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What's the Rarest Early Intel Mac?
- Thread starter mectojic
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Well, surely it would have something on there to say that it was the property of Apple and some sort of serial number so they knew which development machine it was and who had it when they had to return it. There is evidence that there was a label was removed but the labels look to random and nothing looks like it is professionally done. I would rather spend my cash on a more recent MAC rather than something that will probably never work again. Another Mac Pro or Power Mac would be far better. I suppose if a person is a collector and this is a must for their collection then go ahead and buy the thing.
Absolutely. But what does this laptop have to do with "the rarest early Intel Mac"? There were protoypes of early Intel Macs too, such as this.
Those who collect prototypes don't care if another machine is better.
I was searching the Bay to find any development machines and that was the only one that appeared and I thought what price would the Intel one fetch?
![s-l1600.jpg]()
US $1,990.00
Approximately£1,608.54
This is not an Intel Mac but what would a development machine for Intel be worth?
This laptop looks fake any how!
No, the laptop you noted does not look “fake”. The photoshopped depth of field effect certainly is fake, though.
Many mid ’90s EVT/DVT (i.e., prototype-stage) PowerBooks lacked labelling on them, including the model codenamed “Epic” (later, PowerBook 1400) and codenamed “Omega” (later, PowerBook 190):
“Epic”
“Omega”
In the matter of “Epic”, the Apple label did exist, but that label is found on the underside of the bottom case. For “Omega”, the front-facing label was presented simply as “PowerBook XXXX”.
Here’s the “M2 Seed” prototype. It would later be called the PowerBook 5300CS.
The original PowerBook prototype lacked all labelling including the Apple brand mark:
So yes, it’s actually not an anomaly for a pre-New World Mac to lack labelling on the places one might ordinarily expect. As for that eBay listing, the seller is hokey for staging the photo the way they did, coupled with ham-fisted photoshopping, but that PowerBook is all but probably one of these DVT/EVT units found out in the wild.
[sidebar: Heck, I knew all that rooting around the 34 internets for the slow assembly of that project I’ve been working on might one day pay off!]
My vote would be for the (yup, you guessed it) "green dot" MacBook Pro 3,x and 4,x models. They weren't part of any specific production batch or model year, are almost practically unknown outside of our community, and are impossible to differentiate from the original models unless you remove the RAM cover and look at the memory slots (and you might even miss it if you didn't know what you were looking for). I'd wager that only a fraction of the MacBook Pros out there with the defective GeForce 8600M GT actually recieved the replacement motherboard with the revised GPU chip, if my own experience finding replacement motherboards and units with the fixed GPU are any indication.
I've got quite a few in my stash, and I'd agree that the black MacBook is really more uncommon than rare. It actually had a pretty decent production run, since they were made right up until the twilight of the pre-unibody era.
LOL. The crappiness of the GPU aside, I've been able to turn even a lowly Core Duo-equipped MacBook 1,1 into a surprisingly good retro gaming machine thanks to Wineskin. It's a shame the website is down and the repos that hosted the engines and the original apps are down too. I'm thankful I've still got my backups handy, and I recall someone has an archive of old Wineskin software that they posted here, too.
I've got quite a few in my stash, and I'd agree that the black MacBook is really more uncommon than rare. It actually had a pretty decent production run, since they were made right up until the twilight of the pre-unibody era.
LOL. The crappiness of the GPU aside, I've been able to turn even a lowly Core Duo-equipped MacBook 1,1 into a surprisingly good retro gaming machine thanks to Wineskin. It's a shame the website is down and the repos that hosted the engines and the original apps are down too. I'm thankful I've still got my backups handy, and I recall someone has an archive of old Wineskin software that they posted here, too.
Shall I consider myself lucky that I have two green-dot
MacBookPro3,1s then? 
It was $200 more than the nearly equivalent white configuration, and all you got was a bigger hard drive... and a different colour. I've seen quite a few whites at university back in the day, but just a single black.
What about... the Core Solo Mac mini?
Apple TV. No, they aren’t physically rare but the number of them in service running OS X is almost guaranteed to be the lowest of any Apple-produced computer.
Otherwise I wager that finding a 2009 iMac that hasn’t had its EFI patched to support 8GB is the rarest, albeit counterintuitive and useless to have.
Otherwise I wager that finding a 2009 iMac that hasn’t had its EFI patched to support 8GB is the rarest, albeit counterintuitive and useless to have.
Also may I add that getting working 2006 24” iMacs is getting incredibly hard. I’ve had 5 nursed along and all crashed and burned terribly. Friend had 3 that have all died, and I knew a former member of this forum who had to resort to running it without A screen to keep the GPU rebaked and alive. You buy one from eBay it dies the next week.
I once saw an Intel Xeon MacBook Pro prototype on eBay, this was a long time ago and I didn't bid though.
