FrameBook.
A reimagined classic, that's only a little bit janky.
the first-gen macbook from '06 is one of my favorite laptop designs ever, mostly because for the longest time it was one of the only macbooks u could get in black besides the powerbook g3.plus it was the first macbook i ever personally owned, although this was around 2015, so even by then the performance was pretty crummy.what inspired me to do this project was reading articles and watching videos about people retrofitting old macs and old pcs with new guts (usually m1 minis), and i got really motivated when i read that someone had already done something like this, and after watching f4mi's video on converting an imac g5 to a fully-kitted monitor.
and so, after doing lots of research into motherboards, display panels, and gathering everything i could think i would need for this project, in the wise words of NileRed:
i decided to just go for it.
to begin, i ordered a few black polycarb macbooks (model a1181) from ebay. they were all pretty beat up and didn't have their batteries, nor did they power on.i then found and order some oem parts of the outer chassis that i guess had never been made into an actual uniti then follow an ifixit tutorial to completely take apart the macbooks, till i was down to just the bare chassis. my main idea was that the used macs were gonna be my test runs before i did anything with the oem parts, since they were the cleanest looking parts.pretty much all of the parts of the mac i discarded, since they didn't work and even on their own, aren't worth alot if i did sell them. i did keep only a few metal brackets that screwed into the bottom of the bottom chassis (after dremeling away the "middle" section for the old removeable ram sticks), and another that's screwed in at the top that actually holds the hinges for the top chassis.
here's the guts i'm putting in the macbook:
Framework Laptop 13 Mainboard - Intel® Core™ i7-1280P 64GB 2X32GB DDR4 RAM MND307DA1-9 CSOT Display Panel
and here's some periperals and other things i put in the mac
Anker USB C Hub, 7-in-2 EZQuest USB-C Hub, 6-in-1 SVPRO 8MP USB Camera Framework Laptop 13 Speaker Kit USB 2.0 Expansion Module
... continue reading