Modder extroidinaire, Ben Heckendorn has built, quite possibly, the greatest Apple mod to ever grace the Earth. His Apple IIgs laptop makes the Mac|Life staff weepy with nostalgia.
The laptop is equipped with,
• 15-inch color screen,
• Original Apple IIgs motherboard,
• Custom keyboard,
• Original mouse,
• Compact Flash adapter to function as the hard drive,
• Glowing "][" logo
• Built-in stereo speakers
• Side port access for floppy drive, joystick and mouse
The bad news, Ben says that this is a one-time project and he will not be making anymore. Nooo!!!
Check out Ben's photo gallery and video of the project and be amazed.
CPTKILLER
April 15, 2008 at 10:26am
Some of us remember when gas and Mac's were cheap. There is a lot of nostalgia with regard to old Mac's that were compact and really worked. Mine is the old Fat Mac. It was a great engineering tool for its time doing CAD with MacDraft, Spreadsheets with Excel 1.0, Word processing with another product, and project scheduling. This was all with no hard drive but rather the internal and an external hard drive, a dot matrix printer, and a pin plotter.
The gentleman who did this is very creative. However this should be seen as a warning bell to Apple, that we want something different and less expensive than what they currently offer.
Do things differnetly (and well) but don't put all of us in the same box. Nice job on this project.
MacAddict4Life
April 15, 2008 at 10:56am
I don't follow your logic. Some guy making something cool looking out of an old Mac means we want different and cheaper?
I mean, I guess and Apple II is cheaper than a new Mac, but I don't think this is his new production machine...
Ryan
April 15, 2008 at 4:09pm
I can kind of see how this might seem like an indication that we (consumers) would appreciate if yesterday's technology was made available in a new wrapper. Let's just say that Apple took some older technology that was cheaper to produce and provided a $199 portable mini-computer that did some "basic" things.
The problem is that it might not actually be cheaper to do this, but I can see how it would appear that way. And I would personally like to have a lightweight portable computer, even if it were only capable of file management, web browsing, text editing, email, etc.
What if Apple could package up a processor that was capable of running a basic Mac OS X installation, a 10" screen, mini-keyboard, and some USB ports, and sell it for $99. I'd buy one. Or better yet, maybe a 6" screen and I could fit it in my pocket.
Emmett The Crab
April 15, 2008 at 9:41am
What does the "Z" stand for in ZOMG?