This iMac with a GeForce 7600 GT and 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo is pretty rare, the best white plastic iMac ever made, and one that I had in operation for a while. Sleek and best of all with a nice matte 1080p display which I honestly preferred to the later glossy aluminum 24" iMac, but crippled by software / planned obsolescence when Apple dropped support in OS X Mountain Lion. MLPostFactor got Mountain Lion working fine but later versions lacked GPU acceleration and were unusable.
It was a prototype 2009-era Unibody MacBook Pro (red logic board) and the About This Mac showed Intel Xeon. Seller said the fans always ran full blast. That's all I can remember.
That’s not necessarily accurate. It could have been an Engineering Sample CPU OS X didn’t have a clue about.
I guess at this point it's important to stipulate what would count in our "competition" for rarest early intel Mac. Do we count only factory produced retail models from Apple? Do we include prototypes, dev kits, or mods like a 1st Gen AppleTV running 10.5?
Yes! You'd be very lucky indeed!Shall I consider myself lucky that I have two green-dotMacBookPro3,1s then?
It was $200 more than the nearly equivalent white configuration, and all you got was a bigger hard drive... and a different colour. I've seen quite a few whites at university back in the day, but just a single black.
The infamous "Black tax" was pretty annoying, and I'm sure got in the way of people getting the black MacBook, but I've run into a surprising amount of them in my city. I'd never seen one in the wild, but there were a couple of years where it wasn't all that uncommon to see folks selling their black MacBooks for like $50-100.
With the right source ports and an older version of Wineskin (plus a good SSD and the RAM maxed out), I bet I could make one into a half-decent retro gaming machine. There's plenty of good stuff to play with Aleph One, eDuke32, fruitz of dojo's Quake ports, and LZDoom.What about... the Core Solo Mac mini?
The OP seems to want to focus on standard configs, which is fair. I mostly threw the Apple TV out (somewhat jokingly) because it was a legitimate product that you could walk into an Apple store, buy, and install OS X on it the same day. As a matter of fact, people were able to reverse this process and install the Apple TV OS on MacBooks and the like, removing the regular OS X install. All of which was figured out within 2 or 3 months of the ATV coming out. Very unique little box.
I will say that if you can get your hands on a 2005 Intel dev kit, that would be a Grail regardless of the legality of owning it. I do not know if the statute of limitations has expired on those (or Apple would even attempt to reclaim their property at this point)
I had one of them with a 7600 but a 2.16GHz processor and loved it. ML with an SSD was nice on it. Sadly as mentioned the GPU fried itself, and I could not fix this one. I got 4 of them with the standard 7300 config from a school and all 4 died in succession… I have bad experiences with Nvidia dedicated GPUs from that era, but I didn’t realize failure was so widespread on this model.
Apple. Will. Never. Let. Go. Of. The. Past.
(So the answer is “only if their legal team is having a slow month.”)
This would be my guess as well. Core Solo Mini was absolute garbage from a usability perspective, even when new. I know I bought one used years ago that had been upgraded to a Core Duo (Couldn't upgrade to Core *2* Duo, only C1D, different CPU sockets.)
You can upgrade to mobile Core 2 Duos that use the same Socket M as the Core Solo and Core Duo.
The crappy GPU aside, it was still faster than the G4 mini when running native software.
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Yah, I have his site bookmarked and have relied on it whilst working on my current pet project.
I wasn’t aware (or remembered) he was selling some of his gear, though.
Heck, it benchmarked faster than any Mac with a G4 — yes, even faster than a Power Mac DP 1.42 — and faster than any single-CPU/single-core G5. (Which always makes me cringe a little upon reflection, acknowledging — begrudgingly — how Intel could deliver the numbers for a minute around that time period. Now, if only PA Semi could have moved forward a bit sooner…)
I was just about to say, probably the DTK, Developer Transition Kit. If there are even any out there still.
Black MacBooks aren't that rare compared to the early MacBook Airs, probably mainly due to cost. I've seen way more black MacBooks in the wild than 2008-9 MacBook Airs. And one with the original SSD is probably up there as one of the most rare models. They were pricey!
Another rare one could be some of the Xserves. I know they were adopted in a lot of business and schools, but how many are still out there? They also are way too big and heavy to ship so many were probably thrown out long ago.
Black MacBooks aren't that rare compared to the early MacBook Airs, probably mainly due to cost. I've seen way more black MacBooks in the wild than 2008-9 MacBook Airs. And one with the original SSD is probably up there as one of the most rare models. They were pricey!
Another rare one could be some of the Xserves. I know they were adopted in a lot of business and schools, but how many are still out there? They also are way too big and heavy to ship so many were probably thrown out long ago.
And it’s just an updated version (faster FSB, SSE3, VT-x) of the 1.5 GHz Pentium M which was released in… 2003.