Back in 2020, Apple offered selected developers a custom DTK Mac mini with the A12Z Bionic chip inside, so that they could develop apps for the Apple Silicon platform. After the official launch of the M1 Macs, developers had to return their DTK Mac mini to Apple, which scrapped the machines. But one of these scrapped DTKs was successfully restored.
Here’s a restored and fully functioning DTK Mac mini
An electronics expert and collector known as “dosdude1” has shared a video showing the logic board of one of the DTK Mac minis returned to Apple. According to him, Apple purposely disassembled and damaged these Macs by cutting out their logic boards so that no one could use them anymore.
These logic boards were sent back to China for recycling, where components such as the NAND flash were later removed. However, someone decided to keep one of these logic boards for themselves before finishing destroying it – and that’s how dosdude1 got his hands on it.
Both outside and inside, the DTK Mac mini looked exactly like any 2018 Mac mini, except that it had an iPad chip instead of an Intel processor. In the video, dosdude1 shows how he managed to repair the DTK Mac mini’s logic board and solder a new NAND flash to make it work again. After a lot of hard work, he was able to boot up the system, but there was still more to be done.
Despite having restored the logic board, macOS was unable to complete the activation process. Luckily, there’s a workaround for that. After making sure everything was working, the collector placed the logic board inside the chassis of a 2018 Mac mini.
You can watch the whole process below:
There’s not much to do with it
Since the selected developers had to sign NDAs, they were all required to return their DTKs after the end of the program. In 2021, Apple gave developers the $500 they paid for the DTK Mac mini as credit to buy an M1 Mac.
Of course, having a working DTK Mac mini at this point is more about having a rare Apple device than actually having a Mac to use every day. That’s because, since developers had to return the DTKs to Apple, the company stopped providing software updates for this machine a long time ago. More specifically, the latest version of macOS available for DTKs is Big Sur 11.2.3.
Even so, it’s interesting to see how someone managed to restore one of these computers despite Apple’s efforts to make them disappear.
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