- repairs are really really cheap

[illumin8]

I'll second this. I built a hackintosh 2 years ago that ran 10.5 beautifully (leopard), with quad core, 4GB RAM, 750GB hard drive, for only $800. The problem is that now there is no driver support to run snow leopard, so I'm stuck running an OS from 2 years ago that probably won't be supported much longer, and I can't even install point releases very easily without risk of breaking my system.

So, 2 years later I've got a system that runs Windows or Linux beautifully but isn't really a functional Mac. This can be great for a short time, but just keep in mind that anything you build now will probably not run 10.7 when it comes out next year.

[drewcrawford]

But if you're a hacker, and you like doing it (like I do), you can bring new OS support. For instance, I wrote patches to get my system up to speed on 10.6 the week of its release. Lots of other people now use my code. That's rewarding.

Like anything, it's a tradeoff. Do you want to learn about deep osx internals? Or do you want to go back to your day job writing webapps? Both can be rewarding; it's a function of your free time and how much you want things to "just work" vs how much you want to learn.

[tvon]

What hardware did you have issues with?

Not that I necessarily recommend the hackintosh route, but if you had 10.5 running, 10.6 should run as well. I had my system moved to 10.6 within a week of it's release.

[uuid]

I had an ATI 3870 which was supported in 10.5 but ceased to be in 10.6 - a shame, since it outperformed the nvidia cards in core graphics by a large margin.

[sandaru1]

  - don't even think about running it on the hardware you already have - 
  only use specifically built systems (such as those linked)

As far as I know, hackintosh works well in laptops. I'm running it on HP Pavilion dv5-1010us. The only hardware I can't get to work is wireless - which is admittedly quite a pain.

[uuid]

QED