I'd argue that hackintosh users wouldn't buy a mac just for the OS in the first place.. it's not taking sales away from apple. if anything it's boosting the platform user base if only by a fraction, exposing users that wouldn't have otherwise have access to it, and maybe they'll consider investing in the future in apple products.
And it still takes a lot of knowhow to hackintosh a computer or build one from scratch. plus seems like most apple users buy macbook pros anyway, hackintoshing a laptop is a pain in the ass and most of the time something will never work, most people don't want to deal with that.
Just from what I’ve gathered, it seems like there are at least 3 types of scenarios in which people use Hackintoshes (assuming they work decently):
1. Someone who doesn’t know Mac OS well and wants to try it out.
- That’s definitely not a lost sale if they decide to continue using it and follow through and buy it. It’s likely that in some cases it would actually be a GAINED sale IF that person would never have decided to buy a Mac otherwise. But since there are an infinite number of ways someone could get introduced to Mac OS, who really knows how often that's the case.
2. Someone who likes Mac OS but Macs are too expensive.
- I believe this is true: if something is absolutely not available unless you pay a certain price for it, and you don't have that price, but you still want it, your mind will creatively search for NEW ways to pay for it. What didn't seem like a possibility before, becomes a possibility, because otherwise you are CONSISTENTLY faced with the reality of doing without that thing. This was always the case before the digital format (and piracy), but now no longer. Since we already have it for free, we aren't put into a situation that constantly encourages to think of new creative ways to pay for it. (*See below for a story about my friends as a real life illustration.) So at best, it's neutral, not a lost sale--which may not be the case as often as one might first think. And at worst, as I'm sure is at least sometimes the case, it is a lost sale.
3. Someone who likes Mac OS, but Mac hardware doesn't float their boat.
- Under first sale doctrine, you could argue (and I personally agree with this) that you should be able to install any software you buy on any hardware you buy (if you have the know how). However as we know, the problem is Apple packages Mac OS and Macs together so that you can’t buy one without the other. You could see this as crafty or shrewd, but in either case it's a legitimate strategy universally accepted in all kinds of trade (all sellers do it). So the only way to install Mac OS onto non-Mac hardware without a loss of sale, is to "strip" the OS from a previously purchased Mac. Otherwise, if they somehow get an illegal copy without buying a Mac, it’s a lost sale.
The original question was whether or not hackintoshes cause lost sales, which is all I'm trying to address. I don't go so far as to say whether or not the lost sale itself is justified. That would be a whole other topic that I don't really have an opinion about. But it still seems to me that overall, Hackintoshes would cause more lost sales than gained sales. Just my take.
A real example of my friends that illustrates uncreative vs. creative thinking:
I have a good friend, we’ll call him John, who started downloading pirated music a long time ago during college. At the time he argued that it was all music that he would never buy anyway because he was a poor student. Our other friends and I didn't really believe him but didn't care enough to argue. It wasn't provable either way, anyway.
During the same time, our other good friend, we’ll call Bobby, was also a poor college student that loved music, except he was not very tech savvy and wasn’t too aware of the whole downloading music for free thing. But Bobby really liked music. His roommate told us he would go so far as to use his financial aid money that he should have been using to buy textbooks and food to buy a new CD every week.
I believe both of them loved music equally. But the difference was John had an “out” with pirated music, and Bobby didn’t. John assumed he would never choose to buy music, and to him that justified downloading it illegally. He was never forced to find out if his claim was true or not because he already had what he wanted. But because Bobby didn’t know about the “out”, he eventually came up with an "out of the box" way to pay for what he wanted (even though he went way overboard).
Epilogue: about a decade later John makes a decent living and buys all sorts of nice things, but has yet to start paying for music. -_- Bobby also eventually found out about downloading pirated music and has since stopped paying for music. -_-