QUO Wants You To Back The Perfect Hackintosh

Hackintoshing: The art of getting a non-Apple product to run Mac OS. It’s something of a pastime of mine. I used to have a Dell Mini 10v loaded with Mac OS 10.6 as my daily driver, and I squealed with joy when I got an ASUS Seashell netbook that wasn’t supposed to work to run. While I enjoy this sort of thing, many do not. Firstly, there’s the average user who might want to try, but is not as into hardware hacking. I wouldn’t have been able to get the aforementioned ASUS to work if I didn’t have a stack of Dell wireless cards to swap in.

Now, California-based computer company QUO is trying to make having a Hackintosh a bit easier with the AOS (any operating system) motherboard. The Hackintosh community has been excited since news first broke of this, as this new mainboard uses the same chipset as a Mac Pro, and apparently needs no real tweaking to install Mac OS. Plus, having HDMI, support for up to three screens, Thunderbolt, Firewire 800/400, and USB 3 is nice too.

“Shut up and take my money.”

QUO is promoting this new device with a Kickstarter. You can donate $10 or $29 for cute thingies, but $219 gets you a motherboard, as does $239. Apparently the $219 ones are a limited run of 100, aimed at collectors (so far, four have been claimed). The regular price is g $250. A donation of $269 gets you a variation of the board with WiFi/Bluetooth.

QUO is also building desktops for those who don’t want to get under the hood. The lifeQ is a $750 tower that packs the power of a Mac Pro at a price much easier on the pocketbook. Personally, I’d rather buy the motherboard and design my own case, but the one QUO chose is right purty. The Kickstarter project actually has two collector’s editions pre-built, both with serious specs.

Sploosh.

However, there’s still Apple to think of. The computing giant is clearly not going to be so keen on someone porting the company’s proprietary OS off of Apple’s premium hardware. Most may not remember the guy who tried to sell “headless iMacs” back circa 2003. A licensed Apple repair store tried to use assorted parts to build non-Apple Macs, but Apple didn’t look kindly on this and prevented this from happening. However, Apple did give us the Mac Mini as a result. Then there’s Psystar, the company that tried to do exactly what QUO is doing and got sued into oblivion.

What’s going to happen to QUO, then? Will Apple leave them alone if the systems don’t ship with Mac OS (in the same way that Psystar got busted)? Will Apple legal even bother going after QUO directly when it can just send a cease and desist to Kickstarter? Speaking of Kickstarter, will this take as long as some other famous hardware projects (coughPebblecough)? QUO has disclosed that the boards will be built by Gigabit USA, which is a reputable company, so maybe we don’t need to worry, but past experience with hardware on Kickstarter has burned a few.

I don’t know how this situation is going to resolve, but I can tell you one thing: I’ll be watching and fighting the urge to back the Kickstarter.