Below are the most popular options I have people ask me about, as well as my opinion on them for iPhone development.

1. Hackintosh

While the Hackintosh is a solution that people often try (and there is a nice tutorial on Gizmodo for creating one), it does not fulfill the specs for the Apple iPhone SDK EULA. Now, you may be able to put one together, and you may even somehow get by Apple's initial scan of your App. If they do a compliance scan, you may find that all the hard work that you did to get your App finished in the first place was futile since it did not comply with even the most basic standards in their agreement.

If you're looking to make a really crappy piece of software that you do not plan to support and do not care if it never gets advertised on the Top Apps list or if Apple decides to not let it into the store in the first place...then I guess you can try to go this direction. I just can't recommend it. There are too many variables when putting together a Hackintosh to ensure that you will comply with the EULA. If you are looking at targeting jailbroken phones or are generally a hacky type that is more interested in tinkering with the tech than actually deploying to the App Store, then you could give it a try.

2. Using an Older PPC Mac

With the announcement that Apple will not be supporting the PPC chip in the next version of their OS, the price of older Macs plummeted. It makes me wish I had sold my dual-G5 on EBay before the announcement. I would have made a lot more than I could today. But with the lower price-point on older machines, I get a lot of questions about using them.

I got the iPhone SDK 2.2.1 working on my G5 after much internet browsing, swearing, making sure things didn't drop in root versus the developer directory, more swearing, dealing with keychain issues, a ton more swearing. And I got it to work. Then I installed the 3.0 seed and it broke the hard work I had done. Hours and hours of frustration leading to more frustration.

Luckily I had a shiny new Intel Mini on the way. I installed everything, went through the Apple Developer Portal's step-by-step instructions without a single failure...and it worked in 30 minutes (after downloading, of course). What I learned: if you value your time and efficiency (and sanity), it is not worth the frustration to try to get it working on something that it was never meant to work on in the first place. Sure the simulator is a Universal Binary...that gets people excited, but from the wide-range of complaints and questions and problems on the forums dedicated to doing this, as well as my own personal frustrations, I cannot recommend doing this.

Plus, it most likely will not pass the platform compliance pass to get into the App Store. Who knows, it may, but do you want to stake your development hours on it?

3. Jury-Rig a Windows Machine and Cross-Compile with gcc

This is for the truly hardcore. While I can understand the fascination, I think this is best left to people who make homebrew toolchains and port Voodoo drivers to new builds of their favorite flavor of Linux. Especially since they will have to emulate the keychain process as well to sign the App correctly, generate the package and trick it out to look like it was developed on an Intel Mac. While it is probably something that is doable by a somewhat talented hacker, I don't think it is an option for most of the people I talk to who are just looking for a way to use Windows and maybe use some free tools they've heard about as well. Because then it would be free...except for the Apple Developer Subscription, right?

Perhaps, if you like beating your head against brick walls.

My Take On All This

Again, to be the broken record, if you are going to target a platform full-force and want to build a marketable business, you need to work with the bare minimum that the platform requires. This means an Intel Mac Mini with the latest, greatest version of OS X. The XCode toolset and developer documentation is a free download from Apple's DevCenter. You will also need an Apple iPhone Developer subscription.

There are a lot of great platforms that you can develop using a Windows machine (and a good chunk of them will work with a PPC or Linux). You can jump on the BlackBerry developer bandwagon and go crazy. You can hit up the Google Android platform. How about the Palm Pre's WebOSdev? There are a ton of excellent markets out there. Some are emerging and some are well-established. And all of them are very cool. If you're going to target a platform for your business, don't do it half-assed and try to get around the system. You'll usually end up writing really bad code that is not guaranteed to work on the actual platform...and supporting extremely angry customers.

Just my thoughts since I talk to a lot of people trying to target the iPhone.