This Mac Is Open Source Hardware

September 12, 2026 by Jenny List 20 Comments

Apple hardware has always been proprietary, sometimes to an extreme. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to make something that does the same job, which is what [DosFox1] appears to have done with the OSHintosh. It’s an open source PCB that implements a Mac 512k. Is it a 68k Hackintosh? You decide.

While it boots into a classic Mac OS image, it’s not quite a Mac. For a start, there are no disks, and no SCSI. Instead it boots from a disk held in ROM, which we guess will be a lot faster than the floppy from back in the day. They’ve even managed to do it on a 2-layer board, which means that despite its size, it shouldn’t be too expensive to have made.

We’re not sure quite what the legality of dumping a Mac ROM image to the ROM on this board would be, but assume for a moment that you own a copy in a defunct original Mac. This board can’t yet replace the original due to the disk issue, but given that original Macs are now long in the tooth, a modern replacement for those who must have hardware rather than an emulator sounds like a good idea. Perhaps for some people it will join the FPGA Amiga.

The Mactini: A Computer That Does Almost Nothing

August 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Recently [Tucker Osman] brought to life what once was just a meme created by the BBC as it poked fun at Apple’s push for ever smaller devices that also dropped many features along the path towards questionable innovation. This ‘Mactini’ was a super-small laptop, with just a single button that did everything, befitting the overpriced more-money-than-sense status symbol vibe that [Jony Ive] brought to Apple.

The input method suggested in the BBC video involves convoluted patterns using the single button, which would be functional, albeit cumbersome. Even as [Tucker] set out on this mission to make the Mactini real, he had to answer a lot of questions, while sticking to the rules that it had to follow the rough form factor of the original and have the same features.

In lieu of overcomplicating things, he opted to use a 1.69″ ST7789V2-based SPI LCD along with a small RP2350-based board from Waveshare for the brains. Rather than just slapping the LCD example for the Pico board on it as firmware, he actually used DMA to do the screen data copying, freeing up a lot of CPU cycles.

The rest of the hardware was cobbled together from e-waste parts, including an iPad speaker and an audio amplifier from a scrap board. Video was handled using Motion JPEG decoding for a not-horrible-framerate. All of this was put into a 3D printed case that was designed in FreeCAD, to make the Mac that [Ive] could only have dreamed of back in the 2000s.

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Giving A Power Mac G4 A USB Upgrade, For Free!

June 10, 2026 by Jenny List 14 Comments

At various times in the history of desktop computing, the market has stubbornly refused to follow the path dictated for it by a dominant manufacturer. IBM’s move to MCA in their PS/2 line is one of many examples. Another is Apple’s take on USB a couple of decades ago, when their view of the future lay with Firewire 800. [Pierre Dandumont] has revisited a Power Mac G4 from that era and unleashed what Apple never did back in the day: a USB 2.0 port. (French language, Google Translate).

The hack lies in Apple shipping the machine with an NEC USB 2.0 controller, but only using it for USB 1.1. A PowerPC Linux distro will happily use it for USB 2.0, but Mac OS refused. Replacing the BIOS ROM with an image designed for the same Mac without Firewire 800 cured the problem, but at the expense of being so we’re told irreversible.

An obscure set of Macs from the early 2000s with an odd combination of hardware and OS may not count for much in 2026, but back in the day having USB 2.0 was a big deal and this would really have mattered. We like it that he put this together, even if the chances of having a G4 on the Hackaday desktop probably isn’t too high.

This isn’t the first USB hack we’ve seen for a PowerMac G4.

Restoring Apple’s Terrible But Awesome IBook Laptop

June 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

Before the Apple MacBook there was the Apple iBook, fruity 1999 colors included. These PowerPC-based laptops targeted low-cost PC-compatible laptops much like the iMac did, albeit it the latter with more success. That said, these laptops are said to be a nightmare to repair, so when [This Does Not Compute] got his hands on a shiny first generation, 300 MHz PowerPC powered, tangerine-colored one, he somewhat dreaded trying to fix it.

Aside from some relatively minor cosmetic issues such as typical cracks in the plastic and a missing optical drive door it seemed in good condition. The first issue came on boot, when MacOS 9.0 would throw up an error message about an issue with cache memory. After booting into the OS this cache memory did indeed show up as missing. Next issue was the optical drive doing absolutely nothing and restarting leading to the system locking up and not starting until plugging in the power adapter.

Fortunately the optical drive started working after addressing a software issue, but the power and cache issues were concerning. Cue a long troubleshooting and repair session that involved purchasing a ‘parts unit’ from Japan to merge both into a single iBook with hopefully a working system at the end.

Along the way the reason why people dislike maintaining these systems, as to do something like getting to the hard drive requires removing the entire display. The cause for the first iBook’s problems also seemed to be due to a liquid spill of some type, as on boot there was no chime either, indicating a wider board-level issue. Unfortunately this was left further undiagnosed and the Japanese mainboard used instead. It’d be interesting to see the deeper cause, but most likely the mainboard will be used for components.

