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Apple Development Transition Kit

D

Dandu

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 23, 2009
120
15
I have found a nice "Power Mac" : there is a Pentium 4 inside, and a BIOS.

It's a Developer Transition Kit from 2005, the first officiel Intel Mac, with Mac OS X 10.4.1.

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It's a nice machine.
 
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Fun find!

A friend of mine works for Intel's desktop motherboard division. He worked on the team that designed that board for Apple. Very few people knew Apple was the client! He didn't even know until 2010, when I saw a thread where someone posted details of the kit, and I recognized it as an obvious Intel-made motherboard, and asked my friend to look up the details (maximum supported CPU, for example.)

He replied back with something to the effect of "Holy cow! I worked on that board, and didn't even know it was for Apple! I figured it was for Dell or somebody as a custom thing!" (It was just a physical-layout-modified version of a standard retail-available Intel branded desktop motherboard of the time.)

Sad thing: It was locked to the supplied CPU - no faster CPU will work with it. (So no Pentium-D (dual-core Pentium 4) - you're stuck with just the one core.)

While official OS X support doesn't exist for anything newer than they shipped with, I do wonder if a "Hackintosh" type install would work with Yosemite? It is a 64-bit CPU...
 
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Dandu said:
I have found a nice "Power Mac" : there is a Pentium 4 inside, and a BIOS.

It's a Developer Transition Kit from 2005, the first officiel Intel Mac, with Mac OS X 10.4.1.

Image
Image
Image
Image

It's a nice machine.
Click to expand...

what an awesome find I wish I could find one it would be some fun to play with and have... I wonder something what happens if you fit a PC video card too it? like a card from when tiger came out...

regarding hackintoshing it it would prolly run SL fine even on built in GMA 900 using the right kexts and kernel... however yosemite would need a better GPU and a Kernel with a SSSE3 emulator as the P4 lacks that instruction set and yosemite requires it....
 
The problem for the GPU is that there is only driver for PowerPC GPU actually (with the system installed), and the only PowerPC modem with PCIe GPU is newer than this machine.

For the CPU, it's not a problem : it's a Prescott Pentium 4 660, with SSE3.
 
Dandu said:
The problem for the GPU is that there is only driver for PowerPC GPU actually (with the system installed), and the only PowerPC modem with PCIe GPU is newer than this machine.

For the CPU, it's not a problem : it's a Prescott Pentium 4 660, with SSE3.
Click to expand...

note I said SSSE3 witch is different to SSE3. I have played around with Tiger on intel and I found to my surprise quite a few kexts are intel (even the Rage Pro drivers in there are intel coded) so thats why i said it would be interesting to try a Card from the time tiger was around something like a Geforce 6600 or something heh
 
That's an incredible find, and I'm very jealous.

That's a "pipe dream" piece for my collection. They are incredibly rare, and I think Apple took back a lot of them. Truth be told, I'm not even sure they're legal to own, but now that the transition is a long way in the rearview mirror I doubt Apple cares about them anymore.

Please let me know if you ever want to part with it.
 
bunnspecial said:
That's an incredible find, and I'm very jealous.

That's a "pipe dream" piece for my collection. They are incredibly rare, and I think Apple took back a lot of them. Truth be told, I'm not even sure they're legal to own, but now that the transition is a long way in the rearview mirror I doubt Apple cares about them anymore.

Please let me know if you ever want to part with it.
Click to expand...

^what he said^ :p if any one in the UK comes across one and is willing to part with it for something please let me know id gladly work something out :)
 
I don't what to tell you what to do with your own stuff, but I'd really discourage you from trying hackintosh it or modify it in any other way.

These are rare enough pieces that you could probably sell it(my finger is itching on the Paypal send money button) and get enough money to build a much more capable Hackintosh in a G5 case.

BTW, as far as the graphics card-I seem to recall that these used a special Silicon Image card that's not actually a graphics card but a just a conduit to send the onboard graphics to a DVI port. I actually grabbed a couple of these cards out of surplus thinking that they were a decent PCIe graphic card. Researching the p/n kept leading me back to these DTK computers(among other uses).
 
Correct - it is a fairly standard part. They existed for AGP slots, too, as part of Intel's integrated graphics standard.

As for modifying the DTK - I would say that you shouldn't make any major *HARDWARE* changes other than parts that would be considered "standard user replaceable" parts (i.e. RAM, hard drive.)

Use as a "daily driver" is probably a bad idea, simply because it is such an old/slow system. Even if you "hackintosh" loaded Yosemite on it, it would likely be far too slow to be reasonably usable. Yes, you could throw an SSD and a faster video card in - but at that point, you might as well use a modern PC with proper "hackintosh" build.

Its primary use is "as a curiosity." And for *THAT*, I don't see any fault in loading Yosemite on it, as well as leaving its original OS, and possibly even another OS like Windows or Linux. That way if you really need to use it for "daily work" for some reason (say your primary computer conks out and you're waiting on a repair,) you can. But it still lives on as its primary use - the curiosity of the machine.

(Sort of like how for my vintage machines, I tend to load "the original OS" plus "the latest OS it can run." My PowerBook G4 is actually somewhat usable as a "daily driver" with Leopard on it; but I prefer to "play with it" in Mac OS 9.)


That all said - I'd love to have a DTK!
 
bunnspecial said:
That's a "pipe dream" piece for my collection. They are incredibly rare, and I think Apple took back a lot of them. Truth be told, I'm not even sure they're legal to own, but now that the transition is a long way in the rearview mirror I doubt Apple cares about them anymore.
Click to expand...

From what I can remember, it was a condition of the dev programme that you were obliged to send these back on completion of the project in return for a discount on the retail version. Apple was quite assiduous in getting these back and I would be a little surprised if many are still around.

I think if you stuck in on eBay, Apple would have it pulled if it was made aware of it.
 
Hi,

Many news : i can't boot on a USB drive (no option on the BIOS) and can't use a real graphic card : i have tested with many GPU and i have no screen.

Just photos.

01.JPG

02.JPG

03.JPG
 
Dandu said:
Hi,

Many news : i can't boot on a USB drive (no option on the BIOS) and can't use a real graphic card : i have tested with many GPU and i have no screen.

Just photos.

Image
Image
Image
Click to expand...

interesting thanks for trying and thanks for the pics :) i'm trying to research these as I find them very intriguing (I hope to acquire one some day lol)
 
That is not original CPU heatsink. However, original cooler that looks like slightly modified Intel 775 box cooler is too loud and does not a good job. 3.6 GHz HT P4 needs a better cooler and this one looks much better.
 
Yep, i have the original cooler, but he was broken when i received the Mac, i have just installed a recent TX3 Evo, a clssic and cheap S775 cooler.
 
I always serach the 10.4.3 8F1111 ISO for a test, if anyone can help me...
 
A little news : i have found a VGA header on the motherboard, and i have connected two display

CKw0mPgWwAAJ_kn.png:orig


I use a classic VGA header from a graphic card

Next step : dump the BIOS
 
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Dandu said:
I have found a nice "Power Mac" : there is a Pentium 4 inside, and a BIOS.

It's a Developer Transition Kit from 2005, the first officiel Intel Mac, with Mac OS X 10.4.1.

01.jpg

02.jpg

03.png

04.png


It's a nice machine.
Click to expand...

That is a great find! Congrats!
 
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