This Vintage Apple PowerBook Hides Modern MacBook Power

We all enjoy looking at vintage computers and some of us even like doing a bit of computing on vintage computers ...for a little while, as novelty treat. But while many old appliances and devices are just as useful today as their modern counterparts, that simply isn’t true of computers. If you need to get something done, you would be crazy to grab anything with RAM measured in kilobytes or megabytes. That’s why we love that Billy The Kid used modern MacBook hardware to make a vintage Apple PowerBook useful again.

Billy The Kid’s 1994 PowerBook 520C was from a dark period in Apple’s history. The Macintosh was old news by that time and the Apple II series had just been discontinued the year before, but this was before the return of Steve Jobs and Apple’s renaissance. However, the PowerBook 520C still possesses a certain authentic charm that is impossible to find in a modern laptop. Even so, no amount of charm would make a 30-year-old laptop practical and Billy The Kid’s example wasn’t functioning anyway.

To get all the usability of a modern computer in that delightful vintage package, Billy The Kid replaced all of the electronic components. The only real exceptions were the keyboard and trackpad. The replacement hardware came from a broken 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2.7GHz Intel Core i5 processor. That isn’t new, but it is more than capable of handling the vast majority of tasks a modern user would want to tackle on a laptop. It is running macOS Monterey (Version 12) and compatibility with most software should be strong.

Laptops from the early ‘90s had much smaller screens than what we’re accustomed to now and the PowerBook 520C was no different. Its LCD was just 9.5”, which presented a problem for Billy The Kid. The donor MacBook Pro was built for a 13.3” display that would never fit in the PowerBook’s bezel. The solution was to use a 9.7” Retina screen from an iPad 3, which fit with only minor bezel trimming.

Billy The Kid was able to connect the display to the MacBook motherboard using an Adafruit Qualia adapter board (an AbuseMark board would work, too). A custom adapter made with a Teensy 4.0 development board allowed for connection of the original keyboard to the MacBook motherboard. Power comes from a battery pack made using a handful of lithium battery cells (disclaimers galore with that).

The fit is almost perfect and everything looks great. With the power off, everyone would assume that this is just an old PowerBook. But when power comes on, Billy The Kids gets all of the benefits of a relatively modern MacBook.