Phil Letourneau's 3D-Printed Fully-Functional Mini Apple Macintosh Is a Wedding Gift with Byte

Director of product design and kinetic sculpture artist Phil Letourneau has presented two of his friends with a most unusual wedding present: a fully-functional classic Apple Macintosh in miniature, custom-printed and powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer (SBC).

"I built a Tiny Mac for @lindadong and @clarko as a wedding gift," Letourneau announced on Mastodon of the project. "Unsurprisingly, I added some special touches, such as an internal speaker, and color matched Bluetooth mouse & keyboard."

The design of the miniature machine, which came complete in a gift box with transparent window, is based on the original Apple Macintosh — released in 1984 as the successor to the Apple Lisa, and perhaps best known for being the subject of Apple's iconic Super Bowl XVII advert as directed by Ridley Scott. There's one major difference, though: Apple's version sits on your desk, while Letourneau's variant can sit on the palm of your hand.

"The case is 3D printed," Letourneau writes, having used files originally designed by Chuck Genco and published to Thingiverse under a Creative Commons license. "I won’t settle for unsightly layer lines, so I sanded it up to 600 grit, and applied a thin textured clear coat to approximate that classic Mac plastic texture. Found a gift box I was able to retrofit with some laser-cut inserts and some awesome adhesive-backed jet black velvet. I angled the insert to show more of the Mac's volume."

Inside the Mac-style shell is a fully-functional computer, complete with display operable in original black-and-white or modern color modes and running an emulator for the true Mac OS experience. "It runs Mac OS 7.5.5 using the phenomenal Mini vMac emulator," Letourneau explains. "It's fully featured, runs like a dream in both black and white and color modes. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W — which are in incredibly short supply [but] thankfully I had one in my inventory."

To finish the build, and the match the functionality of the original, Letourneau crammed a compact speaker and Adafruit amplifier into the case for stand-alone sound — using a USB sound card soldered directly to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. And as for the recipients' reactions: "I CANT STOP PLAYING WITH MY NEW TINY MAC," Linda Dong posted to Mastodon in response.

More details are available in Letourneau's Mastodon thread.