# Run Mac apps on a PC



## TCB (Apr 4, 2003)

Is there any software that allows to run Mac apps on a PC?


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## CanadaRAM (Jul 24, 2005)

No.

There are some quasi-emulators that perform exceedingly poorly, and some illegal hacks of OSX x86. Nothing will give acceptable performance or stability.


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

There are some 68040 emulators for Windows, so you could run some System7 apps (programs that run on Macs made from 1984 to about 1995) very slowly without all the features. It's getting difficult to find those apps these days, although the upside is they are cheap, since they are 10+ years old.

There is a hacked version of MacOSX 10.4.4 that will run on very new Intel hardware (specific computers made in the last year or so), but it requires you to break the law to run, doesn't work completely, doesn't seem to work with Mac applications besides the OS itself, and is unlikely to work with newer versions of OSX that will come out in the future.

The hacked version of OSX doesn't really run much Mac software; for the most part you can just get OSX to (barely, with a bunch of stuff that doesn't work yet) to run. There are a bunch of hackers trying to get OSX to run on "white box" x86 machines, so it's possible there will be developments in the future. The downside is it's illegal (in the US it's illegal under at least two statutes because it requires you violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and unless you own a new MacBook Pro or Intel iMac, it also requires you to steal a copy of OSX for Intel Macs, which is illegal everywhere) and is forever going to be a hack; an easy install option is very unlikely and if you're not a geek you probably won't be able to get it to work.

If you run Linux on a PPC computer (ie Linux on a Mac) you can run MacOS within Linux. It doesn't work on Linux for x86 (Intel, AMD, etc).

You can download and run Darwin (the UNIX part of OSX) on any x86 computer. This will not allow you to run any OSX applications, but you can run many UNIX apps that also run on OSX (about 10,000 applications are available). Darwin for x86 is a free download from Apple Computer.


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## Wheezy (Mar 3, 2005)

Just wondering... Why on Earth would you want to?


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

"... Just wondering... Why on Earth would you want to? ..."

That's easy. Because you can't.


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