Love the energy with "i decided to just go for it.".
The soldering to the touchpad is absolutely frightful, but you know what? First time soldering (to small testpoints no less), it works, it can always be fixed later if the joints fail. I've been getting too caught up in perfection with my recent projects, it's a good reminder that with a userbase of 1, it really doesn't matter.
This is super cool! These are the Macbooks that the new Neo model reminds me of. Except now the author's machine is much more powerful and in a classic chassis :D
I liked the glowing Apple logo touch. Perhaps if author wants to enhance this part they could mask off the Apple shape so there's less light bleed. But looks cool as-is.
I used to run Linux (JLime Linux) and NetBSD on those. I did prefer the bigger NEC MobilePro competitors though, but I spent so much time on those Jornadas in college.
I have an old aluminium 17" MacBook. It got retired fairly early because it suffered from a design flaw but was outside the free replacement window.
Its screen is nice, and there looks to be plenty of room inside. I have been keeping an eye on options for putting something else inside. Its mostly the power delivery for the display that I think is beyond my skill that's holding me back.
Mine is a random reset when GPU kicks in, Apparently it's a single tiny component that needs to be changed, but to get to it requires almost complete disassembly. The cost of having it done professionally probably more than it's worth. Chance of breaking it by doing it myself too high.
But now I'm just thinking of it as a solid box with nice screen and keyboard attached.
The worst part is that the discrete GPU was used to drive external displays, so now I’m stuck with a 17” integrated display, which is large for a laptop but still small for a computer that I’ll never again lug with me (it’s heavy by today’s standards).
> I remember these Macbooks did tend to break apart at the corners of the palmrests.
Not the corners for me, but the "feet" of the topcase digging into the palmrest, which would splinter the plastic, then you'd have holes in the case and jagged plastic splinters digging into your wrist as you typed, not enjoyable.
Shame because it was the last macbook that was really easy to upgrade: the battery was removable (with a simple lock), and behind it were the RAM and 2.5" drive slots.
The next generation was not that hard but you had to unscrew the entire bottom shell, and the battery was glued.
Mine had been upgraded from 4GB of RAM to 8GB, and I replaced the HDD with an SSD, and replaced the DVD drive with the original HDD for more storage. Was a nice machine for uni, I really loved it.
Unscrewing the bottom on the generations after this gave you access to nearly everything. Which was vastly superior for most repairs. Getting to the logic board or AirPort card on the polycarbonate MacBook took significantly longer. For the Bluetooth motherboard you had to remove the display cable, optical drive and HDD.
That’s what happened to my 2006 Core Duo MacBook after about three or four years of use. It was an excellent laptop that was quite user-serviceable (I upgraded the RAM and hard drive), but I did have problems with the palmrests, and the Ethernet port stopped working after four years.
It was my first Apple laptop and I have fond memories of using it during my college years.
I had one of those machines in university too and had the same stained/cracked palmrests. That said, I also paid for extended AppleCare and had the whole top case swapped for free multiple times throughout the three years that the coverage lasted.
When I was a broke student I would buy MacBooks with broken palm rests for a discounted price, drop them off at Apple for a free repair (under extended warranty) and flip them for a profit. Three hours of my time turned into €100 profit. Minimum wage was €6/hour back then.
Did the same years later buying up first gen iPod Nano and trading them in for sixth gen because of the battery recall.
I want a laptop form factor that is basically a briefcase with the display, computer and battery with space for a keyboard and mouse of some kind. I basically hate laptop keyboards/trackpads but want a portable computer. Plan on building my own at some point using frame.work components as the base but I haven't started on it yet. One day.
I'd like it in a setup that makes usable as a portable without a lot of setup. IMO it is feasibly to disable the keyboard/trackpad and just put my keyboard on top but it isn't ideal.
I have an external Thinkpad USB keyboard with full-travel keys, a built-in trackpoint, 3 physical buttons, and no trackpad. It cost me about £60 new, 3 years ago.
I use it with my MacBook Air when travelling, and a cheapo external USB-C screen with a broken laptop mount.
