For years Love Hultén has been making gamers jealous of his woodworking and electronics skills with hand-crafted arcade cabinets, portable consoles, and handheld gaming units. But now he’ll be the envy of Mac fans too with a new replica of the original Macintosh he calls the Golden Apple.
It’s understandable why Apple chose to make the original Macintosh with a plastic housing instead of warm walnut wood; it was far cheaper to mass produce. But Hultén makes a strong case for skipping plastic altogether on his hand-crafted replica.
Even the Golden Apple’s custom keyboard is made from walnut, with gold-plated zinc keys backed by blue cherry MX tactile switches so it feels as good to type on as it does to look at. Given how many people have snatched up gold iPhones and MacBooks over the years, there’s no doubt a gold keyboard would be a big seller these days.
You won’t find the guts from an original Macintosh 128K inside the Golden Apple, though. Instead of cannibalising one of the original machines which aren’t so easy to come by these days, Hultén instead packed his recreation with a Mac Mini inside, and an optical DVD drive where the original only accepted floppy disks.
So where can you order one for your own private collection? Unfortunately, you can’t. Like many of Hultén’s creations, this is a one-off meant for his own personal use. All you can do is lust at it through your browser (although technically nothing is stopping you from building your own).