Apple II Bits

You may not know Charles Mangin’s name, but you know his work. Almost six years ago, he put a Mac G4 inside a Mac Plus. Two years later, he put a 2006-era Mac mini inside a Disk II floppy drive case. He’s like a cat who just loves being inside things.

One of Mangin’s early failed hybrids.

Having recently completed his Kickstarter-funded PressurePen project, which brought a pressure-sensitive stylus to the iPad and other tablets, Mangin is now returning his attention to his retrocomputing hobby. He’s privately shown me some ideas he’s working on, and they have the potential to be killer. But instead of using Kickstarter to fund the development, Mangin is turning to eBay. Specifically, he is selling the aforementioned Mac mini.

But does it still make that grinding noise at boot-up?

The auction, which ends on Monday, October 1, 2012, does not yet have a taker on an opening bid of $500 or a Buy It Now price of a cool $1,000. Either one is a significant investment, and one I’ll unfortunately have to pass on — but only because I’m waiting for Mangin’s G4 IIc to go on sale.

Mac OS X has never looked better.

Want to save a buck and try to create your own thing-inside-a-thing? Get more details on how to perform the Disk II hack from the RetroMacCast forum, the RetroMacCast podcast, or on Flickr — or follow John Bumstead’s video tutorial.

It seems almost every time Apple is due to refresh their product line, the Mac mini is rumored to get the axe. But this model, the most affordable (though perhaps underpowered) of all Macs, is an excellent low-end product that most people overlook. For consumers switching from a PC who already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, the Mac mini is the best value. Three years ago, I replaced my father’s beige PowerMac G3 with a Mac mini. After I upgraded the RAM, he couldn’t have been more satisfied with his first OS X machine, which serves him well to this day.

But an average Apple II user might find the Mac mini underwhelming, as we like to trick out our rigs, and the mini, with its compact size and modest horsepower, doesn’t afford much opportunity to do that. So if we can’t go forward with the Mac mini, why not go backward?

Dr. Steve Weyhrich of Apple2History.org posted to csa2 the story of Charles Mangin, who has taken his Mac mini and encased it in a Disk II floppy drive, which was popular with the Apple II. Like the TARDIS, the Disk II must be larger on the inside than it appears!

Copyright Charles Mangin

This same gentleman made a similar internal upgrade when he put a G4 Macintosh into an original Mac Plus. I wonder what he does with the discarded guts?

(Hat tips to Gizmodo and Blake Patterson)