Since some readers liked the unusual Mac mods in a recent article, I’ve decided to go with a part 2 to share some more! I was a PC user before I became a Mac user in 2008, the mindset of modifying/upgrading your PC as you desired made it’s way over to how I interacted with my Macs.
Nothing was off limits to me, I just wanted to throw things at the wall and see what would stick, just see if the imagination works. I won’t focus too much on the eGPU Mac mods as they’ve been covered extensively.
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1. Magnetic Retina iMac screen
They say when there’s a will, there’s a way.. but which way was this idea going? With the help of superglue and old hard drives, this iMac is now more easily accessible.
I took a bunch of old 3.5″ desktop hard drives, took the neodymium magnets out of them, and superglued them into a 2013 21.5-Inch iMac. Superglue didn’t hold up overtime like I’d have wanted to, but the concept actually worked.
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2. Several iMac G3 cooling mods
These were all done in 2010 when I had a ton of 2000-2001 iMac G3s, thought it looked cool so I ended up doing it to multiple iMacs.
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3. Portable 4x AA-Cell iPod power bank
A friend gave me water-damaged iPod with a dead battery, which could be revived only by keeping it plugged in. I was too lazy to take it apart and fix it, so instead I just made a portable 4x AA Duracell battery bank. Modern problems require modern solutions.
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4. Different colored keyboards and Apple logos
The IceBook G3s had relatively easy to disassembly displays, so it was easy to slip a piece of construction paper in there and call it a day.
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5. Mac Pro 1,1 GPU not working anymore? Still good to hold a Rift CV1 sensor.
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6. Running an Oculus Rift CV1 off a Mac Pro 2,1
There are multiple things going on here: Aqua Blue LED light modification, an Asus Strix GTX 980 TI is in the Mac Pro, it’s running El Capitan with a Piker Alpha mod, and it dual booted Windows 10. I did this back in 2017 to prove you didn’t need an AMD FX-8350 to run VR.
Despite all the modern (and valid) advancements in graphics and compute power, an 8-core upgraded 2006 Mac Pro or a 2007 Mac Pro with solid upgrades can handle VR for real.
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I miss this Mac Pro 2,1 although still have the Oculus Rift CV1, albeit now connected to a Mac Pro 5,1. Am interested in collecting a good condition 2,1 again at some point in the future, and make an even better version than the one I had before. Hopefully the software can still run on there in 2025!
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7: iMac on a wood board
I’ve covered iMac in a shelf, but here’s another one I did – it runs entirely off the 32 GB sandisk drive, with Yosemite Piker Alpha. It’s a 2006 17-Inch education model iMac with the wires spliced to power a Mac Pro 3,1 GPU. It now has graphical hardware acceleration for all Mac OS X versions up to 10.11 Capitan.
Have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Would be nice to throw it into a case, make it look nice. Also a proper SSD for it, as well.
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In Conclusion
Wanna see more whacky experiments from the past, to any more in the future? Stay tuned for part 3 and beyond in this series, whenever it may be. Some of these unusual mods deserve a revisit for their own article, while others have their own YouTube video up on my own channel. Thank you for reading!
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