Duncan Hall's "Restomod" Apple Macintosh SE Hides Modern Internals and Some Smart 3D Printing
A restoration-modification project bears impressive fruit, as this empty shell of a classic Apple Mac is brought back from the brink.
Maker Duncan Hall has saved a scrapped Apple Macintosh SE's housing from the scrapheap, turning into a modern sleeper build — powered, in another great example of e-waste diversion, by the guts of a Dell XPS laptop whose screen had met an unfortunate end.
"In 1987, when Apple released the Macintosh SE, it represented the cutting edge of personal computing," Hall explains of the "restomod" project. "With its compact all-in-one design, built-in hard drive capability, and that iconic beige case, the Mac SE was the computer many of us dreamed of owning but could never quite afford. For me, that dream lingered for decades. It wasn't until 2010 that fate intervened in the form of a garage sale. There it was, an empty Mac SE case, specifically the M5011 'SuperDrive' model from 1987."
Unsurprisingly, given it was on sale for just $10, the case was entirely empty — having long since lost its original innards, which would have included an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 1MB of RAM, and a 20MB or 40MB hard drive behind the machine's iconic 9" monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) display, which itself sits above the machine's dual floppy drives.
The empty shell was in poor cosmetic state, having been subject to an ill-advised paint job some time in its past, but relatively intact — and, being from the age of CRT displays, provided plenty of room for the mainboard of a scrapped Dell XPS laptop one a new 9.7" color flatscreen display had been inserted. The problem of modern systems having very different ports to those of a classic Macintosh was resolved with a little 3D-printing, providing a custom input/output cover that exposes a power connector and switch, HDMI, and USB ports.
Other modifications made to bring Hall's build up to spec include a switch from mono to full stereo digital audio and a repurposing of the cut-out behind which the floppy drive lived in the original machine: "Where 3.5-inch diskettes once provided the primary means of data transfer," Hall explains, "a 5MP [megapixel] webcam and microphone now reside in a 3D-printed enclosure. It's a perfect example of how modern functionality can be seamlessly integrated into vintage design."
The build is documented in full on Hall's website; a separate page provides links to the components used plus STL files for the 3D-printed parts.