Apple hardware has always been proprietary, sometimes to an extreme. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to make something that does the same job, which is what [DosFox1] appears to have done with the OSHintosh. It’s an open source PCB that implements a Mac 512k. Is it a 68k Hackintosh? You decide.

While it boots into a classic Mac OS image, it’s not quite a Mac. For a start, there are no disks, and no SCSI. Instead it boots from a disk held in ROM, which we guess will be a lot faster than the floppy from back in the day. They’ve even managed to do it on a 2-layer board, which means that despite its size, it shouldn’t be too expensive to have made.

We’re not sure quite what the legality of dumping a Mac ROM image to the ROM on this board would be, but assume for a moment that you own a copy in a defunct original Mac. This board can’t yet replace the original due to the disk issue, but given that original Macs are now long in the tooth, a modern replacement for those who must have hardware rather than an emulator sounds like a good idea. Perhaps for some people it will join the FPGA Amiga.

Recently [Tucker Osman] brought to life what once was just a meme created by the BBC as it poked fun at Apple’s push for ever smaller devices that also dropped many features along the path towards questionable innovation. This ‘Mactini’ was a super-small laptop, with just a single button that did everything, befitting the overpriced more-money-than-sense status symbol vibe that [Jony Ive] brought to Apple.

The input method suggested in the BBC video involves convoluted patterns using the single button, which would be functional, albeit cumbersome. Even as [Tucker] set out on this mission to make the Mactini real, he had to answer a lot of questions, while sticking to the rules that it had to follow the rough form factor of the original and have the same features.

In lieu of overcomplicating things, he opted to use a 1.69″ ST7789V2-based SPI LCD along with a small RP2350-based board from Waveshare for the brains. Rather than just slapping the LCD example for the Pico board on it as firmware, he actually used DMA to do the screen data copying, freeing up a lot of CPU cycles.

The rest of the hardware was cobbled together from e-waste parts, including an iPad speaker and an audio amplifier from a scrap board. Video was handled using Motion JPEG decoding for a not-horrible-framerate. All of this was put into a 3D printed case that was designed in FreeCAD, to make the Mac that [Ive] could only have dreamed of back in the 2000s.