I sometimes wonder what monsters haunt the nightmares of Apple’s resident designer, Mr. Jonathan Ive. He’s so prim, so meticulous, so clean and proper, but on those nights when he has a slice of pepperoni pizza a little too close to bed time, what horrors does he dream up? Some horrible Cenobite iMac dragging itself bloodily across the floor whispering “Make way for the new flesh:” a biomechanical monstrosity of Foxconn components crammed into the pulsating sack of some skinless, cancerous stomach?

Or is it something more like this cardboard box Hackintosh, put together by the guys over at One Block Off the Grid — a cooperative for buying photovoltaic solar panels at a group discount — after one of their Macs proved too slow to run Adobe After Effects?

To make this Hackintosh, the One Block Off The Grid chaps simply ordered $900 worth of components from Amazon, including a 2.66 Intel Core i5 CPU, a 1 TB hard drive, 8 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, and an XFX Radeon HD 5770 1GB DDR5 Graphics Card, and installed it inside the cardboard box in which it had all arrived. They installed Snow Leopard on the finished machine using iBoot Multibeast.

The end result? The performance equivalent of a $2700 Mac Pro in a $900 ghetto package. Jonny Ive must feel invisible insects crawling all over his body right about now. Some things were not meant to be.

[via Gearfuse]