I just bought a macbook pro and love it...can I take the install cds, and use it to replace my windows xp os?

This is not possible without a lot of hacking since Mac OS X is made to work on a mac, not a PC. it is legal, but hard

Max OS is not intended to run on non-Apple hardware. It technically can be done, but Apple is suing that company and probably not too happy with these guys either.

Generally, no. The installer will detect the processor & make of the computer and say “no.”

“Legal” depends on your definition, and hence the lawsuits with Psystar. It violates Apple’s EULA, so you are violating your agreement with Apple.

Yeah, but apple dont care if you run it on your own computer. Making computers that run OSX and selling them is completely different.

Not sure I understand what you’re getting at, wilhel1812. Whether Apple “cares” or not is speculation, but installing their OS on other hardware explicitly violates their end-user agreement. Apple both makes and sells computers, so I’m not sure what your last sentence means.

Historically, Apple has very lenient with regular users when it comes to OS installs. They have no complex activation system and you can install the OS on multiple machines without worry. That said, the reason they can be this way is that their OS only runs on their hardware, so installing it 3 times means you have 3 Macs, which is fine by them. If people suddenly started easily installing OS X on other hardware, they might be forced into adding activation schemes.

For the moment, running the OS on a ‘hackintosh’ isn’t easy, unless you build a custom computer with very similar hardware to the stuff Apple use. I don’t think we’ll see an activation scheme for a long time yet.

Ok, maybe i was unclear. What i mean is that as far as i know it’s legal to install software i own on my own hardware. What is not legal, is to create and sell computers made to run OSX without hacks and emulating of Mac hardware.
But it might be different in the states. But let’s not get offtopic :)

All in all, installing OSX on your pc is not worth it other than as an experiment to see if and how it works. It will never be really stable and you will allways have trouble with drivers and stuff.

Gotcha. True, Apple is not likely to go after a single user for monkeying with installing OS X on their homebuilt PC. Their lack of desire to pursue it doesn’t necessarily make it legal, it’s arguably a breach of contract, but I agree that’s off-topic. It is relevant, though, that if this practice ever becomes easy and the resulting machines stable, they’ll likely be forced to lock their system down more as they’ll start to lose hardware revenue.

I managed to do it on a 4 year old laptop. Admitadly the wifi didn’t work and it crashed pretty quickly but it can be done. I just went for ubuntu though. I couldn’t stand using windows after my unix experiance

It’s probably been mentioned already, but those companies are getting sued because they tried to sell machines that had been interfered with. Adam Pash at Lifehacker wrote a great Hackintosh recipe but hasn’t been sued by Apple. Neither has the community at OSX86 project. Doing the project on an individual basis is very unlikely to have any legal ramifications.