I have had my little hackintosh for almost exactly a month now. I saw how the wired editors soured on the idea of their tiny notebooks, and I figured I would check in to share my experience.
The Good
All in all I am happy I did it, and I am happy I have it. It hasn’t replaced my macbook, but it is a great thing to be able to travel with. It is light, small, and it doesn’t fill up my messenger bag all by itself. It is also a lot more inconspicuous to leave in a car for a quick trip into the store. It is surprising that I feel this way, but I don’t worry at all about losing it or breaking it due to it’s low replacement price.
The battery life is great, I haven’t had any software issues since the install, and it is fun to see the occasional (but not as many as I would expect) person go nuts when they realize it is osx on an hp netbook.
The keys might not be backlit, and I don’t think they are 100% full size, but I haven’t personally ever had a problem with them. Not bad for such a tiny machine!
The Bad
The ssd is really tiny. I thought I would be ok, but it does cramp my style. I installed developer tools so I could work on an iPhone app and it really sucked up a lot of drive space. This won’t be an issue for the layperson, but I found out quickly that when I was shooting tethered timelapses the hard drive filled up quickly.
The trackpad is functional, but it is amazingly tiny. It is almost a joke. For any serious work I plug in a mouse. The good thing is that isn’t much of an inconvenience. I do the same with my macbook most of the time.
The lack of a hibernate feature means that the “sitting in my bag being ignored” time is cut down from “practically forever” to just “a few days” That is still really good, but I do wish it was able to hibernate.
Conclusion:
DO IT!
This has been a fun project for me. I have learned a bit, and in the end I got a osx netbook for $250! It might not end up running 10.6 (still to be figured out) but maybe I will end up running linux or (god forbid) windows on it after it gets too far behind the update cycle. The ongoing cat and mouse game between devs and hackers is always more fun to watch from the inside out as well! Also, how much cheaper can this get on the used market? I have seen some go for more than I bought mine for on craigslist already. It is so cheap to start off with, it doesn’t have all that far the price can drop!
Just in case you want to pick one up, you can click below or the top image to get whisked away to amazon. You know you want one!
I have a HP Mini 1031NR that I bought from WalMart. I dual boot OS X 10.5.5 and Windows 7 and both are running great. It has a 160 GB hard drive so space is not an issue. I do not like the SSDs because the are too small. Everything works except the Microphone and the Ethernet Port. The Ethernet is not necessary if you have wireless and as far as the Mic that is not necessary either but I am looking for a fix to it so I can use iChat or Yahoo Messenger. I have had no issues with as far as using it. It is a nice little companion to have around the house. The only thing is that I can not upgrade it to 10.5.8. It crashes about 1/3rd through the install. That is not really an issue. I plan to try to upgrade it to 10.6 when I buy it for my iMac. Just waiting to make sure there are no issues with 10.6 before I upgrade on both. I have been following some of those posts too Hacintoshing other Netbooks and I am glad that I picked the HP Mini. HP makes a good product. Their quality is close to Apple’s. If I would buy a regular PC, I would buy an HP and no one else’s just because of that reason. I have a friend who works in Best Buy and they get a lot of returns on the other netbooks and not the HP one. The one that is the most crappiest is the Acer. They get returned the most. Well I must say that I am very happy with the HP Mini and how the hack turned out.
thanks for your thoughts Larry!
I agree, I am also excited about installing 10.6. I have done all of the install prep (even booted to the installer flash drive!), but haven’t taken the plunge yet. I’ll be sure to post some details when I do!