Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2025/06/new-filament-lets-you-3d-print-parts-in-authentic-1980s-apple-computer-color/

by CobaltFire • 1 year ago

251 85 1 year ago

JKCalhoun4• 1 year ago

There is a wild assortment of modern hardware out there for keeping older hardware running. BlueSCSI is mentioned in the article and I have been a customer. I used a BlueSCSI to save pull some old sources from an old SCSI drive I had been hanging on to for 35 years or so [1].

People are making replacements for the dead lead-acid batteries from the original Mac (so-called) Portable. There are USB-powered cables to charge/power early MacBooks. I'm sure others can rattle off several other devices.

Now you have people 3D printing replacement bezels, etc. for these old machines. Very cool.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

Did you make a full backup of that old SCSI device to modern devices? What did you do with all of the extra space as I can only imagine how small the old SCSI device was compared with modern media sizes

JKCalhoun4• 1 year ago

Yeah, the drive was 20 or 40 MB, I think. Easily moved it all to an SD card.

If anyone cares about old shareware game source code, I used the opportunity of recovering some old code to create a number of disk images (that you can mount from a modern Mac emulator like Basilisk II for example). Here is one (I think you can find the other three or so from this one):

https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SoftDorothy-UnfinishedTa...

JKCalhoun4• 1 year ago

Something that has been kind of funny for me, perhaps others are feeling this way: I see increasingly this "retro computing community" fawning over machines that I think of as ... just machines that I used once. Some of the machines were even kind of scorned at the time as I recall — now they're sought after, lovingly restored....

I don't know if my reaction is as one who is being made aware of just how old they are (61, BTW) or if it is a bit of a sweetness that I feel that younger generations are coveting these older machines instead of reflexively landfilling them.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

Does that same feeling of wow still exist for kids today? They have grown up with computers there entire life. Some of us were introduced to computers in our teens, so there was prior experience of not having a computer for that wow to hit. Even now, the wow factor has diminished for me with new computers/devices. They are not really doing anything new as much as they just do the things faster/quiter/cheaper/smaller. There are definite milestones for me that just made my socks roll up and down when they were first available on computers. Is there anything not done on a computer now?

cosmic_cheese• 1 year ago

Some of us were introduced to computers in our teens, so there was prior experience of not having a computer for that wow to hit.

The effect is similar for those of us whose exposure was earlier, but similarly devoid of computers prior.

In my case it was a 1996 Mac tower w/internal 28k modem, at which point I was seven. It was not only the first computer of any sort in the house (no game consoles either) but also our first CD player. Up until then, the extent of tech for me was a late 80s Sharp VCR and an even older faux wood console Zenith TV hooked up to a roof antenna (no cable). Anything beyond that existed only in TV commercials and movies.

It was such a huge shift that it’s difficult to articulate. It sparked a lifelong obsession.

alnwlsn3• 1 year ago

In my case the computers I 'learned computers' on were old pre-xp 90's machines. Nobody cares if some kid wants to take apart a few old computers on their way to the trash. That feeling of 'getting something to work' on those old machines sort of never went away for me, which is why I like retrocomputing even though the internet, cell phones, youtube, social media was pretty much around most of my life.

bombcar3• 1 year ago

The key is that you used them. The retro community is for people who lusted after those machines, but we’re stuck with something much more affordable and much less powerful.

And now they’re well into middle age and they have money.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s that simple.

Yes for some people who used these machines once, they might just think of them as old machines, the same way an ancient Roman still alive today might not think much of mundane Roman tech.

But getting into retro-computing as a hobby is more like being a historian or archaeologist. There is endless lore to discover, and restoring old hardware is an art. Some of these people were never old enough or even existed to lust after these machines.

Someday, all the people who used these machines will be dead, completely dead, and the machines will be all that remains. Blessed are those who keep them running in their memory.

JKCalhoun4• 1 year ago

Myself, I have passion for the KIM-1. Perhaps, as you suggest, because I saw it in a TAB book in the early 70's when I was a teenager, unable at that time to swing the $400 or so to get it.

But I think my current passion has more to do with the simplicity of it, and being forced (well, more or less) to learn 6502 assembly. (Oh, and Christ an original KIM-1 is a good deal more than $400 now, ha ha. But there are nice reproductions you can build yourself.)

What a breath of fresh air the thing is — having so little between its hex keypad and its six character display.

ehnto2• 1 year ago

The same thing happens with cars. There's a somewhat predictable spike in used car prices for what become cult classics. Cars that are otherwise pretty mundane, and have since been well surpassed.

