Retro PowerBook Gets a Mac Mini Transplant

https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/retro-powerbook-gets-a-mac-mini-transplant

by linguae • 7 years ago

1 1 7 years ago

linguae• 7 years ago

This mod fascinates me as a Mac user. For the past few years I've been interested in projects like the ThinkPad X62 and ThinkPad x210, which are unofficial ThinkPad modifications with updated components. There are some ThinkPad users who prefer the design of 2000s-era ThinkPads, before Lenovo switched to using chiclet keyboards in the x230 and T430 series, and before 4:3 displays were replaced with widescreen displays.

Similarly, there are Mac users who prefer the designs of older Apple laptops when Apple laptops featured non-chiclet keys. I would love to have a Titanium PowerBook G4 modified to have a recent x86-64 processor, 16 GB of RAM, a M.2 NVMe SSD, and a modern display. I love the aesthetic of this model of PowerBook; it still looks modern even after 20 years, and it's thin enough to be comfortable to carry yet not so thin to result in compromises such as soldered RAM and storage.

I don't have the electronics expertise to attempt anything like the ThinkPad X62, but I've thought about buying a broken Titanium PowerBook G4 and connecting the display, keyboard, and trackpad to something like an Intel Compute Stick. The Intel Core m3 versions of the Intel Compute Stick are capable of running macOS based on some forum posts I've read from Hackintosh users. If this works, it wouldn't be quite at the level of the ThinkPad X62 project, but it would be something that I'd be interested in using regularly.

Retro PowerBook Gets a Mac Mini Transplant

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