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A Modern Web Browser For Classic Mac OS

May 29, 2026 by Jenny List 9 Comments

When using older computers there comes a point at which modern software drops support, as for example is happening with builds for Windows XP. Every now and then though, along comes something that bucks the trend. Enter [mplsllc] with Macsurf, a port of the Netsurf browser for classic MacOS 9 on PowerPC. Bring your nineties beige box back online!

The first generation of PowerPC Macs occupy an odd position, being faster and more capable than their predecessors while not sharing the ability to run MacOS X like their G3 descendants. Macsurf has the promise of bringing them into the 2020s, but if you’re expecting the equivalent of Google Chrome you might be disappointed.

Netsurf is a browser that started life on RiscOS, the original ARM OS from the Acorn Archimedes. It’s lightweight and portable, it’s an active project, it has a good rendering engine that does up to date HTML and CSS, it offers native TLS, and it has JavaScript built in. It’s ideal for a 1990s PowerPC, but with the caveat that sites expecting the very latest browsers might struggle. Sadly we don’t have a ’90s Mac to hand so we can’t try this port, but we’re used to it on other lower-power machines so we thing it’ll be a great asset to the platform.

We last looked at Netsurf when we had a look at RiscOS, if you are interested.

Yes, that's a MacBook Neo. The important parts, anyway.

Unlocking The True Power Of A MacBook Neo By Cooling It

May 20, 2026 by Tyler August 20 Comments

Mobile devices generally have one Achilles’ heel when it comes to computing power: thermal throttling. Outside of bulky desktop and server systems, chips have to run at a fraction of their true potential to keep from cooking themselves to death. The MacBook Neo, with its iPhone-derived A18 processor, is no exception. Since Apple’s budget offering first came out, though, there’s been an arms race on the benchmark sites to see just how far you can push it, and [Salem Techsperts] briefly claimed the accolade of ‘fastest MacBook Neo’, and of course provided a video showing how it’s done.

It’s hardly rocket science: you cool the chip. Outdoing Apple’s cost-cutting design in that regard is not difficult; you can evidently get notable performance increases just with decent thermal paste. [Techsperts] goes further than that, combining PTM7950 phase-change thermal paste with a peltier cooler to actively suck watts of heat out of the SOC, heatsinks that likely weigh more than the laptop itself, and an industrial air blower to serve as the highest CFM air cooler we’ve probably ever seen.

By this point it’s hardly a laptop anymore, with the logic board removed to sit inside a cooling sandwhich– water cooled with the peltier on one side, and air-cooled by the blower on the other–but the point wasn’t to have a light, practical daily-driver here. Apple already covered that. The point was to go fast. With 41.47% higher Cinebench scores than the stock laptop, and a power draw of 11W compared to the stock 4W, we can say he’s succeeded in that. Interestingly enough, [Techsperts] could not best the top 3DMark score, in spite of his Cinebench success. It’s possible he just lost the silicon lottery when it comes to the GPU section of this particular A18 chip, but if you have another theory, be sure to let us know in the comments.

Of course you could go colder. For all the absurd impracticality of this setup, it’s not liquid nitrogen cooling, which means there are still gains to be made-– we saw a Pi 5 clocked at 3.6GHz that way last year— and that just means the crown is laying in the gutter, waiting for anyone to pick it up. Unless they already have by the time this prints. In which case, all hail the cryogenic king, and please send us a tip so we can hail their glory.

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Trying To Install Haiku On A 2009 Mac Mini

April 12, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

Although the number of uses for a 2009-era Mac Mini aren’t very long, using them to run new-and-upcoming operating systems like Haiku on would seem to be an interesting use case. This is what [The Phintage Collector] recently took a swing at, using both the 2024 Beta 5 release and a current nightly build. The focus was mostly on the 32-bit build, as this has binary compatibility with BeOS applications, but the 64-bit version of Haiku was of course also installed.

One of the main issues with these Mac systems is that they use EFI for the BIOS, so you’re condemned to either take your chances with the always glitchy CSM ‘classical BIOS’ mode, or to make Haiku and EFI get along. While for the 64-bit version of Haiku this wasn’t too much of a struggle, the 32-bit version ran into the problem that the 64-bit EFI BIOS really doesn’t like 32-bit software. After a while the 32-bit version of Haiku was thus abandoned for a later revisit.

With the 64-bit version a lot of things just work, though audio couldn’t be made to work even with a USB dongle, and there’s no hardware acceleration for graphics, so gaming isn’t really going to happen either. The positive thing here is probably that as a test system for 64-bit Haiku such a Mac Mini isn’t too crazy, it being just an Intel system with an Apple-flavor EFI BIOS.

If you’re into giving it a shot yourself, the video description page contains a lot of resources to consult.

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