The world's first Apple Silicon iMac is actually a Mac Mini

Unwilling to wait the few months until the launch of the first Apple Silicon iMac, a popular retro computing vlogger has retrofitted a 2011 27-inch model with the innards of the latest M1 Mac Mini. And it worked. Sort of. This wasn’t as hard as you might expect. YouTuber Luke Miani's first step was to remove the internals of …

[AlexG_UK]

This must surely be christened a Mac Mi(a)ni!

[CynicalOptimist]

I have the same era iMac - I painstakingly deconstructed it so that I could swap the processor - forgetting to put the optical drive back in during the reconstruction process! (it was behind me on the floor). The optical drive has now spent 5 happy years in my cupboard.

[Justin Clements]

Wow

He put a board inside a case designed to hold a board. Just wow. Seriously? Are we struggling for stories today? He didn't even make the power switch work. It may have taken him 2-3 minutes to work that out.

Look, I put a AMD 64core machine in a G5 case. Power switch doesn't work. And the holes didn't match up, I even took a grinder to open the back up. And the SSD is held in with hope. But the PSU does hold itself (barely) inside with one screw. And to stop mice living in the machine I put a bait box in it.

Can I too have a particpation award?

[david bates]

Re: Wow

I took a 7 bay networked SCSI CDROM box with a top mounted PSU, took an angle grinder to it as well, fitted a new PSU AND a micro-ATX board in the old PSU enclosure and filled the rest of the box with HDDs to make a NAS.

Can I have an award as well please?

[TeeCee]

Re: Wow

I once had a gen-u-ine honest-to-god IBM AT case, containing a 486 DX4 100 mobo with a SCSI card and the rest of the case stuffed with surplus AS/400 SCSI disks.

I had them set to sequential spin up both 'cos it sounded cool and also it didn't blow the (bog AT) PSU.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Wow

It's not that he did it, it's that Apple hardware is usually fortified by design to make something like this impossible, and it's a surprise that he was able to do it. This is the same Apple whose products are typically rated 1 out of 10 (or worse!) for repairablity by iFixit.

[Dan 55]

Re: Wow

He's probably going to find the new M1 Macs will die sooner or later (Louis Rossmann, 10 mins).

[Duvelhedz]

The issue with these 2011 machines is the the graphics cards all go bad on them (2011 AMD crap) I got mine with this fault for next to nothing. Tricked it out with a flashed K4100M 4GB card (for bootscreen, native brightness control etc) 32GB RAM and bucketloads of storage. A more modern wifi card was added to enable Handoff. They are the last gen that can be truly upgraded. Still smokes the pants off a 2018 iMac with a HDD. Here is a link to the GPU swap if anyone wants to have a go.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2011-imac-graphics-card-upgrade.1596614/

[Mark 65]

Hey hey hey, don't forget the 2010s too. My graphics card sh*t itself and the only thing anyone would replace it with was the exact same model sh*tty card that had the issue in the first place. Wouldn't even replace it with a later model card that was clearly compatible. For this reason it's stuck on High Sierra.

[Anonymous Coward]

"My graphics card sh*t itself"

POINH

[WallMeerkat]

I've been looking at using my 2014 Mac Mini for a project, but that is the thing - accessing the ports and power buttons. Even if you have extender mounts for the USB sockets, you still have a fashion a mechanism for pressing power, and I haven't figured that out.

Maybe a commenter who has more of a hardware background could provide tips?

[WarmCat]

Should be as easy as disconnecting the wires from the back of the iMac power button, and soldering a pair of wires from the MacMini power button to the iMac power button.

[-tim]

HDMI converter?

Does anyone have references for the HDMI -> iMac display adapters or any advice on what to look for? I have a few very nice iMac screens that could use a new computer attached since Apple doesn't want to pay any of their engineers to do what DosDude1 has done.