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Wired takes down Hackintosh video

Despite Twitter message that Apple sued the publisher over a video describing how to get Mac OS X on a Netbook, Apple merely contacted Wired regarding the post.

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
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Tom Krazit
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Wired is being sued for posting a video on how to get Mac OS X on an MSI Wind, shown here. CNET

Update at 11:30 a.m.: It seems that Chen did not understand exactly what happened regarding his article. Updates throughout.

Wired has confirmed that Apple contacted the publisher about a blog post with step-by-step instructions on how to get Mac OS X running on a non-Apple Netbook and decided to remove the offending video.

Earlier in the day, Brian Chen, who writes for Wired's Gadget Lab blog, posted a message to Twitter spotted by Gizmodo saying "just found out Apple is suing Wired for my video tutorial on hacking Netbooks to run Mac OS X."

It turns out, however, that Apple merely contacted the Conde Nast division regarding the post in question, and after reviewing the post, Wired decided to remove the video from its site, a company representative confirmed. Chen updated his Twitter feed to that effect shortly after we contacted Wired.

The video no longer appears on Wired's site. The original article with step-by-step instructions on how to circumvent Apple's restrictions on where Mac OS X can be installed is still up as of this moment, and Wired is currently reviewing it but plans to leave it up for now, the representative said.

Apple has appeared to gently tolerate the "Hackintosh" community that sprung up after the company decided to adopt Intel's x86 processors for the Mac, so long as the project didn't advance much beyond science fair mode. But it has shown a clear interest in protecting its licensing agreements for Mac OS X this year, through its legal battle against Psystar, a clone maker selling generic desktop PCs with Mac OS X preinstalled.

In its article, Wired admitted that the practice is illegal, requiring the installation of hacked software, linking to well-known torrent site The Pirate Bay to provide a source for the software. It also offered the following disclaimer: "Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple's End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please ensure you own a copy of Mac OS X Leopard, if you wish to follow the procedure."

An Apple representative declined to comment on the situation. Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief of Wired.com, did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Updated 12:25pm - Our friends at ZDNet were able to get a hold of Hansen, who had the following to say. "We made a determination that the video...we're more comfortable taking down the video." Hansen also told ZDNet that Wired tries "to default to the most conservative position we can in terms of removing content ... but we don't want to pull content (needlessly)."