Title says it all. I am doing a little research for a blog I want to write up on my website about different OS platforms. One thing that I am trying to figure out, is that would it appeal to people to load OS X on their PC, and would they be willing to pay for it?

If so, would you even consider buying Mac hardware, or only run it if they allowed you to buy it and install it on your PC?

What are your thoughts and concerns if this were possible?

This is completely hypothetical and while there are projects out there like OS X x86 I am talking about official pay for software from Apple.

So the standard price for OS X is like $99 to $129 depending on if you can get the upgrade, or $199 for a 5 install license (they call it the family pack), would you be willing to buy it and try it on your PC?

Thoughts and concerns?

Thanks in advance for discussing this.

Thanks for everyone who voted, if you don't mind elaborating your decision either I would appreciate it and also be interested in what you have to say.

I like OS X, using it every day for my big screen desktop.

I voted no. But in order to make sense of my vote I should explain.

I personally don't like the Mac OS interface, and I am not a big fan of many of the implementation of many of the administrative tools. Yes, I could install tools to do things those things way I want but as someone who works mostly from the command line it makes more sense for me to use something which behaves in a more traditional way such Solaris, GNU/Linux or BSD. Also I don't use any of the software for which Macs are the ideal platform.

Having said that, from a business perspective if there was a truly legitimate (not ambiguous) way to do this and people reporting to me wanted to use OS X and it would run on the standard hardware provided to them I wouldn't have a problem approving it on the condition that they could perform all of their work without needing to use another paid-license OS.

I also use the command line and like to script everything, however, that doesn't mean it can't be efficiently done from the GUI. The one thing I love about OS X is that when I do something on the back end (be it shell script or Casper Policy at work) there is almost always a GUI answer for it. So, I can tell another person in the IT department who doesn't know Unix how to do it through the GUI if need be.


I would just like to see better market competition. Also, I think Apple has achieved something with Unix that no one else has done, and I think (but could be wrong on this) that OS X is the most widely used Unix based OS.

The problem with relying on the topmost system layer is the lower, less visible ones may end up badly neglected. I haven't seen much refinement to OSX's UNIX underpinnings at all; it's enough to run Darwin, and beyond that they don't demand much of it. Darwin gets the new features and development.

I voted perhaps. I have never used OSX so I would need to get some hands on to evaluate. If the provided a free 120 day trial install or similar I would definitely give it a decent go before deciding whether to build a box for it.