Open virtualbox and click ‘New’ to create a new virtual machine with the following details: The following link contains details of the download (you’ll need to follow my instructions to get the screen resolution and apple ID working correctly though.)ģ. Download the mac OS X El Capitan virtualbox disk, and unzip it. Download virtualbox (I’m using version 5.1) and install it, along with Winrar or 7zip and some torrent downloading software if you don’t have those already.Ģ. Realistically you are going to need a quad core processor with at least 8GB of ram on your host machine. By the way you should know that this is not really in line with Apple’s T&C’s…. It’s almost impossible to run OS X on anything other than official apple hardware, but it turns out the ‘guest’ machines created by virtualbox can be tweaked and are much easier to get OS X running. I’ve used it before to have a separate windows installation for games and development, but I recently found out it was possible to run mac OS X too. It’s a piece of software that allows you to run a virtual computer ‘guest’ inside your standard computer ‘host’.

So, I’m not willing to buy a mac (especially since I’ve just recently bought a nice new laptop), but I want to have a go at developing an iOS app…Įnter Virtualbox. It’s not like Windows or Andriod which you can develop on any platform. I was pretty keen to try my hand at something new, however I’ve got a big idealogical problem with Apple – mostly because I think their hardware products are hugely overpriced for the specifications but also because of their annoying insistence that you have to develop for iOS on mac software. I was recently asked by a client to port a simple web-based javascript program to an iOS app.

Virtualbox for mac os x el capitan