I selected the laptop very carefully: it's a Dell Latitude E6220, refurbished. With all the upgrades (SSD, wifi, even a new keyboard and case), it came to aroun

I selected the laptop very carefully: it's a Dell Latitude E6220, refurbished. With all the upgrades (SSD, wifi, even a new keyboard and case), it came to around $300 - laughably cheap! It took a week to get it working. (All instructions at http://www.osxlatitude.com/ http://www.osxlatitude.com/) A physical copy of Snow Leopard is required. I encountered problems downloading Yosemite in VirtualBox, so access to a real Mac may be necessary. My local Apple Store had everything locked down, but a nearby PC store (also selling Apple) didn't! Initiating a download on the App Store added Yosemite to my account, and made it possible to continue the process back home in VirtualBox. Once I had a bootable USB flash drive, the installation was a breeze. After that, just fiddling with drivers ('Kexts') and bootloaders - not too intimidating for Linux users. Most importantly for the experiment: XCode works perfectly! I have a full dev environment, and I love it!