Today you can run hackintosh osx in a vm, ssh to it, and use xcodebuild.

Obviously it's more overhead but it functions today.

Except that you violate the EULA. I wouldn't recommend this in a commercial environment.

Not if the VM host is on Apple-branded HW.

Also, you'd have to get caught. It's not customer-facing.

"You'd have to get caught" isn't a way to do business. Plus it won't fly for those of us who work in giant megacorps with license audits.

And if your company has dreams of becoming a larger successful company, you are going to have to pull it out anyway. Its cheaper in the long run just to buy a Mac Mini or an older MacBook. I'd even argue its cheaper time-wise just to get the hardware instead of dealing with an unstable build server if you go the hackintosh route.

If you're running xcode CI at a giant megacorp, you might want to rethink your life decisions.

Thats unfair to say. Release Engineering is super critical to running great software companies and is a strict technical discipline of its own.

Why doesn't Apple make it possible to use its development environment (required for developing products to run on its hardware) in a VM? This seems like a user-unfriendly decision.

Its business model is making a sweet profit on premium hardware.

I'm curious which set of hackintosh instructions you used. I tried a long time ago to install Snow Leopard on a VirtualBox VM using iBoot, but I couldn't get iBoot to work correctly on the VM. I'd love to have an OSX VM for browser testing and CI.

Using VMWare Player is a much easier install. I run it on VMWare Workstation 8 (it may even work on 9, I don't plan on spending the money to upgrade right now) There is one little Unlocker tool to run that tells VMWare to go ahead and boot OSX. Lion runs extremely well for me. Yes this violates their EULA.

I'll try VMWare next. I think I found the unlocker, too. Thanks for the tip.

I respect a EULA as much as it respects me.