I recently set up a development environment specifically for IOS iphone application development.
I have a requirement for couple of personal utilities one of which may have retail value.

Cheapest options just to get to a point where I can have my own application on my own phone came down to installing OSX on a virtualbox machine on my Windows8 workstation or setting up a hackintosh on a PC laptop.

I tried various laptops with hackintosh (all said to be compatible) but was unable to achieve anything stable and suitable for Dev work with the lastest OSX version installed. There are a lot of hoops to jump through to get a hackintosh up and running and life is just too short and many hours were wasted.

The virtualbox was more successful. OSX Mountain Lion (lasted OSX release at the time of writing) was installed and worked. Again quite a few hoops to get to the point of a working machine. I was able to compile and install applications to my Iphone. Virtual machines are clumsy and quirky to work with, from differing keyboard layouts being annoying to restricted graphic modes.

I decided to go full Macfag and purchase a new MacBook Pro - with uprated specifications. This is machine is for IOS Dev and as a everyday laptop to replace my current (7 year old lenovo laptop running linux). The HP workstation still kept for gaming on.

Even with this £2k solution developing apple applications comes with snags. You need a £99 yearly subscription for the privilege. Which is a bummer if you like me just want to poke around with code and run it freely on my own iphone/ipad at will. If I ever get to the stage that I want to publish an application then sure I will pay up and go official route otherwise FU apple.

I found this simple to use neat tool which will strip out the certification requirement of the xcode projects and allow the installation on the application onto a jailbroken Iphone. It's called JailCoder, check it out > http://jailcoder.com/