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Self-declared hipster builds Macintosh Portable case mod, reckons it goes well with skinny jeans (video)
If size and weight aren't nearly as important as turning heads at your local coffee shop, then why bother with today's banal hardware if you've got a perfectly good Macintosh Portable lying around? One nostalgic modder with a disregard for luggability has updated Apple's very first laptop to run OS X, creating what he calls "a great café computer." Obviously, the software isn't all that's changed, as behind the white plastic hides the internals of a Toshiba NB100 netbook sacrificed for the project. The keyboard has been painstakingly rewired through a USB controller, and the ball mouse now houses an optical cousin which connects via the original cable. A cordless drill battery powers the thing, which has also been gifted with all the mod cons -- WiFi and USB connectivity -- to make it pretty usable. If you're interested in build pics, the tech-savvy hipster promises to post them soon at the source link below, and for a tour of the finished article, a video awaits you beyond the fold.
Apple Macintosh 128k prototype with 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drive for sale on eBay
Apple's Macintosh took many forms over the years, from its initial concept by Jef Raskin as a $500 appliance that contained a built-in keyboard, printer and 5-inch display, to its ceremonious debut in 1984 with an inflated price that was five times this initial vision. For a period in the Mac's development, it was assumed that the computer would feature Apple's proprietary Twiggy 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, which also came as standard issue on the original Lisa. Just recently, an extremely rare prototype of the 128k Mac with a Twiggy drive has surfaced on eBay, but with an opening bid of $99,995, this antique is beyond what most of us could ever afford.While the Twiggy disk could store an impressive 860KB of data, it was also notoriously unreliable -- so bad, in fact, that one engineer responsible for the drive remarked to Steve Jobs, "Take out your .45 and shoot the friggin' horse in the head." Ultimately, the company did just that, and the original Macintosh shipped with a 3.5-inch drive from Sony that could write only 400KB to its not-so-floppy disks. While this prototype will attract only the most affluent of bidders, the rest of us can enjoy the priceless photos of what might've been.