It's the people now with full time employment, who couldn't afford them when they were 16. Now they can, and the cars in good condition are more scarce.

flomo• 1 year ago

You're right about the money part, but it always seemed more like a 30-year-old pursuit than middle-aged.

But once I went through Vogons and had the impression that many of them lacked any taste. A lot of PCs (and Macs) were total shite back then. If you want to dink around, you can now get the best old stuff.

icehawk• 1 year ago

I don't think that's entirely it. A lot of the things I've been collecting in the hobby are just things that I had used a the time. I've got more weird variants of Mac SEs and Mac LCs which were things I had at home, or used at school, than the Quadras and Power Macs I dreamed of.

qoez• 1 year ago

For me I did use them but it was during very early childhood so they have a special place in my heart.

bandoti• 1 year ago

There’s a lot more to it actually. When given the knowledge of today, a lot can actually be done with vintage computers. I would say it’s an artistic medium.

Take a look at the Commodore 64 developer manual and quickly realize that without much difficulty, one can learn the full assembly instruction set along with all BASIC commands.

https://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c...

The machine is completely open to experimentation. You can write to memory anywhere including the active display terminal. The chips are easy to mix, match, swap. Hardware and software is malleable, not a locked-down black box of complexity and TPIM modules!

bigpeopleareold• 1 year ago

I have become slightly more interested in the software, that is, the GUI, the operations, etc. I miss some of the simplicity of classic mac, and the silly ideas I had trying to program it (which I sort of understand better now.) The hardware is physically demanding and costly (space in my apartment is precious).

steamrolled• 1 year ago

There's a ton of hobbies like that. There are people who collect out-of-print comic books, sports memorabilia, old militaria, etc. What's the point of any of it? It's the joy of having a hobby and being a part of a community, not the utility of the gear itself.

donatj• 1 year ago

I feel this way about the keyboard community and their love of old IBM keyboards.

In the mid-to-late 90s I had probably fifteen of them laying around and couldn't give them away. No one wanted these heavy bulky noisy keyboards. Now people pay hundreds of dollars for the originals and there's even a company[1] devoted to making new ones.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a Model M and still have a couple, but I would never pay these insane amounts for one.

1. https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT

fidotron• 1 year ago

I am not quite that age but notice a similar phenomenon, and have indulged slightly in it myself. My gut feeling is the motivation relates to how computing evolved, particularly in the 80s and 90s.

Essentially people used to feel that their inability to perform a given task was gated by their lack of access to a certain sort of machine, such as a UNIX workstation or LISP machine. Now we all have surplus computing power and cheap peripherals the sense is that we must be missing some essence that was lost since these machines, because that is the nicer explanation than that given access to tools far better than those in previous generations most of us have no idea what to do with them, or worse that we allow ourselves to be distracted entirely.

The musical equipment world is just like this too.

dale_glass• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's kind of weird.

I had a 386 with 4MB RAM and am not the least nostalgic about it. In fact damn near everything about that machine was limiting and something I couldn't wait to replace with something newer.

I even didn't care for the beige color schemes of the day -- I remember going for the brushed aluminium case way back because I was excited it wasn't freaking beige.

Watching some of the channels though I'd say a lot of the retro experience isn't quite what most people had. A lot of modern retrocomputing is putting together what would have qualified as a "dream machine" back in the day. Some are specced up to the absolute best one could get, some are unrealistic (1990 Monkey Island on a 2000s Pentium 3), some are jazzed up with scifi tech like floppy emulators.

inejge• 1 year ago

I had a 386 with 4MB RAM and am not the least nostalgic about it. In fact damn near everything about that machine was limiting and something I couldn't wait to replace with something newer.

It is difficult to be nostalgic about the machines lacking, for want of a better term, a soul. PC compatibles are as soulless as it gets. Quite soon after introduction, they became part of the endless treadmill of faster CPU - more memory - better graphics - larger HDDs. (That doesn't stop people being nostalgic about software running on PCs, again with that same basic characteristic.)

dfe• 1 year ago

I, too, am not the least bit nostalgic about the 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and later machines that I owned.

I think for me it's that they are too much the direct ancestors of current machines. There's basically zero software from that era nor any modern software written for these machines that really cares all that much about bus timings or cycle counting. It runs just as well or even better on modern machines in an emulator.

