Can we REPAIR Apple's FIRST EVER laptop?

what if I told you that Apple used to make a fully modular laptop that was upgradable expandable and featured a mechanical keyboard would you think I'm crazy quite possibly but it's true they did and this is it it's actually the first laptop that they ever made if you could call it that it's the Macintosh portable from 1989 and one of the few things that it is is portable now you might remember from a couple videos back I was recently in California where I bought a gigantic lot of 12 vintage macintoshes and while on that trip I made an interesting remark I love the Macintosh portable I've been wanting to get one of those now it just so happens that when we took those 12 macintoshes to Vintage Mac expert hap he has a ton of Macintosh Portables and he actually gave me this one so that I could make a video on it but there is one problem it it doesn't really work all the way [Music] all right so we've got it plugged in here and interestingly enough these machines don't have power buttons you just kind of hit a key [Music] ah yes see that that that does happen sometimes battery is not even in it let's let's unplug it yeah so this thing has a range of problems sometimes it actually boots all the way sometimes it doesn't boot at all so after doing some digging online I think I found what the issue might be the Macintosh portable has this little sub chip in the bottom left called the hybrid board and this controls a lot of stuff with the power management and battery and so when that goes bad it could lead to the issues that I've been seeing fortunately it's a pretty common problem on these machines and there are Recreations available now obviously I'd like to fix something like this myself but I don't really know what I'm dealing with I'm relatively new to Vintage Apple stuff so after doing a little bit of digging I decided that the best move here was to find someone who could help me restore this machine and who actually knows what they're doing and that's when I I found Steve from Mac 84. Steve is one of the foremost experts on Vintage Max he knows these things inside and out and he very kindly agreed to take a look at my Macintosh portable and that's also when I found today's video sponsor anchor work who has sent over their new anchor work m650 wireless microphone system this is a super easy Plug and Play dual lav mic system and I'm going to be using this for the rest of the video so this thing is basically like the airpods pro of wireless microphones except unlike airpods this charges via USBC basically you flip open the case it turns on automatically and we have our little connection module here with all of the input information then you just grab one of these microphones it has a clip on the bottom so you can clip it to a shirt like that or you can pop this back off which is magnetic run that through the shirt and pop it it on like that plus the microphones feature dual Channel Wireless pickup and voice Shield noise reduction for Clear crisp vocals and three-dimensional lossless sound it's just so easy to use and the Hub here can automatically detect that I've left the other lav mic in here so it's just doing one and this thing which has a clip so you can clip it to your shirt can also clip right into a shoe Mount and now your camera person can be monitoring your levels to make sure that they're not peaking plug it straight into the camera and boom I've now got wireless lav mic audio straight into my camera recording right onto the SD card it's it's literally the airpods pro of wireless mics Wireless transmission is good for 656 feet and the battery life is good for six hours on the mics and 15 hours with the charging case so big thanks to Anchor work because they they kind of made this whole video possible so let's get on the road and go meet Steve shall we look at that we're all miked up so Steve I brought you theoretically a laptop if you could call it that but this one actually has a secret that I haven't told you about I'm scared now it's a good secret I think uh so this this is not a retail Macintosh portable oh because it has this sticker on the bottom it says attention this device is a demonstration unit only so I don't think it's a prototype but it's something yeah it's probably just not a retail model but that's really neat I I can tell from the serial number f9344 that it was made in the 34th week of 1989. you've done your research apart from that this thing is pretty nice it looks beautiful it just needs a little bit of love I think we can go ahead and start breaking it down and one of my favorite things about the Macintosh portable is you can actually fully disassemble this without a screwdriver at all yeah just be careful that plastic all right so this is how you take apart this gigantic Macintosh portable I I'm actually kind of in love with it it's very genius but we have the very simple one is these two buttons on the back here and this pulls off the battery cover we've got our big old hard drive in here 40 megabytes so lots of room on that one then you have the battery cover obviously I've removed the battery already we do need one tool I guess and that is this guy for popping off be careful so you just kind of Leverage that off there and that's one side so we pull off the keyboard cover and that gives us access to these connections for the trackball and the keyboard nice little pull tabs so those just come right off super duper easily and then we just have these little Clips in here there's the trackball if you do it that easily with the keyboard I'll be impressed the keyboard I have gotten some progress on basically wedging up one side and then grab those three with the other finger and there it goes nice so the keyboard comes out and this little mid wall can actually move so you can put it over here and have the keyboard on this side with the trackball over here they're interchangeable that's that's this is genius all right so with those out now we can move on to the display we've got little Clips on either side here that hold it in I know I think we take this off first and then we do the clip see I'm remembering stuff you want me to hold the display while you do the other side it's going to come very very floppy little that grab that perfect pull that one out disconnect it look at that display out in two seconds oh yes and we do have all of the signatures of the design team here on the bottom this whole frame is plastic by the way which is a really arguably bad idea but you know what cut down on weight for a thing that