Decapitating a MacBook (2025)

Posted by luu 2 days ago

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Comments

Comment by jeremyloy_wt 2 days ago

I could not grasp the “why” here, not for the life of me. A Mac mini/studio would have been so much straightforward for the actual cited problem of “needing to develop on Apple hardware”.

Sometimes we do things just for “the love of the game” and learn something along the way but I couldn’t help scratching my head the entire time while reading this

Comment by walrus01 1 day ago

I have to say I'm a bit perplexed as to why a person who is living in a small camping trailer would not want a normally functioning laptop with a screen.

https://mm-dev.rocks/posts/my-working-environment/intro/

I could see something like a macbook laptop sans screen being useful if it was like, perma wired into the electronics enclosure in a cabinet on a boat and plugged into an existing monitor/keyboard/touchpad... Maybe a tiny two way HDMI KVM switch to toggle between it and an existing x86-64 small computer?

Comment by makeitdouble 1 day ago

> laptop

His current setup doesn't look bad to me from an ergonomic standpoint. Displays are fully articulated in all directions and probably at eye level, and keyboard and mouse will be in a comfortable position, with th trackball helping it all.

I'd hate such small screens but to each their own, and the MacBook wouldn't help.

On the decapitation, he's mentioning buying a cheaper device with a damaged screen (I'd assume those are near junk price) and I guess he used it the same way he uses his other computer.

It all seem to make sense to me ?

Comment by Simon_O_Rourke 1 day ago

There's a lot of that with this guy... His comment about requiring a low power environment so he discards all laptop power bricks. Dude, unless you're powering things off a hand cranked dynamo a few laptops are not going to melt your fuse board.

My guess is that the "why" is largely just showing off, coupled with oddness.

Comment by walrus01 1 day ago

That's actually a valid choice in an extremely watt-hour per day (or week, or month) constrained environment. Like a relatively small to mid sized sailboat crossing a whole ocean. If you have very limited solar power, for instance, and you have critical instruments/radios and stuff to power.

If you have a "house power" 12V battery bank, and a regular laptop which expects 110-240VAC input, 19VDC output (example, random Dell) power brick which is being fed from a small true sine wave inverter, like 12VDC-to-120VAC, you're losing energy to heat and the DC to AC conversion process.

You're converting DC to AC and then the laptop is converting that back into DC. Ideally you do something like wire up a small inline fuse and a tiny meanwell DC-DC converter that can take 12VDC input and output 19VDC natively.

He has basically replicated on a limited budget and in a very small space on land a setup that is not that different than economically built DC power systems are done on boats.

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by bayindirh 1 day ago

His logic is correct though. The native power of his grid is 12V. He has a 20V step-up circuit and an inverter. 12V -> Inverter -> 12V is only good for UPS. He can directly setup USB-PD up to 9V from the 12V circuit or full 12V PD from the 20V one.

Also, I believe he hoards the power bricks as he notes.

What he does is not ideal, and I don't share the same view with him, but I understand what he does.

Comment by yreg 1 day ago

It is odd but also fascinating. If he likes it that way then all the power to him. He's not exactly trying to convince others to do the same.

Comment by saghm 1 day ago

> If he likes it that way then all the power to him.

Except the literal power, apparently!

Comment by youngtaff 2 days ago

There are people “deshelling” Mac Minis and driving them via other power supplies

Here’s an M1 and somewhere in this guys Insta are photos of an M2 which is even easier as the cable is easier

https://www.instagram.com/p/CvP8FuLtzzr/

Edit: Here’s the M2 https://www.instagram.com/p/CxgRNuYrUyN/

Comment by hankbond 1 day ago

I have an M1 14" macbook with a broken screen. Would have cost $600+ to get it replaced so i just bought another refurbished one for $750. If i want to use the keyboard its kind of annoying to have to deal with the useless screen, so I would be open to just taking the dang thing off.

Comment by mholm 2 days ago

Their power needs must be absurdly strict, considering they didn’t want the 12v -> 220v -> 12v loss for an M1 chip.

Comment by ectoloph 1 day ago

The idle cost of inverters can be quite high.

EcoFlow power stations draw somewhere around 30w with the inverter switched on with no load.

The idle power of a Mac Mini at the wall is a few watts total.

Comment by turtlebits 1 day ago

Yes it seems absurd optimizing to keep on 12v to save on the inverter overhead, but at the same time are running sealed lead acid batteries.

Switching to LFP would give them 5-6x the capacity for the same weight. Current rate for LFP is around $100/kWh.

Comment by awakeasleep 2 days ago

I inferred it was primarily a psychological need

Comment by qazxcvbnmlp 2 days ago

Felt like a case of controlling what is visible to avoid some unconscious fear.

The relative tradeoffs (hacking together monitors, sketchy battery power, etc) don't seem to coherently add up to the stated goals.

Interesting read tho.