I'm not a big gamer, but even if I play later-1990s era EGA/VGA games on a modern PC, it feels basically normal to me.

I am nostalgic about machines older than that, particularly the mid-to-late 1980s machines that I grew up with. I now have decades of experience writing software. Even though I don't do much with hardware in my day job, I do know my way around hardware interfaces. I can read schematics and chip data sheets and know how to make it work. And what's nice about these machines is that many of them came with schematics and hardware register descriptions. Even if the paper is lost to time, someone has scanned them in and put them on the internet.

So I like to tinker with them. I like making them do things I wished I could do 35-40 years ago. I especially like when I can do it with pure software. Once such example is a DOS driver I wrote to make Tandy ROM drives accessible to (newer) non-Tandy DOS versions. https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive

I had a 1000 TL I think I got probably late 1988 or early 1989. Back then I had a 40 MB hard card and it had to be partitioned because of DOS's 32 MB limit. When I upgraded to DOS 5 in 1991, literally going to the store the day it came out, I was dismayed to find I could no longer run Deskmate which was one of the main reasons to own a Tandy.

A few years ago I bought another one (my old one sadly bit the dust in a natural disaster) and went to work on fixing the problem. The journey was fun, and so was the end result. I finally got what I wanted, a machine running Deskmate and other software on DOS 5.

Coupled with my "sci-fi" Gotek I now have a machine that does a really good job of behaving like a machine of that era, because it is a machine of that era, running my old games with Tandy graphics and sound exactly how they ran back then. And I have real nostalgia for these games. There's something neat about what could be done with hardware of that era.

Emulation is just not quite the same. There's something about the CGA rasters on the tube that just feels right.

Plus, even though the machine bit the dust, I still have my old floppies, which I've started reading in with a Greaseweazle.

The Gotek doesn't really detract from the experience, it just takes away the drudgery of dealing with actual floppies and avoids wearing down what little is left of them.

philistine3• 1 year ago

The people in the retro community do not require these machines to perform all their tasks. They're not filing their taxes with a Macintosh LC III. They have modern computers! This allows old computers to be appreciated very differently. And retro enthusiasts will often love a machine because it is such a bad machine. It gives it a different appeal, its history and poor reception part of its charm.

Ultimately, they're collectors. They collect the good and the bad.

wincy• 1 year ago

If you’re driving around in your 1971 Ford Thunderbird and the vacuum line fails, making it so your headlights doors are stuck closed, that would have been super annoying in 1977 as you were driving home in the evening.

In 2025 it’s just “the charm of owning a classic car”. Instead of an annoyance, you might think of it as having a unique and endearing quirk.

nemo44x• 1 year ago

A lot of this stuff was beyond reach for people back in the day. A Neo-Geo game system is something a lot of people still want because it’s something they can finally acquire.

Ezhik• 1 year ago

for some of us computers used to be something special

tinco• 1 year ago

Perhaps it's related to what age you were when that particular computer caught your attention. I don't have any attachment to any hardware that came out after I was 18 or so. But my parents bought the Compaq Presario 5030 when I was like 10, and even looking at a picture now fills me with excitement. A computer could not be less important to computing in general: A bog standard mid market Pentium II from one of IBM PC clone companies. But to me it represents my first connection to the internet, and a huge part of what grew into my identity.

Perhaps you'd feel the same way about a machine or tool or toy that you used when you were 10?

testing22321• 1 year ago

Some people are passionate about cooking. Some dancing. Others mountain biking, snowboarding, hiking, painting, music, gardening, …. Literally endless list of hobbies and passions.

These people are passionate about old computer hardware. I’m not, but it makes me happy to know they are happy doing what they want.

wpm2• 1 year ago

Polymaker's Panchroma Matte White is also a very close match to Classic Mac plastics.

And since I didn't actually see a link to the filament in the Ars Technica article, here it is https://polarfilament.com/products/retro-platinum-pla-1kg-1-...

zargon2• 1 year ago

Panchroma Muted White is the one that is somewhat similar to the Apple platinum color. Someone sent Polymaker an RGB color code instead of a sample, so it's pretty off in reality. That would be fine, because all machines are yellowed to some degree anyway, so colors vary widely. More importantly, it's just terrible filament. Layer adhesion is virtually non-existent, compared to Polymaker's Poly Lite filaments. I have wasted so much time trying to print that awful filament. Hopefully this manufacturer is better.

wpm2• 1 year ago

Yep, you're right, I meant Muted White.

