Upgrading The M4 Mac Mini With More Storage

December 1, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 17 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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Building A Reproduction Apple I

November 14, 2024 by Al Williams 3 Comments

If you think of Apple today, you probably think of an iPhone or a Mac. But the original Apple I was a simple PC board and required a little effort to start up a working system. [Artem] has an Apple I reproduction PCB, and decided to build it on camera so we could watch.

For the Apple I, the user supplied a keyboard and some transformers, so [Artem] had to search for suitable components. He wisely checks the PCB to make sure there are no shorts in the traces. From there, you can watch him build the machine, but be warned: even with speed ups and editing, the video is over an hour long.

If you want to jump to the mostly working device, try around the 57-minute mark. The machine has a basic ROM monitor and, of course, needs a monitor. There was a small problem with memory, but he eventually worked it out by inhibiting some extra RAM on the board. Troubleshooting is half of the battle getting something like this.

Want to look inside the clock generator chip? Or skip the PCB and just use an FPGA.

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The Most Inexpensive Apple Computer Possible

November 7, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices. But there are some alternatives if you want the Apple experience on the cheap. Buying their hardware a few years out of date of course is one way to avoid the bulk of the depreciation, but at the extreme end is this working Mac clone that cost just $14.

This build relies on the fact that modern microcontrollers absolutely blow away the computing power available to the average consumer in the 1980s. To emulate the Macintosh 128K, this build uses nothing more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Pico. There’s a little bit more to it than that, though, since this build also replicates the feel of the screen of the era as well. Using a “hat” for the Pi Pico from [Ron’s Computer Videos] lets the Pico’s remaining system resources send the video signal from the emulated Mac out over VGA, meaning that monitors from the late 80s and on can be used with ease. There’s an option for micro SD card storage as well, allowing the retro Mac to have an incredible amount of storage compared to the original.

The emulation of the 80s-era Mac is available on a separate GitHub page for anyone wanting to take a look at that. A VGA monitor is not strictly required, but we do feel that displaying retro computer graphics on 4K OLEDs leaves a little something out of the experience of older machines like this, even if they are emulated. Although this Macintosh replica with a modern e-ink display does an excellent job of recreating the original monochrome displays of early Macs as well.

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An image of a dark mode Linux desktop environment. A white iTunes window stands out in a virtualized Windows 10 environment. Two iPod games, "Phase" and "Texas Hold 'Em" are visible in the "iPod Games" section of the library.

IPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project

November 4, 2024 by Navarre Bartz No comments

The iPod once reigned supreme in the realm of portable music. Hackers are now working on preserving one of its less lauded functions — gaming. [via Ars Technica]

The run of 54 titles from 2006-2009 may not have made the iPod a handheld gaming success, but many still have fond memories of playing games on the devices. Unfortunately, Apple’s Fairplay DRM has made it nearly impossible to get those games back unless you happened to backup your library since those games can’t be downloaded again and are tied to both the account and iTunes installation that originally purchased the game.

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Apple Forces The Signing Of Applications In MacOS Sequoia 15.1

November 1, 2024 by Maya Posch 137 Comments

The dialogue that greets you when you try to open an unsigned application in MacOS Sequoia 15.1.

Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID certificate. Starting with MacOS Sequoia 15, the easy bypassing of this feature with e.g. holding Control when clicking the application icon is now no longer an option, with version 15.1 disabling ways to bypass this completely. Not unsurprisingly, this change has caught especially users of open source software like OpenSCAD by surprise, as evidenced by a range of forum posts and GitHub tickets.

The issue of having to sign applications you run on MacOS has been a longstanding point of contention, with HomeBrew applications affected and the looming threat for applications sourced from elsewhere, with OpenSCAD issue ticket #880 from 2014 covering the saga for one OSS project. Now it would seem that to distribute MacOS software you need to have an Apple Developer Program membership, costing $99/year.

So far it appears that this forcing is deliberate on Apple’s side, with the FOSS community still sorting through possible workarounds and the full impact.

Thanks to [Robert Piston] for the tip.

Asahi Linux Brings Better Gaming To Apple Silicon

October 29, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

For those of you longing for better gaming on an Apple Silicon device, Asahi Linux is here to help.

While Apple’s own line of CPUs are relatively new kids on the block, they’ve still been around for four years now, giving hackers ample time to dissect their innards. The team behind Asahi Linux has now brought us “the only conformant OpenGL®, OpenCL™, and Vulkan® drivers” for Apple’s M1 and M2.

The emulation overhead of the system means that most games will need at least 16 GB of RAM to run. Many games are playable, but newer titles can’t yet hit 60 frames per second. The developers are currently focused on “correctness” and hope to improve performance in future updates. Many indie titles are reported to already be working at full speed though.

You can hear more about some of the fiddly bits of how to “tessellate with arcane compute shaders” in the video below. Don’t worry, it’s only 40 minutes of the nine hour video and it should start right at the presentation by GPU dev [Alyssa Rosenzweig].

If you want to see some of how Linux on Apple Silicon started or some of the previous work on hacking the M1 GPU, we have you covered.

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A stack of Activation Locked MacBooks destined for the shredder in refurbisher [John Bumstead]’s workshop.

Apple IOS 18’s New Repair Assistant: Easier Parts Pairing Yet With Many Limitations

October 27, 2024 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Over the years, Apple has gone all-in on parts pairing. Virtually every component in an iPhone and iPad has a unique ID that’s kept in a big database over at Apple, which limits replacement parts to only those which have their pairing with the host system officially sanctified by Apple. With iOS 18 there seems to be somewhat of a change in how difficult getting a pairing approved, in the form of Apple’s new Repair Assistant. According to early responses by [iFixit] and in a video by [Hugh Jeffreys] the experience is ‘promising but flawed’.

As noted in the official Apple support page, the Repair Assistant is limited to the iPhone 15+, iPad Pro (M4) and iPad Air (M2), which still leaves many devices unable to make use of this feature. For the lucky few, however, this theoretically means that you can forego having to contact Apple directly to approve new parts. Instead the assistant will boot into its own environment, perform the pairing and calibration and allow you to go on your merry way with (theoretically) all functionality fully accessible.

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