BuildYourOwnMac.com went live over the weekend. While the Web siteis owner, Pualo, acknowledges that Apple wonit get back into the cloning game and will use legal means to shut down any company that tries to sell x86-based hardware with the Mac OS, he feels that hobbyists should be able to build their own x86-based systems and run Mac OS X on them. The site will be geared toward users who want to either build their own systems or figure out how to run Mac OS X on existing machines.
The siteis forums arenit very active at the moment, but thatis likely to change as more people start pondering those options. Pualo realizes that his potential audience will never be huge, since most consumers donit want to build their own computers or hack their operating systems, but he wants to interact with users who are interested in one of those avenues. He expects Apple to use off-the-shelf parts to assemble the new "MacIntel" systems, so he thinks he should be able to figure out which ones are used and build his own. He also expects that volunteers will write drivers for the parts that Apple doesnit use, so that enthusiasts can build their own machines and run Mac OS X on them.