was already heavy and there we go all we need is this logic board so we can set aside our gigantic bottom half there and just kind of go around to all these little clips logic board look at that little capacitors that are here the yellow ones those are obviously Replacements so okay this has been recapped otherwise you'd see the little silver electrolytic cans um these are recapped as well because they look like they're in pretty good shape but there is some corrosion here at the bottom by where the hybrid unit is we'll make sure that isn't causing any trouble but yeah this is the unit that will have to be replaced this is going to be real fun to desolder so that's going to be fun yeah I'm not looking forward to well I'm not looking forward to you not looking forward to it so should we get under the microscope yeah let's do it all right it's Gonna Make some noise but oh that's what it do I'm not worried about the noise these anchor work 650 microphones will do just a great job of isolating our voices so let's take a look at the corrosion there so that is right on the analog board that's all that crud there we're gonna test that with a multimeter make sure it's not making any connections it shouldn't yeah so this is a like a plane here and this should be connecting to that yeah so even though that's deteriorated there it's still making a connection it looks like crap but it's still making a connection there are some pins that are just bent that are not pointed up so we're going to have to carefully Point those up otherwise we'll have some problems desoldering on that because the desoldering gun I use is going to basically wrap around these pins and heat them up and if they're bent it's not going to do that easily and the board we're putting on is going to replace these pins anyway so we don't need them so what I like to do is get some fresh solder and we're just going to touch up some of these pins because it makes it a lot easier to take them out it's going to give us a bit of an easier time when we're going to be sucking it off in a bit this stresses me out just to watch I'll be fine I would I would be sweating bullets at this point I like how you got the Plastics here not the padded chair that was right next to it it's too late now you're a man that likes discomfort I understand I want to feel your pain so what this does is it has a soldering iron at the end it'll heat up the tip of the pin there and then it'll just suck all this on off it you're going to hear that noise a lot you can see that the pins on the right the first three there yeah have most of the solder sucked out so we're gonna have to go back and make some changes but it's making some progress [Music] mmm this sound is weirdly mesmerizing I call it the Claris because it's like the dog cow it does kind of making a move [Music] so what we're going to be doing is alleviating some of the solder from these pins because this how these pins are sort of hooked over we could just sort of desolder them and flip them up that might help alleviate some of the struggle that we were having oh I see wow that's really satisfying yeah once this board is out of the way it'll be easier to get these pins out of the holes because it's kind of being stubborn yeah so there there is some minor corrosion on this little chip here on this hybrid board you can see some of the green there that's just a Telltale sign that it was either moisture or however this was stored was not in a good state so removing this and replacing it with that replacement unit should hopefully help us out a great deal yes there's more desoldering it looks like because these pins are going like to the board and then they wrap around to the top oh no oh that's that's fine that's just more work yeah just look how brittle this little board is just fractured as we're trying to remove it here well we're getting somewhere yeah it's lifted off at least halfway halfway through now we get to deal with the same but with all this complication here oh you're a saint [Laughter] here's your souvenir oh boy uh I think this is ceramic probably no don't eat it oh gosh look at it it's halfway there this is ceramic so this is not a normal PCB which is why it's absorbing a lot of heat which is great but not great for desoldering so great for its function not for its removal you got it you see I'd use a heat gun here but there's so much plastic right next to it that that would probably melt everything yeah that's that's very true so we have to do the slow and tedious way we'll just do a couple passes of this until it gives up and I will say uh it's pretty loud here we got the fume extractor on and the soldering gun and uh honestly these these mics are doing a really good job of isolating the vocals I put everything in the laptop just to make sure that everything sounds good and I'm very very impressed and that's thanks to voice Shield noise reduction which intelligently eliminates background Noises by identifying and isolating the human voice it's really effective here in this noisy indoor environment but it also works great outdoors and whether you're connecting it to a DSLR like I am or whether you want to use the included lightning and USBC adapters to connect to a smartphone these things offer compact great sounding dual Channel audio wherever you are anyway what were we saying this is just like right on the ground plane so it's just sucking up all the heat I'm putting into it oh which is great but yeah I can see every time you touch it I can see the temperature dropping yep right under 420. yeah nice well that crack that started completed itself but that's okay oh no ceramic I swear this is not reflective of my skill set oh no it's very much reflective of they put a ceramic PCB on a laptop it's finally free yep oh sorry in a number of pieces but look at that yeah so that was hiding under there everything looks fine underneath so once we get all these pins out we'll be able to put the new board back in we'll be good to go hopefully but here's your prize oh boy I actually like this one it's a rhombus look at that just glued together making a necklace put it in lucite Etsy no no you know how many chemicals we're touching that because did you smell this it smells like a pastry yeah no that that smells like the the flux no it smells like pastry that's the flux smell that's good yeah clear out all those little beads I see yeah because there's just like a little bit of a pin or solder or something that's just in the hole so after much toiling all of those little Vias are clear so we can put in