I've not had too many issues with it on my crappy Ender 3 clone. I print at 225C with a 60C bed, which lowers to 55 after the first layer. Never had any problems other than typical bullshit with my Z-offset.

ghushn3• 1 year ago

Not gonna lie, I was expecting to see something in translucent bondi blue.

peteforde• 1 year ago

This article is peak Jeff Geerling territory.

ThatPlayer• 1 year ago

Looks like he did comment on the original post: https://bsky.app/profile/jeffgeerling.com/post/3lqt52wh4ec2t

geerlingguy• 1 year ago

Heh, this morning my roll arrived (looks good, but don't have time today to unwrap it and fire off a print). I checked HN, saw this post... the rest is history :D

amelius5• 1 year ago

Is anyone having success printing keycaps with filament?

chubs• 1 year ago

I printed a few for a friend. They seem to work just fine, but if you look close you can see the ‘terraced’ steps in the printing. Probably feels a bit rough. I guess you could smooth that with acetone vapour and ABS filament if so inclined.

ehnto2• 1 year ago

With an ender 3 it's easy enough, but it does not feel as nice as shot ABS plastic caps.

I am sure though, if you spent time polishing and painting the surface it would feel much better. It's still similar plastic after all.

Biggest problem for me, if printed in PLA the + shaped slot eventually gets too loose and the key pops off. Can just print another but it's annoying for sure.

Resin printers would likely have a much nicer out of the printer feel, with much smoother details at that size (for caps with 3D details on top). You could also print a whole set much quicker. Same speed for one cap as it would be for 100 at once.

Symbiote• 1 year ago

I've been using a PLA space (1U) key for over 5 years without any issue.

I think I printed the top at a smaller layer height.

amelius5• 1 year ago

Thanks. Do you have any suggestions for printing the glyphs on the faces/sides?

PunchyHamster• 1 year ago

...pretty sure you can just get the color scanned and mixed at any paint shop if you really want to

Milner08• 1 year ago

Getting it in paint form wasn't the issue. But the issue with that is many of the originals have changed colour over the year, so getting a match is hard. Plus the plastic is brittle so if you want to replace things you need to print it and its easier if you dont need to then paint it.

_def• 1 year ago

Why PLA though, it PETG has much better qualities

alnwlsn3• 1 year ago

I'm not sure if there's any material limitation to it, but every PETG roll I've used has come out with a very glossy finish, which is probably not what you want here.

manyturtles• 1 year ago

Matte PETG is available. No affiliation, but: https://californiafilament.com/collections/new . Great when you want the properties of PETG but not the shiny plastic look, e.g. printing things for car interiors. Like GP I'd also love to see this filament in PETG.

TazeTSchnitzel• 1 year ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Grd_a4oi7qU is a really cool video where someone builds a computer that looks and feels like an early Apple design concept for a flat, portable Macintosh, something between a modern laptop and a tablet. They pull it off really well; if you didn't know better, you'd think you'd found a lost prototype. Anyway, one of the problems they had to solve was the plastic colour, and they did it by painting the case. With this new filament they wouldn't have needed the paint. :)

WillAdams• 1 year ago

Neat! Feels a bit like the Soulcircuit Pilet:

https://soulscircuit.com/pilet

amelius5• 1 year ago

If Woz were still in Apple there would be Apple-run makerspaces, with Apple branded 3d printers and all the types of filament you could dream of.

Too bad Jobs turned the company into a boring locked-down anti-consumer appliance factory.

millerm• 1 year ago

If Jobs didn't come back and run Apple the way he did, it is very likely that Apple wouldn't exist today. They were on a tailspin to destruction. That's my take.

amelius5• 1 year ago

Both things can be true.

And by the way, Microsoft saved them with a $150M injection.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...

ninjamuffin99• 1 year ago

Unfortunately in our reality Woz is merely a humble multimillionaire instead of a billionaire, and we do not have Woz funded makerspaces.

msgilligan• 1 year ago

Well, he did fund this: https://www.thetech.org/education/

chakintosh• 1 year ago

that boring locked-down anti-consumer appliance factory is a $3T company. Not sure if Apple would have been as successful if they diversified too much.

amelius5• 1 year ago

Too bad that money can't seem to help them lose their boring zero-sum thinking.

thenthenthen• 1 year ago

You are invited to my makerspace to print with whatever filament we have on non-branded printers!

alnwlsn3• 1 year ago

Reminds me of this April Fool's hackaday article from some years back:

https://hackaday.com/2016/04/01/apple-introduces-their-answe...

crazygringo• 1 year ago

The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers.
Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience.