The MBA is slim, light, and 3 years on, its battery still lasts several days. It's perfectly able to do 8-10 hours of near-continuous use. But the keyboard and trackpad are awful.
So, external keyboard, external screen, pocket USB-C hub to connect them, which also gives me a spare full-size USB port and Ethernet.
If you don't need the battery life, I suggest investigating a ?20 era Thinkpad.
The X220 is quite portable and though the screen is small the keyboard is great and the range of ports good.
The T420 is moderately portable, has a decent screen and the i7 has a discrete GPU. Works surprisingly well with Wayland these days.
The W520 is not really portable at all but has a lovely big screen, tonnes of ports, and quad-core models have 4 SO-DIMM slots so 24 GB is cheap and 32 GB doable.
For all, get an i7 model, fit 2 SSDs and max out the RAM, and the result is perfectly usable in 2026 if you're a gamer or "influencer" who needs to edit video.
Cost, £200 or so.
And there's the 701 DS which has 2 screens, a numeric keypad, and a Wacom tablet built in.
very cool project. id like to do something similar with my favorite thinkpad models.
that said, practice soldering, the insulation on those wires[0] and the sheer distance that they wicked solder upwards makes me really wonder how much heat got dumped into those tiny pads!
Agreed, this got me thinking maybe I should try something similar with my own old macbook pro. They did mention that this was the first time they had soldered anything, so it's great that they went for it and it worked! So now it's just a matter of improving technique.
Long term, that may need to be redone. Really want less exposed wire in the final product, tin the tips of the wire first so they don't suck up the solder and trim to the appropriate length(only a bit bigger than the size of the pads at most). This is a good example on tinning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRPF4wpXX9Q And if you need to expose a lot of wire then just use some heatshrink so it's not exposed once you're done.
In a perfect world, you'd want to remove all the existing solder and then re-solder everything. But de-soldering can be its own skill and isn't always strictly necessary. Just something more to work toward.
I had a black and white MacBook that was a Frankensteins Monster made out of at least 3 of these. It was around 2011-12 and I couldn’t afford anything else. I think I still remember how to disassemble them by heart… <3
I definitely have a soft spot for these first MacBook designs. The plastic wasn't very good, but they looked so cool compared to most of the competition. Plus the introduction of x86 was really exciting.
This is pretty impressive! I'm always impressed with what one can 3D print to fit commercial products into a previous case! Modifying to fit the larger webcam module, battery in that way was neat too. Does the display connect via framework's cable without modification? I have an old motherboard running headless I was thinking of resurrecting but if I need to hook up a USC-C display.
I would imagine battery life would be poor vs an eReader. In case you seek the same: I used a boox onyx (12"?) and OK overall. Issues IMO were the display is very fragile & did it in in the end despite a case and pocket in the bag, color was a bit of gimmick, most importantly the resolution was not good enough read journals/PDFs/stuff like the guardian weekly via libby crisply without zooming in... but the rest was decent. I switched to a kindle scribe I got for 1/3 the price after but it can't read the guardian or anything like that unfortunately like an android tablet. So just a bulky eReader with meeting notes there. If it even just showed my daily calendar I’d be happy.
Boox Note Air 5C is €530, Kindle Scribe also in the region. Pine does tend to have a bit of a premium spec for spec, presumably largely from (lack of) scale.
Now you should go and reinforce the two lines on top of the screen, make them wider. Or replace them with something softer. Otherwise they will crush your topcase to a pulp. Like they did on every genuine macbook out there for many years because Apple never bothered to fix it.
Personally I thought the later plastic macbook with the rounded edges was a much nicer design. Or the earliest white iBooks, which had a transparent case with white paint inside so they had this really cool glow. Unfortunately that caused shadows on the tiniest scratch which acted like a magnifying glass, so you really had to keep it pristine. But in those days a macbook was super expensive so I always kept mine in sleeves.
By the way I love what you've done with the EL film powering the back apple light. That looks amazing. It should always have been implemented like this, so you can drive it separately.
