Do not buy this obvious hackintosh scam

For more than a decade people have been installing macOS on regular PCs, and for just as long, bonafide brain geniuses the world over have thought: why don't I try to sell one of these for profit? Well, here we are once again, and this time a fly-by-night operation called "OpenCore Computers" is trying to do just that.

The website, which was registered just last month (with domain privacy turned on), touts a pretty generic looking PC that it's calling the Velociraptor. The company claims the computers will come with "macOS Catalina professionally installed using the OpenCore bootloader." In this line alone there's a lot to unpack.

First let's talk about that OpenCore Bootloader. OpenCore is, as the name might imply, an open source bootloader that you can use to boot all kinds of operating systems on PC hardware. The hackintosh community used to use Clover bootloader, but its developer hasn't been active in a while. In a nutshell, bootloaders like OpenCore map your hardware in a way that looks legit to macOS, making it the most important piece of the puzzle for getting your hackintosh up and running.

Of course, OpenCore Computers (this scam website) has nothing to do with the open source OpenCore Bootloader project. As mentioned above, the scam website claims that these computers will come running OpenCore, but it's a lot more likely that none of this is real and that the company is just trying to scoop up Bitcoin payments using the credibility and goodwill that OpenCore Bootloader has built up over time.

Do NOT give this company your money.

Obviously the developers at OpenCore Bootloader aren't very happy about this. Here's the statement they gave to Macrumors:

We at Acidanthera are a small group of enthusiasts who are passionate about Apple ecosystem and spend time developing software to improve macOS compatibility with different kinds of hardware including older Apple-made computers and virtual machines. For us, who do this on entirely volunteer and uncommercial basis, for fun, it is shocking and disgusting that some dishonest people we do not even know dare to use the name and logo of our bootloader, OpenCore, as a matter of promotion in some illicit criminal scam. Be warned, that we are nohow affiliated with these people and strongly ask everyone by all means to never approach them. Be safe.

If this sounds familiar, you might remember Apple's successful lawsuit against a Mac clone maker called Psystar which was also known as... "Open Computers..." back in 2009. Just as now, Pystar co-opted community hackintosh software and tried to sell it (and macOS itself) to end users in the form of pre-built computers. Long story short; Psystar got smacked by the long arm of the law and ended up owing Apple just under 2.7 million dollars.

We have reached out to OpenCore Computers for comment and will update this post in the unlikely event that we recieve a response. If you're interested in actually building a Ryzen hackintosh, check out this guide. And if you're looking for a high quality laptop that's a good candidate for hackintoshing, check out our guide on installing macOS on the early 2019 Razer Blade Stealth.