So it seems like the color is for 3D-printing stuff to look "new"?

Makes me wonder if there will be a "thirty years discolored" version as well, if you want to print a piece to replace something broken... or can you just leave it out in the sun for a couple weeks or something?

bigfatfrock• 1 year ago

Makes me wonder if there will be a "thirty years discolored" version as well, if you want to print a piece to replace something broken... or can you just leave it out in the sun for a couple weeks or something?

Would probably just need to make this part of a build loop where you send it through a high intensity light/heat cycle such as when they beat up jeans for purchase by people who buy those.

"Would you prefer the color tone of the 1977 Apple II or perhaps a 1980 Apple III?"

wtallis• 1 year ago

Nitpick: the "Platinum" color in question was part of the "Snow White" design language introduced in 1984 (and originally using a different color before switching to Platinum) so this is the wrong filament for emulating the color of 1977 or 1980 Apple products.

riskassessment• 1 year ago

I don't think you can assume that this color-matched material will discolor with age in the same way that the original material did.

jchw4• 1 year ago

or can you just leave it out in the sun for a couple weeks or something?

I actually don't know if there's a good source for this, but I've heard that the yellow discoloration caused by UV rays actually happens because of the specific way that window glass is filtering the UV spectrum unevenly; that would at least partly explain why retrobrighting, where you literally put things out in the sun or expose them to UV-C light directly, seems to actually work, and some people claim that even just leaving yellowed plastic out in the sun with no cover also works to an extent.

wkat4242• 1 year ago

Usually they leave it in the sun with retrobrite applied (which I believe is pretty much just hydrogen peroxide)

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

That’s a nice color.. but different from the nicotine yellow

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

If Tim Cook introduced new Mac hardware with the retro look (anything before, eh, 2003) the tech world would lose its flipping mind.

charliebwrites• 1 year ago

I was really hoping this would be the colorful plastic backs of the early 2000s iMacs we had in school

leoc• 1 year ago

Here's what the foreword to Keep It Simple https://arnoldsche.com/en/vergriffen/keep-it-simple/ https://archive.org/details/keepitsimpleearl0000essl/ says about the Platinum colour, also known as Snow White:

Esslinger had been working with Steve Jobs since 1982 and was of paramount importance for the look of Apple products as an external designer -—as of 1983 also as Corporate Manager of Design. The start of collaboration between Steve Jobs and Hartmut Esslinger went from 1982 to 1983 with “Snow White,” a new color and design concept that was the base for all future Apple products. Besides specifying certain design aspects, the concept entailed introducing a new color. The dull “greige” of the industrial and corporate workplace was to be replaced by a broken white-called “Snow White" in the US. First used for the Apple llc, this white not only made the computer esthetically compatible with living rooms but also psychologically underpinned the user-friendly menu navigation. The new “Snow White” line worked up by Hartmut Esslinger was supposed to be launched with the Macintosh Computer—originally designed by Jerry Manock-but many reasons made this impossible. So the revised version could not be introduced until later: with the Macintosh SE.

JeremyHerrman• 1 year ago

I know this book is a first hand account from Esslinger himself, but aside from your quoted passage, I've never seen Snow White refer to a specific color, only to the design language itself. Even the other mentions of Snow White in his book refer to the design language, not a color.

The first product to feature the Snow White design language was the Apple IIc, which featured a color known as "Fog" which is distinct from the Platinum used in Apple's products from 1986-1999. For a good side-by-side comparison, check out this image of an original Apple IIc (1984) and the Apple IIc Plus (1988): https://i0.wp.com/lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/iic-and-i...

leakycap• 1 year ago

Thanks, I was scratching my head wondering why anyone would confuse Snow White (the design language) and Platinum (the plastic shade of 80s-90s Apple devices)

Supermancho• 1 year ago

First thing I thought of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N5Eqt5AEN8

The first mac cube was the 4th computer I ever got my hands on, iirc. TRS80, Commodore, Apple II, Mac Plus

dheera• 1 year ago

These kind of "off-white" colors of the 1980s are making a comeback these days; they were considered dated design during the early 2000s but in the 2020s they're "in" again, e.g. anthropic.com, hume.ai, ...

Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D-printer filament

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