Can I just say again that I absolutely love what Framework's built/enabled? Between projects like this and things like the RISC dev board, they've immediately become the hacker supplier of choice. When they first debuted, I was skeptical they'd survive, but they've really shown you can build a successful company for a niche audience, and they've had a huge impact for the maker community.
This is brilliant! The techniques remind me of a lot of my Toughbook modding, back in the day, which I did not document nearly enough.
I still have the shell of a CF-17 that's just begging for new guts... but I'd have to aim for something quite a bit lower-power as it's a sealed chassis with no provision for air cooling. Perhaps a CM4-based build...
Aaah! Why must other people be so productive! It gives me too many projects!
Hackintosh typically refers to running not-MacOS on apple hardware? Imo this project of removing almost all of the inner guts and using effectively a Frankenstein'd collection of things to reconstitute it into laptop needs a different word.
The first-gen macbook shared a lot of internals with certain Dell laptops of the era. In 2010 I was homeless and attending high school at a boarding school and didn't have nice macbooks like my classmates, but I cobbled together my first laptop that summer from a few different old salvaged Dell models.
Dual-booting into a hackintosh was a breeze. I eventually salvaged an old T60 and it was a similar case, enough crossover in components that it wasn't any trouble running macOS.
This was in an era where you wanted Apple software even on non-Apple hardware. Today, it's the opposite.
Love the energy with "i decided to just go for it.". The soldering to the touchpad is absolutely frightful, but you know what? First time soldering (to small testpoints no less), it works, it can always be fixed later if the joints fail. I've been getting too caught up in perfection with my recent projects, it's a good reminder that with a userbase of 1, it really doesn't matter.
This is super cool! These are the Macbooks that the new Neo model reminds me of. Except now the author's machine is much more powerful and in a classic chassis :D
I liked the glowing Apple logo touch. Perhaps if author wants to enhance this part they could mask off the Apple shape so there's less light bleed. But looks cool as-is.
They never actually say what the project is, LOL. I figured out that it’s to put the guts of a framework laptop into an old MacBook case.
Well done for figuring it out
Wow, 64 GB of RAM.
I'm really tempted to build a modern computer into an HP Jornada case. I really miss that form factor. It's pocketable yet has a usable keyboard.
I used to run Linux (JLime Linux) and NetBSD on those. I did prefer the bigger NEC MobilePro competitors though, but I spent so much time on those Jornadas in college.
At some point some kristoff guy was developing some flashrom boards so that jlime linux on the hp jornada could have actual suspend to ram.
On one hand, it would’ve been cool.
On the other hand, at the time netbooks were becoming common and were essentially taking the spot of those kind of devices (jornada 728 etc).
Is it easy these days to get a mortgage for 64 GB of RAM?
Just buy it on credit and then delete the app.
That's called Affirm
Negative.
I can only imagine a giant using the domestically-produced hardware of Lilliput.
Ha. I frequently visit this site to check out the latest little gadgets: https://liliputing.com/
You mean one of the wider ones? Look a little like cyberdecks.
I have an old aluminium 17" MacBook. It got retired fairly early because it suffered from a design flaw but was outside the free replacement window.
Its screen is nice, and there looks to be plenty of room inside. I have been keeping an eye on options for putting something else inside. Its mostly the power delivery for the display that I think is beyond my skill that's holding me back.
You may be interested in this Framework build that converted a 17" MBP.
https://community.frame.work/t/i-converted-a-macbook-into-a-...
Melted GPU? I’m still sore about that one.
Mine is a random reset when GPU kicks in, Apparently it's a single tiny component that needs to be changed, but to get to it requires almost complete disassembly. The cost of having it done professionally probably more than it's worth. Chance of breaking it by doing it myself too high.
But now I'm just thinking of it as a solid box with nice screen and keyboard attached.
The worst part is that the discrete GPU was used to drive external displays, so now I’m stuck with a 17” integrated display, which is large for a laptop but still small for a computer that I’ll never again lug with me (it’s heavy by today’s standards).
I remember these Macbooks did tend to break apart at the corners of the palmrests.
But I like the idea of re-visiting Macbook plastic chassis w/ new inside.
