[cosmic_cheese]

iMessage can be made to work with a hackintosh. You just have to go the whole way in making your hackintosh fully Mac-like with a fake but plausible/realistic serial number and expected network setup. You can’t stop at just getting macOS installed and booting.

I’ve had multiple installs in the past where it worked fine.

[jonhohle]

Who minds committing a little wire fraud and possibly screwing over some chump who really owns that serial number?

[cosmic_cheese]

How is it wire fraud?

While it’s ultimately up to the person doing the hackintoshing and thus an “honor system” thing, all the guides are pretty explicit about how you should generate serial numbers that are syntactically valid but cannot belong to real machines, for example that of a 12” Macbook manufactured in 2020 in Cork, Ireland (no such machine exists, as they were discontinued in 2019 and manufactured in China). That way there’s a small chance of collision with other hackintoshers, but no threat of accidentally using the serial of someone’s real Mac.