A few years ago my trusty Macbook Pro kicked the bucket. I was advised that the cost of repairing it was extensive and that I would be better off recycling it and getting a different laptop. I didn’t have the heart to throw it out at the time, so I put it in the pile with all of the other dead electronics that “could be used for something cool one day”. Fast forward to June of 2019, and the Raspberry Pi 4 has been released. Its got 4GB of ram, a decent processor, and its the size of a deck of cards…. perfect for cramming into a laptop shell and using as a full fledged computer! The “Apple Pi” is born!*

That’s right, I’m in the process of gutting a late 2011 15” Macbook Pro and replacing the internals with a Raspberry Pi 4. My primary goals with this project are to:

  • Use as many of the original MacBook components as possible (screen, keyboard, trackpad, etc).

  • No modifications to the Raspberry Pi 4. I’d like to be able to hot-swap the mini computer for other single board devices in the future with minimal effort.

  • Connect all of the existing IO ports (USB, SD Card Reader, Ethernet, etc.) to the new computing unit.

There are also a few sacrifices I’m willing to make. I don’t need the speakers to work or the front facing camera. If I can get them to function again, fine. If not it’s not the end of the world.

I’m expecting that this is going to take a lot of time an effort to get right. I have a background in software development, but I know next to nothing about electronics at this point. I expect I’ll probably burn myself, destroy hard to replace components, and probably compromise on my lofty goals. Fun!

*I was going to call it a “Franken-Pi but everyone thought it was a terrible name and I didn’t even consider the much better “Apple Pi” until someone pointed it out to me