I would love to know what the weight is in the end.
Can the old Macbook chassis lead to a lighter weight computer than the current 1.23kg Macbook neo and Macbook air?
> I remember these Macbooks did tend to break apart at the corners of the palmrests.
Not the corners for me, but the "feet" of the topcase digging into the palmrest, which would splinter the plastic, then you'd have holes in the case and jagged plastic splinters digging into your wrist as you typed, not enjoyable.
This: https://ismh.s3.amazonaws.com/2014-02-24-macbook-topcase.jpg is exactly what mine had, on both sides.
Shame because it was the last macbook that was really easy to upgrade: the battery was removable (with a simple lock), and behind it were the RAM and 2.5" drive slots.
The next generation was not that hard but you had to unscrew the entire bottom shell, and the battery was glued.
Same issue with mine, and I came in the comments to see how many people were affected. I’m very surprised OP don’t have the problem with his unit.
Mine had been upgraded from 4GB of RAM to 8GB, and I replaced the HDD with an SSD, and replaced the DVD drive with the original HDD for more storage. Was a nice machine for uni, I really loved it.
Unscrewing the bottom on the generations after this gave you access to nearly everything. Which was vastly superior for most repairs. Getting to the logic board or AirPort card on the polycarbonate MacBook took significantly longer. For the Bluetooth motherboard you had to remove the display cable, optical drive and HDD.
That’s what happened to my 2006 Core Duo MacBook after about three or four years of use. It was an excellent laptop that was quite user-serviceable (I upgraded the RAM and hard drive), but I did have problems with the palmrests, and the Ethernet port stopped working after four years.
It was my first Apple laptop and I have fond memories of using it during my college years.
I had one of those machines in university too and had the same stained/cracked palmrests. That said, I also paid for extended AppleCare and had the whole top case swapped for free multiple times throughout the three years that the coverage lasted.
When I was a broke student I would buy MacBooks with broken palm rests for a discounted price, drop them off at Apple for a free repair (under extended warranty) and flip them for a profit. Three hours of my time turned into €100 profit. Minimum wage was €6/hour back then.
Did the same years later buying up first gen iPod Nano and trading them in for sixth gen because of the battery recall.
The plastic by the trackpad would turn pink as well from my sweaty hands. Good times.
From all those long sessions playing Call of Duty and Quake 4!
The palm rest plastic and screen frame cracked on almost all of these. Not a model I romanticize.
https://www.cultofmac.com/how-to/exchange-your-cracked-macbo...
I’d love the same thing but with the titanium powerbooks / intels. What a beautiful design it was.
I liked my old magnesium Thinkpad T41p but it was a different aesthetic.
I want a laptop form factor that is basically a briefcase with the display, computer and battery with space for a keyboard and mouse of some kind. I basically hate laptop keyboards/trackpads but want a portable computer. Plan on building my own at some point using frame.work components as the base but I haven't started on it yet. One day.
I want something like the huawei matebook fold but with a stand to raise the screen to an ergonomic height.
could this not be solved by just getting a laptop and also carrying external kb and mouse?
I'd like it in a setup that makes usable as a portable without a lot of setup. IMO it is feasibly to disable the keyboard/trackpad and just put my keyboard on top but it isn't ideal.
This is so established a thing that it has a name: Sonshi Style.
https://dylanbaileywrites.medium.com/sonshi-style-an-obscure...
I have an external Thinkpad USB keyboard with full-travel keys, a built-in trackpoint, 3 physical buttons, and no trackpad. It cost me about £60 new, 3 years ago.
I use it with my MacBook Air when travelling, and a cheapo external USB-C screen with a broken laptop mount.
The MBA is slim, light, and 3 years on, its battery still lasts several days. It's perfectly able to do 8-10 hours of near-continuous use. But the keyboard and trackpad are awful.
So, external keyboard, external screen, pocket USB-C hub to connect them, which also gives me a spare full-size USB port and Ethernet.
If you don't need the battery life, I suggest investigating a ?20 era Thinkpad.
The X220 is quite portable and though the screen is small the keyboard is great and the range of ports good.