Comment by a1o 1 day ago

I think that dude lives in a van somewhere in UK so everything is powered through some powerbank in the van. Plus having several different hardwares that all has to occupy less space as possible.

Comment by ale 1 day ago

Are you implying that removing the display would therefore be more space and power efficient than the actual 3mm display specifically calibrated to be powered by the built-in battery lmao. OP is just stupidly contrarian.

Comment by bayindirh 1 day ago

I believe since he wanted to hide the machine away somewhere in his caravan and connect to it remotely only, also I believe that he didn't make peace with himself aboug Apple devices and thought that having a complete system might mean giving up that mental red-line and breaching his stance.

Also, he states that "he doesn't love laptops", because having peripherals he didn't choose are redundant. I believe that's a somewhat distorted and carried-on trauma with laptops with subpar input devices and screens.

While I respect his choices and understand where he's coming from, in my opinion he has to change some perspectives and throw away some prejudices like he did for his belonging to fit into that caravan.

Emotional minimalism and throwing away expired things from our mindset is very beneficial for us.

Comment by benbojangles 2 days ago

I once bought an apple silicon macbook pro logic board to use with a kvm. It was a fun adventure. Things to notice:

-laptop lid closed/open sensor.

-no lid screen at first boot was a pain to fix to external monitor.

-logic board only on first boot requires macbook pro trackpad and keyboard(case), connecting external keyboard and mouse doesn't work at login screen due to security.

Once up and running though it is an excellent, cheap compiling/local llm machine i use over ssh from another mac

Comment by NorthSouthNorth 1 day ago

I just had this nightmare yesterday. Water damaged MBP so just the power button worked.

You can use any keyboard during recovery mode. But not connect BT devices (technically possible via some secret screen but it was stuck on a loading loop and needed a restart every time I tried) and I didn't have a wired mouse lol. So I had to voice mode + keybindings through a reinstall of MacOS which sounds easy but there were like 5 issues with focusing screens so regular tab didn't work and needed like cmd shift f4 and other mega random key bindings (thanks to AI this was easy to figure out though with enough trial and error). Had to restart it after an install thinking the keyboard would still work, but nope after login screen it wouldn't let me lol.

Pro tip — a magic keyboard with usb-c to lightning cable DOES NOT count as an accessory somehow. So you can use that.

Comment by benbojangles 1 day ago

Magic keyboard and track pad or mouse did not work for me with logic board first boot, only a MacBook case with track pad and keyboard worked. Connecting any peripheral over usb on a logic board at login screen will not function due to macos external connected device trust acceptance popup only appears after login.

Comment by kphorn 1 day ago

I lived and worked in a van full time for a while. There are easier ways to save power than delidding a MacBook. Like using a 12v USB-PD adapter that connects directly to the battery. I suppose there’s a particular attachment to the “Low power display” in this article but that kind of runs against the whole van life argument which is live light and have a small footprint.

Comment by 4fterd4rk 2 days ago

Why the hell would anyone live like this

Comment by bigyabai 1 day ago

Macs were never for the crazy ones. Why Think Different in today's day and age?

Comment by iugjkihh 1 day ago

There’s good crazy and there’s bad crazy. There’s good thinking different and there’s bad thinking different. This guy falls squarely on the latter of both.

Comment by bigyabai 1 day ago

Thanks Steve, didn't know you used HN these days.

Comment by RunSet 1 day ago

Semi-related. I wonder why Mac OS does not provide any setting to keep the laptop running with the screen closed. You either need to use third party software or connect a dummy HDMI dongle. Both of which cost additional money for a function that is furnished as a matter of course by other operating systems.

Comment by Crestwave 1 day ago

There is a setting for it, it's just not exposed in the GUI.

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

As mentioned by the other commenter, `caffeinate -s` also works, but with the caveat that a) the command has to be running and b) the laptop has to be plugged in to power. Configuring disablesleep=1 completely prevents sleep and lasts until you manually configure it back to 0.

Comment by mrheosuper 1 day ago

Thermal problem maybe ? The hot air escapes through the vent near screen.

Comment by lbourdages 1 day ago

You can use the caffeinate command (CLI) to do that, IIRC.

Comment by duskdozer 1 day ago

>I tried Virtual Machines, probably had half a dozen MacOS VMs over the years in VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM. Getting MacOS working in a VM is difficult, inconsistent and (at least on my machines) performance isn’t great. Apple strongly does not want you doing this, you’ll always be swimming upstream.

Idk. A year or two ago I wanted to test something on Mac. I searched a bit and found an image and probably copied a qemu config from somewhere, and it worked without any obvious problems. I'm sure there was a performance hit, but it wasn't unusable by any means, and I don't run the latest hardware.

Comment by Grombobulous 1 day ago

I’m wondering if a cloud VM is would be the best for the author’s needs.

