There’s the Mac Mini, and Then This Mini Mac You Never Knew You Needed

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Apple’s Mac Mini has been sitting quietly on desks all across the world, pushing through daily business and creative chores with the simplicity of a small powerhouse. In spirit, if not in design, it is right next to an equally little, yet quite different, machine known popularly as the Mini Mac, or Wondermac in some circles. This little device began life as a Maclock, a desk clock that looks exactly like the original 1984 Macintosh, complete with the instantly identifiable beige shell, a teeny-tiny screen bezel, and even a false floppy disk port, but what occurs next adds a lot of complexity to what was once a simple gimmick.

YouTuber This Does Not Compute disassembled the Maclock and then rebuilt it from the ground up, using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a chip small enough to fit discreetly inside the clock’s shell but powerful enough to tackle the work at hand. He combined it with a 2.8-inch Waveshare LCD panel, which is small enough to fit comfortably behind the curved plastic lens that attempts to simulate an old-school CRT monitor. The resolution is a respectable 640×480, which complements the old atmosphere perfectly. For power, he used a customized USB-C connection on the back, which was tuned to produce a clean 5 volts after some fiddling with the original charging circuit to bypass it. Then there’s a little heatsink that quietly keeps the Pi from overheating without creating any fan noise.

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