The T420 is moderately portable, has a decent screen and the i7 has a discrete GPU. Works surprisingly well with Wayland these days.
The W520 is not really portable at all but has a lovely big screen, tonnes of ports, and quad-core models have 4 SO-DIMM slots so 24 GB is cheap and 32 GB doable.
For all, get an i7 model, fit 2 SSDs and max out the RAM, and the result is perfectly usable in 2026 if you're a gamer or "influencer" who needs to edit video.
Cost, £200 or so.
And there's the 701 DS which has 2 screens, a numeric keypad, and a Wacom tablet built in.
Hard to find and expensive, though.
I want a lunchbox formfactor laptop that can be integrated into a Eurorack or used stand-alone.
very cool project. id like to do something similar with my favorite thinkpad models.
that said, practice soldering, the insulation on those wires[0] and the sheer distance that they wicked solder upwards makes me really wonder how much heat got dumped into those tiny pads!
[0]: https://fb.edoo.gg/assets/images/image06.jpg?v=86ae0ddf
Agreed, this got me thinking maybe I should try something similar with my own old macbook pro. They did mention that this was the first time they had soldered anything, so it's great that they went for it and it worked! So now it's just a matter of improving technique.
Long term, that may need to be redone. Really want less exposed wire in the final product, tin the tips of the wire first so they don't suck up the solder and trim to the appropriate length(only a bit bigger than the size of the pads at most). This is a good example on tinning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRPF4wpXX9Q And if you need to expose a lot of wire then just use some heatshrink so it's not exposed once you're done.
In a perfect world, you'd want to remove all the existing solder and then re-solder everything. But de-soldering can be its own skill and isn't always strictly necessary. Just something more to work toward.
for cool framework thinkpad project, see https://github.com/Maglev-Rabbit/702_Project_Public.
I love these project posts that take a design people enjoy and upgrade the guts.
I think they speak to the importance of good design in the objects we use the most. Function but also form.
When everything is mass-produced, everything is ill-fitting. Normalize tailoring.
I had a black and white MacBook that was a Frankensteins Monster made out of at least 3 of these. It was around 2011-12 and I couldn’t afford anything else. I think I still remember how to disassemble them by heart… <3
> . i learned alot from this project, from how to solder,
This part is simply amazing, the "nothing is impossible" drive!
I definitely have a soft spot for these first MacBook designs. The plastic wasn't very good, but they looked so cool compared to most of the competition. Plus the introduction of x86 was really exciting.
This is pretty impressive! I'm always impressed with what one can 3D print to fit commercial products into a previous case! Modifying to fit the larger webcam module, battery in that way was neat too. Does the display connect via framework's cable without modification? I have an old motherboard running headless I was thinking of resurrecting but if I need to hook up a USC-C display.
An ebook reader from Framework would be awesome....
I would imagine battery life would be poor vs an eReader. In case you seek the same: I used a boox onyx (12"?) and OK overall. Issues IMO were the display is very fragile & did it in in the end despite a case and pocket in the bag, color was a bit of gimmick, most importantly the resolution was not good enough read journals/PDFs/stuff like the guardian weekly via libby crisply without zooming in... but the rest was decent. I switched to a kindle scribe I got for 1/3 the price after but it can't read the guardian or anything like that unfortunately like an android tablet. So just a bulky eReader with meeting notes there. If it even just showed my daily calendar I’d be happy.
This is probably close enough:
https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/
610 Euros seems quite steep for an eReader.
Boox Note Air 5C is €530, Kindle Scribe also in the region. Pine does tend to have a bit of a premium spec for spec, presumably largely from (lack of) scale.
Or a printer...
Or a phone ...
Or a router ...
No one will make a printer because the margins are so low. They are like the FMCG [0] of the tech world
0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-moving_consumer_goods
* OpenPrinter has entered the chat.
https://www.opentools.studio/
Phone is thankfully covered by Fairphone.
