Raspberry Pi 4 Powers Retro Apple Experience

News
By Ash Hill
published

This Macintosh SE/30 is Raspberry Pi 4 powered—complete with the look and feel of Mac OS.

Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: MajorWahoobies)

The Raspberry Pi is so small, half of the fun of using one in a project is finding something to put it in. Reddit user MajorWahoobies may have found the best Pi housing out there for Apple fans—especially those with a favor for their vintage desktop computers. With the help of a Raspberry Pi 4, MajorWahoobies has brought power back to an old Macintosh SE/30.

The project doesn’t just use the Macintosh SE/30 for housing either, it hosts an operating system designed to look like Mac OS. This is something we’ve seen before in projects like iRaspbian but, in this case, MajorWahoobies is using TwisterOS. If putting Raspberry Pis into Apple products is your thing, you should also check out this Raspberry Pi “PiMac” project and this Raspberry Pi-powered MacBook.

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Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: MajorWahoobies)

According to MajorWahoobies, no working Macintosh SE/30 had to be sacrificed just for this project but rather the case was purchased from eBay as is. Only a small modification was necessary to install the new LCD screen used by the Pi for display output. For this project, MajorWahoobies has installed a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB model with a 1TB SSD inside of the old Macintosh SE/30. That said, there’s no reason you couldn’t use an older model like a Pi 3 or even a Pi Zero.

The Pi is secured within an Argon ONE case (check out our review of the M.2 variant which features a slot for an M.2 SATA SSD), alongside an 18-watt power supply. It also makes use of a USB hub to both connect peripherals and power the LG 9.7-inch LCD panel (2048 x 1536px). For input, the setup relies on a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard/touchpad combo.

On the software side, it’s running BerryBoot boot manager which can be used to select between a few operating systems including Buster, Bullseye, Kodie, RetroPie, and Xubuntu using just one microSD card. To get the Mac OS experience, MajorWahoobies is using TwisterOS with Xubuntu to modify the GUI.

If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project yourself, check out the original thread over at Reddit for more details and comments from MajorWahoobies about the creation process.

Ash Hill
Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.