MacBook Mod Gives Base Station Chassis New Purpose 129
odysseus31173 writes "A little over a year ago, I began developing for the iPhone and needed a working mac (not a Hackintosh), so I decided to purchase a MacBook logic board to save on cost. I modded a Linksys case to accept the logic board (along with all of the other hardware) and made it function again. The Mac currently runs Leopard and has a working iSight and mic along with fully functional WiFi and bluetooth. The RAM is the standard 1 gig, but the hard drive has been upgraded to 160 gigs. The iSight/mic holes in the front panel are hard to see and this could be used as a nanny cam of sorts."
Re:Looks like a Hackintosh to Me (Score:3, Informative)
Unless 'that much work' amounts to putting a Mac in a different case. He made a non-portable MacBook, but of course OS X installed on it, it is an Apple computer.
Re:Link already dead (Score:1, Informative)
RSS feed on feedburner still works http://feeds.feedburner.com/phantomdev/lHhb
Google Cache working (Score:5, Informative)
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phantomdev.com%2Fmacbook_mod_2%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [74.125.93.132]
Re:Not a bad little hack (Score:3, Informative)
drive and memory is cheap. 500GB 2.5" is $70. So we can safely say that new you can get them for under $100.
I think it is reasonable to say that a $350 is significantly less than $600.
And if you go on ebay(ewww) and buy a semi-broken macbook and take its logic board, or buy a used working logic board they are significantly less than $250. Most of the buy-it-now prices are more than $250, but you can usually get one for under $200 with a little effort.
Re:So you bolted together a Mac from parts ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So you bolted together a Mac from parts ... (Score:2, Informative)
Who labeled this informative? A single chicken will lay eggs just fine; if you want them fertilized you need 2.
Re:Um (Score:4, Informative)
Just in case anyone thinks building a Hackintosh is clearly bad...
Installing OS X can be an easy process IF the hardware which it's being installed on plays nice with it. I believe a lot of people, myself included, got turned off to getting OS X working on their machines because of the *MANY* issues people faced while trying to get Tiger to work. Now that the entire OS is written for the x86 platform, many machines with Core 2 Duo processors or higher can at least install OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard using the retail disc, which was never possible previously. The only thing that's needed to get the disc to boot is a bootloader that can recognize it.
Choosing the right hardware makes a huge difference in getting OS X running just right. Lots of people run into issues with sound, graphics and wireless, but they also fail to consider that these fail because OS X lacks the native support to make them work. Furthermore, many of those experiencing growing pains fail to look at the HUGE wiki of compatible devices that have been tried and proven working.
I was able to get OS X Snow Leopard installed on my Dell Latitude E-series laptop with minimal pitfalls. The only trip-ups are in areas that don't bother me, but might bother others. I can't sleep the machine if I want to keep my webcam and USB 2.0 at the moment, and everyone's having problems shutting down and restarting their machines using ACPI. Considering the minimal amount of time I needed to get it up and urnning, I consider these side effects negligible. The fact that I can use OS X in my daily workflow and virtualize Windows 7 within it is more than enough to keep me happy.
In the end, though, I wouldn't recommend that people build rigs expressly for getting OS X installed on it unless it differs significantly from Apple's offerings and is significantly less expensive. Their prices are coming down quite nicely, so I don't think they are as unreasonable as they used to be. Plus, their Mac Pro is pretty nice...