the header to put in the new hybrid board hopefully that will go in easily this has been a long process hopefully it won't be too much longer this is called solder mask and what it does is it replaces any of the grain that is worn away on the board so for example this area here where you can see some of the copper coming through or behind this capacitor it might be a little hard to see there is some copper exposed and this copper will turn black and it will oxidize and corrode things so you do want to scrape away any of the old stuff and put some of this new solder mask on that to protect it and keep anything like moisture out of there so it doesn't cause any problems in the future it's like this goopy stuff that's so interesting put a very thin coating on that's all we need and we're just going to shine that on there for about a minute or so it's going to cure and that should seal in anything so we don't have to worry about any corrosive glue getting in there in the future okay so the replacement hybrid board will go here we have these little headers and sockets so we're going to install these in those holes that we made if I could do that correctly there's just fit in there and we'll solder those to the bottom of the board and then we'll solder the replacement hybrid board fits right on top of course it's loose nothing's making a connection now but once we solder all those points we should be good to go all right so what I'm going to do is just put this over here and we'll just solder the hell out of this so I'm just putting some flux here which is solder's best friend even if your solder has flux in it already oh it's so satisfying to watch yep I should put this fume extractor on that's probably a good idea yes I can smell it gosh it's a lot easier going on than coming off isn't it you're damn right it looks good well first try yeah I mean I'll touch up one or two of these things I'm not gonna say I did perfectly but all right well a plus so thankfully this is telling us the buttons face this way so we have the board on correctly nice printed on the PCB alignment all right so now we're just doing the same thing and connecting all these pins to the socket here and I'm just going to put a little bit of pressure down to make sure that it's all even foreign so there you have it wow that does look really almost OEM [Laughter] it's less janky than Apple's Original Part honestly yeah I mean look at this thing I think we're gonna have great success yeah I'm hopeful too we only found a little bit of weird things on this board we were able to fix them up nothing major no broken traces or anything so yeah that's a good sign all right so now we'll take our carefully reassembled board and just stick it back in our no no screw required case and let me tell you assembly is a lot easier than disassembly and then we just basically drop it into place connect up all of our different drives and our power connections there trackball and keyboard cables those just pop right into the board and now the keyboard oh my gosh it's so satisfying and then we grab our display insert the display onto the hinge like so clip and this hinge cover which makes it look nice so before we put the rest of the top case on I think this is probably a good point to do a little test power on shall we no power button we just hit a key okay it chimed our driver's spinning up our drive is spinning there's a happy Macintosh wow it's hard to see that's a desktop trackball works pretty darn well it even is showing the state of charge we're a little under halfway oh my gosh Steve you did it that's amazing oh and apparently now it's full I think it's not quite used to this uh situation of it working but that's the calibrate itself it's it's a working Macintosh portable that's amazing it was no easy task but it was well worth it to see this thing work again listen that hard drive hum it really does hum this hard drive seems to be pretty good yeah it's not making any weird sounds how much memory you have in this guy oh yeah let's check I don't know anything about this about the finder I think this is system six yep one megabyte of RAM that's all you need ah should we put a floppy Drive In got some games on here oh showed up right away wow look at that we got vintage gaming on the Macintosh portal this is the first ever gaming laptop that is a fully functioning Macintosh portable I'm I'm so over the moon excited about that I have always wanted one of these things and it just every single thing works the speaker works it's running on battery power the floppy Drive the hard drive the trackball the keyboard is mechanical it feels incredible wow thank you so much Steve you got it happy to help [Music] okay so I'm now back at the studio and I have to say this might be one of my favorite videos I've ever filmed I have always been fascinated with the Macintosh portable and I now finally have one that completely works every single thing on it works I'm running on battery power right now look it's not plugged in but it is on you're gonna have to trust me on that because you probably can't even see it but the Sound Works all these different little sound effects [Music] of that so the speaker works the puppy Drive works the battery works the P Ram works the hard drive an old 40 megabyte scuzzy drive that still works in 2023 it's amazing every single thing on this is absolutely Flawless and it's all thanks to Steve and hap those two made my dreams come true so I have to give a huge huge shout out to both of them now hopefully I will be able to figure out a way to actually film this extremely hard to see non-backlight display here in the studio eventually because I would like to make a retrospective piece where we talk in depth about the features and functionality of the Macintosh portable so definitely make sure to get subscribed and stay tuned for that but until then thank you guys so much for watching and thank you to Anchor work for sponsoring these lav mics which I'm still wearing by the way we're an absolute Savior and I didn't have to worry about audio at all for this entire video so check that out with the link in the description down below and of course a big thanks to all of you for watching with that I will see you all in the next video [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 327,665

Keywords: apple, restoration, apple restoration, diy, fix, mac, macintosh, macintosh restoration, macOS, restore, vintage, vintage apple, first apple, earliest apple

Id: hWvIjyKm1sQ

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023