Mac Hacks

240 Articles

Designing A Portable Mac Mini

March 25, 2025 by 8 Comments

When Apple first launched the Macintosh, it created a new sort of “Lunchbox” form factor that was relatively portable and very, very cool. Reminiscent of that is this neat portable Macintosh Mini, created by [Scott Yu-Jan].

[Scott] has created something along these lines before—putting an iPad dock on top of a Macintosh Studio to create a look vaguely reminiscent of the very first Macintosh computers. However, that build wasn’t portable—it wasn’t practical to build such a thing around the Macintosh Studio. In contrast, the Mac Mini is a lithe, lightweight thing that barely sups power—it’s much more suitable for a “luggable” computer.

The build relies on a 3D printed enclosure that wraps around the Mac Mini like a glove. Inside, there’s a chunky 20,800 mAh power bank with enough juice to run the computer for over three hours. Just like the original Mac, there’s a handle on top, too. The build’s main screen is actually an iPad Mini, hooked up to the Mac Mini. If you want to use it separately, it can be popped out just by pushing it via a cutout in the bottom of the enclosure.

[Scott] notes that it’s cool, but not exactly practical—it weighs seven pounds, mostly due to the weight of the heavy power bank. We’ve featured [Scott’s] stylish builds before, too, like this nice iPhone dock.

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An excerpt from the website, showing the nRootTag block diagram and describing its structure

Hijacking AirTag Infrastructure To Track Arbitrary Devices

March 3, 2025 by 7 Comments

In case you weren’t aware, Apple devices around you are constantly scanning for AirTags. Now, imagine you’re carrying your laptop around – no WiFi connectivity, but BLE’s on as usual, and there’s a little bit of hostile code running at user privileges, say, a third-party app. Turns out, it’d be possible to make your laptop or phone pretend to be a lost AirTag – making it and you trackable whenever an iPhone is around.

The nroottag website isn’t big on details, but the paper ought to detail more; the hack does require a bit of GPU firepower, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The specific vulnerabilities making this possible have been patched in newer iOS and MacOS versions, but it’s still possible to pull off as long as an outdated-firmware Apple device is nearby!

Of course, local code execution is often considered a game over, but it’s pretty funny that you can do this while making use of the Apple AirTag infrastructure, relatively unprivileged, and, exfiltrate location data without any data connectivity whatsoever, all as long as an iPhone is nearby. You might also be able to exflitrate other data, for what it’s worth – here’s how you can use AirTag infrastructure to track new letter arrivals in your mailbox!

Adding USB-C (Kinda) To A PowerMac G4

February 15, 2025 by 9 Comments

For those who’ve never bitten the Apple, the PowerMac G4 was a blue-tinted desktop Macintosh offered from 1999 to 2004. At the time, the machines were plenty fast — being advertised as the first “personal supercomputer” when they hit the market. But Father Time is particularly harsh on silicon, so they’re properly archaic by modern standards.

As such, the rear panel of one of these machines is hardly where you’d expect to run into a functional USB-C port. But thanks to the efforts of [Dandu], old has officially met new. Critics will note that it’s not real USB-C, and instead uses USB 2.0 with the more modern connector. That’s true, but considering how many commercial devices we run into that are still using the same trick, we’ll give it a pass.

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Running Doom On An Apple Lightning To HDMI Adapter

February 6, 2025 by 25 Comments

As a general rule of thumb, anything that has some kind of display output and a processor more beefy than an early 90s budget PC can run Doom just fine. As [John] AKA [Nyan Satan] demonstrates in a recent video, this includes running the original Doom on an Apple Lightning to HDMI Adapter. These adapters were required after Apple moved to Lightning from the old 30-pin connector which had dedicated pins for HDMI output.

As the USB 2.0 link used with Lightning does not have the bandwidth for 1080p HDMI, compression was used, requiring a pretty beefy processor in the adapter. Some enterprising people at the time took a hacksaw to one of these adapters to see what’s inside them and figure out the cause of the visual artifacts. Inside is a 400 MHz ARM SoC made by Samsung lovingly named the S5L8747. The 256 MB of RAM is mounted on top of the package, supporting the RAM disk that the firmware is loaded into.

