Fresh from the Low End Mac tech Mailbag is a CustoMac submission from one of our community members, Dan Schnur. He put together “The newest 2025 model year Macintosh IIci”, and this thing has a completely brand new, purple logic board! Gives it a strong Sonnet upgrade kind of vibe, the way it looks.
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Assembling a logic board

Dan Schnur: “Soon to be the world’s newest (really) low end Mac. All I need is for UPS to deliver the rest of the parts tomorrow and it’ll be on to testing and debugging!”
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(Above: Before starting)

(Above: After one evening)

(Above: During)

First boot

First Boot! The (almost) world’s newest Mac IIci logic board. I have a little more debugging with the power on/off circuits to go, then I’ll add the rest of the parts, clean it up, give it one last test, one more last test, etc. After that, it goes into a restored case (scrubbed/retrobrited/new nickel-conductive coating on the inside.)

It will also have a fully restored / recapped power supply with a nice quiet Noctua fan and an Ethernet card which has been updated to work with modern switches.
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I’d like to present to you..

…The newest 2025 model year Macintosh IIci! All done. I needed to use a fresh copy of the ROM’s because all my parts board had a bad UM12. That’s the one the battery is happiest taking out.
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Just about complete. All it needs is a programmer’s switch. I borrowed a video and cache card from a different machine. The power supply is fully recapped, cleaned and restored. Looks like a normal restored IIci, except for the hint of purple.
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All buttoned up! Passed all Snooper tests several times over too. Too bad nobody makes a clear case for it.
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Spreadsheet I had to make so I could see what was happening on the power circuit of a working machine vs this one. Figured it out! After seeing this it was pretty obvious.
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