They clearly don’t want a Mac laptop or a laptop form factor at all for various reasons, maybe they’d be better off with a raspberry pi or even an android tablet plus keyboard and mouse remoting into a Mac VM in the cloud.

The cloud part would also mean that the cloud provider is going to handle all the difficulty in setting up a Mac VM for you.

Comment by mproud 1 day ago

Yep. They came up with the solutions I would have suggested! (CMD + F1, internal/external monitor craziness, Caps Lock key as your power indicator.)

Probably the battery isn’t that great because it’s old — I’d be curious what mAh it’s still holding. Also wondering if that display is being connected and somehow drawing power from the computer (although I wouldn’t think it should if it’s turned off).

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Comment by jnaina 1 day ago

felt the sudden urge to play Noël Coward's 1931 comic song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen"

Comment by kvuj 2 days ago

> The battery bank from which I power my home is 12V (24V or 48V would be better and I’ll upgrade when the time is right). All my electricity comes from this battery bank.

> I have a power inverter, meaning I can use appliances with normal/household plugs, but the inverter wastes some power in the conversion process, stepping up from 12V to 220V. To then plug in a power brick, which will again throw away some power in converting 220V back down to whatever voltage a device uses, means double wastage, and a mess of plugs and wires.

Is this... a joke? How much freaking amps are you pulling? Average Canadian electricity consumption is 1270 watts. 1270 / 12 = 100+ Amps for one hour.

I'm guessing this is more of a third world situation and that electricity usage is much lower, but still...I fail to see how you would get to a setup like this. If you're fully off-grid then your generator or solar system could give you much higher voltage. If not, how are you charging the battery bank?

EDIT: From your CV, you are from the UK. I'm very confused.

Comment by FLHerne 1 day ago

Not the poster, but I live off-grid on a boat in the UK and pretty much everything (including the laptop I'm commenting from) runs off 12V DC.

I have 800W of solar panels and a 3.5kWh LFP battery bank.

I use approximately 2kWh per day in summer, 1kWh in winter, 500Wh when it's cold enough that I can turn the fridge off.

In the summer I dump any excess to an immersion water heater.

At that level the self-consumption power of an inverter, about 5-10W, is significant so I avoid relying on it for anything powered all day (but it's useful for appliances, power tools and other intermittent items).

Using incredibly wasteful amounts of energy isn't necessary, people just do it.

Comment by turtlebits 1 day ago

Unless there is some space/weight constraint, adding additional battery capacity for idle draw and running an inverter is likely less expensive than trying to find 12v only equipment.

OP is running sealed lead acid batteries, they could have 5-6x the capacity using LFP batteries with the same weight.

Comment by FLHerne 1 day ago

Space for panels is very constrained, they already get in the way more than I'd like.

I'll probably expand the battery bank at some point, but that only averages energy over a wider time period rather than increasing the total available.

I've spent very little on 12V equipment - my router and laptop are easily run off DC-DC supplies and USB supplies/lighting/water pumps/radios etc. are widely available. The only thing that's powered full-time and would have been significantly more expensive at 12V is the fridge, and I got that for free with an easily-replaced failed thermostat.

Doubling my present battery capacity would definitely cost more than I've spent on everything else.

Comment by Grombobulous 1 day ago

In America, a 1,000 square foot home uses an average of 8x the energy you do during the summer. I find that amount to be somewhat lower than I expected to be if I’ll be honest. After all, America is the land of central air conditioning and clothes dryers.

I’m sure you’re aware of this already, but maybe it’s worth pointing out to people that changing your lifestyle to consume less doesn’t require boat life, van life, or tiny home life. A smaller conventional house and a more thoughtful use of your thermometer will go a long way. Hang up your clothes instead of putting in the dryer, as a bonus they’ll last way longer.

Comment by mrheosuper 1 day ago

Why not use higher voltage, like 24 or 48V?

Comment by FLHerne 20 hours ago

That's how it came, and while I've incrementally added or replaced a lot of things there's no point switching.

I would probably go with 24V if starting from scratch - there's a huge market of automotive and caravan parts that are 12/24V and generally don't support 48V.

If relying on an inverter more I might have a 48V main bank and run the low-voltage stuff off a DC-DC.

Comment by soci 1 day ago

Why dumping the excess is needed?

Comment by FLHerne 1 day ago

It's not needed, but if the batteries are full the energy might as well go somewhere useful.

Comment by starkparker 2 days ago

https://mm-dev.rocks/series/my-working-environment/

Lives in a caravan and avoids using mains power.

Comment by Simon_O_Rourke 1 day ago

Has nine children, lives on a halting site. There is a name for folks like that.

Comment by madiling 23 hours ago

What is it?

Comment by a012 2 days ago

It sounds crazy but pulling >100A from low voltage battery is kinda normal for a 6kw solar inverter (in 220-250V countries). It needs a pair of 50mm2 wires which is thick as a rope though.

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