Although designed to only run the Apple-blessed firmware, these adapters are susceptible to the same Checkm8 bootROM exploit, which enables the running of custom code. [John] adapted this exploit to target this adapter, allowing this PoC Doom session to be started. As the link with the connected PC (or Mac) is simply USB 2.0, this presumably means that sending keyboard input and the like is also possible, though the details are somewhat scarce on this aspect.

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FlatMac: Building The 1980’s Apple IPad Concept

December 7, 2024 by 17 Comments

The Apple FlatMac was one of those 1980s concepts by designer [Hartmut Esslingers] that remained just a concept with no more than some physical prototypes created. That is, until [Kevin Noki] came across it in an Apple design book and contacted [Hartmut] to ask whether he would be okay with providing detailed measurements so that he could create his own.

Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Raspberry Pi 4 running an appropriately emulated Macintosh, with a few modern features on the I/O side, including HDMI and USB. Ironically, the screen is from a 3rd generation iPad, which [Kevin] bought broken on EBay. There’s also an internal floppy drive that’s had its eject mechanism cleverly motorized, along with a modified USB battery bank that should keep the whole show running for about an hour. The enclosure itself is carefully glued, painted and sculpted to make it look as close to the original design as possible, which includes custom keycaps for the mechanical switches.

As far as DIY projects go, this one is definitely not for the faint of heart, but it’s fascinating to contrast this kind of project that’s possible for any determined hobbyist with the effort it would have taken forty years ago. The only question that’s left is whether or not the FlatMac would have actually been a practical system if it had made it to production. Although the keyboard seems decent, the ergonomics feel somewhat questionable compared to something more laptop-like.

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A hand holds a small PCB with an edge connector over the exposed, mostly black components of an M4 Mac mini. The bottom cover is hanging by an FFC cable off to the left of the

Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage

December 1, 2024 by 16 Comments

Apple’s in-house chips have some impressive specs, but user serviceability is something Apple left behind for consumer machines around a decade ago. Repair legend [dosdude1] shows us how the new M4 Mac mini can get a sizeable storage upgrade without paying the Apple tax.

The Mac mini is Apple’s least expensive machine, and in the old days you could swap a SATA drive for more storage and not pay the exorbitant prices that OEMs demand. Never one to turn down a walled garden, later Intel machines and now the ARM-based M-series chips soldered storage into the machine leaving an upgrade out of the hands of anyone without a hot air station.

Both the Mac Studio and Mac mini now have proprietary storage cards, and after some tinkering, [dosdude1] has successfully upgraded the storage on the base model M4 mini. While most people don’t casually reball NAND chips while chatting on a video, his previous work with others in the space to make a Mac Studio upgrade kit give us hope we’ll soon see economical storage upgrades that keep the Mac mini affordable.

We’ve previously covered the first time Apple tried to make its own processors, and some of their more recent attempts at repairability.

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Even Apple Get Their Parts Wrong Sometimes

November 27, 2024 by 14 Comments

There can be few among those of us who produce printed circuit boards, who have not at some point placed a component the wrong way round, or with the wrong footprint. Usually this can be rectified with a bit of rework and a fresh board spin, but just occasionally these mishaps make it into the wild undetected. It seems nobody is immune, as [Doug Brown] is here to tell us with a tale of an Apple product with a misplaced capacitor.

The LC series of Macs came out through the early 1990s, and their pizza-box style cases could be found slowly turning yellow in universities and schools throughout that decade. Of them there was a persistent rumor of the LCIII had a misplaced capacitor, so when he received an unmodified original machine he took a look. The investigation is quite simple, but revealing — there are three power supply rails and one of the capacitors does have a significant leak.

The explanation is simple enough, the designer had placed a capacitor on each rail, with its negative side to the ground plane, but one of the rails delivers -5 volts. Thus the capacitor is the wrong way round, and must have failed pretty early in the lifetime of each LCIII. We’re curious then since so many of them went through their lives without the component being replaced, how the circuit remained functional. We’re guessing that there were enough other capacitors in the -5 volt line to provide enough smoothing.