Aug 5, 1997: End of the Mac Clones
Apple gets into a standoff with Power Computing, a maker of Macintosh clones. It marks the beginning of the end for Apple’s mid-’90s strategy of licensing the Mac operating system.
“If the [Mac] platform goes closed, it is over,” predicts Power Computing CEO Joel J. Kocher of Apple’s strategy. “[It’s] total destruction. The kiss of death.” Of course, things don’t turn out exactly like that…
https://www.cultofmac.com/440940/today-in-apple-history-beginning-of-the-end-for-clone-macs/
And then the Hackintosh was invented.
Wikipedia described the Hackintosh as a computer that runs the MacOS on hardware that is not authorized for the purpose by Apple. Personally, I have been running on for about a decade with an older version of Logic Audio plodding along in my studio specifically for this purpose. In 2020, Apple made the decision to move from the Intel platform to the ARM64-based platform and will eventually phase out the X86 operating systems, but for the moment, MacOS Monterey (ie., MacOS 12) will still work on this platform.
It isn’t without difficulty. Specific hardware has to be chosen either that has official drivers for the operating system, or that others have compiled Darwin-based community support.
If you’d like to build your own, this site will help find compatible motherboards, compatible notebook computers, KEXTs (Kernal Extensions), and bootloaders to ensure that you get the best performance out of a machine that wasn’t supposed to run Apple’s operating system. So if you want to build a form factor that Apple doesn’t support, if you want to just be nerdy and experiment with an amazing UNIX operating system, or you are just too cheap to buy the latest and greatest (i.e., me).