That is pretty cool, I would not have the time, creativity and dedication to start something like that. Wanted to donate a nice comment. Best regards
Now you should go and reinforce the two lines on top of the screen, make them wider. Or replace them with something softer. Otherwise they will crush your topcase to a pulp. Like they did on every genuine macbook out there for many years because Apple never bothered to fix it.
Personally I thought the later plastic macbook with the rounded edges was a much nicer design. Or the earliest white iBooks, which had a transparent case with white paint inside so they had this really cool glow. Unfortunately that caused shadows on the tiniest scratch which acted like a magnifying glass, so you really had to keep it pristine. But in those days a macbook was super expensive so I always kept mine in sleeves.
By the way I love what you've done with the EL film powering the back apple light. That looks amazing. It should always have been implemented like this, so you can drive it separately.
Can I just say again that I absolutely love what Framework's built/enabled? Between projects like this and things like the RISC dev board, they've immediately become the hacker supplier of choice. When they first debuted, I was skeptical they'd survive, but they've really shown you can build a successful company for a niche audience, and they've had a huge impact for the maker community.
DIYers are a core audience for us (along with Linux users), but actually we’ve had a lot of success with other audiences too!
This is brilliant! The techniques remind me of a lot of my Toughbook modding, back in the day, which I did not document nearly enough.
I still have the shell of a CF-17 that's just begging for new guts... but I'd have to aim for something quite a bit lower-power as it's a sealed chassis with no provision for air cooling. Perhaps a CM4-based build...
Aaah! Why must other people be so productive! It gives me too many projects!
So it's a Hackintosh?
Idk what the word for it is
Hackintosh typically refers to running not-MacOS on apple hardware? Imo this project of removing almost all of the inner guts and using effectively a Frankenstein'd collection of things to reconstitute it into laptop needs a different word.
If it were me I would choose
Franekntosh
No, Hackintosh specifically refers to running MacOS on non-Apple hardware.
I don't think there's a word for running other OSs on Apple hardware, because it's officially supported.
Hackintosh is running MacOS on non Mac hardware.
During the time of x86 macos this was AMD or Intel PCs
> During the time of x86 macos this was AMD or Intel PCs
Still is.
A modern Hackintosh can run macOS 15 "Sequioa" and Tahoe still has x86 support and OCLP is working on it. It will happen in time.
Looks like Windows with a very MacOS-esque theme rather than a proper hackintosh, the screenshot says Windows 11 IoT Enterprise.
For people curious, it looks like it is MyDockFinder. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1787090/MyDockFinder/
I previously had a pretty good experience with it before moving to Linux.
Scrolled down just to find this comment
I was initially so happy to see a Linux build that looked so much like macOS, but then saw windows 11 pro on the about, and died inside..
I guess that’s why it has 64 gb of ram, so that there’s 10 left for applications after windows is done lol
Indeed, is not a Mac, I really expected some old MACOS
Hackintosh refers to doing things the other way around: running MacOS on non-apple hardware. So no, this is not a hackintosh.
In a way, it’s the exact opposite
64GB RAM in a laptop, why
Interesting because I always felt like the Framework already looks like a Macbook Pro with the grey case and the black keys.
I wish the same could be done with the 11 inch MacBook airs, still my favorite laptop I’ve owned.
I still rock one of these running Linux and it’s plenty capable for my hobby workloads. Just had to replace the inflating battery!
What era and which distro? I have one from ~ 2011... would be cool to do something with it.
The first-gen macbook shared a lot of internals with certain Dell laptops of the era. In 2010 I was homeless and attending high school at a boarding school and didn't have nice macbooks like my classmates, but I cobbled together my first laptop that summer from a few different old salvaged Dell models.
Dual-booting into a hackintosh was a breeze. I eventually salvaged an old T60 and it was a similar case, enough crossover in components that it wasn't any trouble running macOS.
This was in an era where you wanted Apple software even on non-Apple hardware. Today, it's the opposite.
The mid-2000s Yahoo chat writing style is too grating for me in this article.
theseus's macbook, love it!
Dog ate your shift key?
Noice!
Very cool!
Ugh, those bezels are so 2000. Maybe a good laptop if you don't wanna look at it all the time (e.g., as a home server).