There's nothing wrong with building a Hackintosh, but I personally think it's more trouble than it's worth. The savings of a few $100 probably doesn't justify the hassle. The whole point of buying a Mac is having something that works out of the box (with a user interface that doesn't suck). A couple of weeks ago, I brought home my daughters new MacBook, plugged it into her old Mac to migrate the data/applications, authorized it on my wi-fi network, plugged in a blank backup drive, and handed it over to her. I have not had to touch it again, it works perfectly. I plugged her new iPhone into the MacBook and it asked if I wanted to restore the backup from her old iPhone (that had been saved on her old Mac), a few minutes later her new iPhone was populated with all her data, apps, contacts, calendars, email accounts, etc. That's what you are paying for, it's just a trade off between cost/time/hassle.

Do NOT buy any Macbook Pro containing the Nvidia 8800m GT video card. Basically the Pennryn and Santa Rosa models.

They will all fail and the replacements from Apple will also fail since they haven't solved the problem. This fault also affected a handful of other laptop makers as well.

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-Typos courtesy of my mobile phone.