YouTuber Scott Yu-Jan faced an issue common to anyone harboring an affinity for technology – the clutter it brings along with it into our lives… and desk. Being a designer well acquainted with the capabilities of his Bambu Lab P1 3D printer and 3D-modeling tools – alongside harboring an appreciation for the original Macintosh desktop design – Yu-Jan got to designing what eventually would become the Macintosh Studio to combine the iPad mini and Mac Studio into an homage to the machine that started it all.
An impressive self-made solution, Yu-Jan’s creation seamlessly combines a Mac Studio desktop, an iPad mini, and a rear drawer outfitted for external SSD storage into a cohesive sidekick “computer.”
Even a computer as compact as the Apple Mac Studio can eat up a chunk of valuable surface area. And even though the headless desktop is designed to connect to an external monitor, the computer itself can seem like it’s just sitting there, missing something. That something as envisioned by Yu-Jan would be an iPad mini.
Yu-Jan using the Shapr3D app for iPad to explore preliminary storage ideas for his Macintosh Studio.
Upon recognizing the iPad mini and Mac Studio share the same dimensional width as one another (nice touch, Apple!), Yu-Jan decided he could design and 3D print a base to house the Mac Studio below and hold the iPad mini up top with a slide-in dock.
The resulting DIY is a convincing facsimile of the original Macintosh desktop introduced way back in 1984.
Not only does the design allow the tablet to operate as a secondary small monitor using macOS screen mirroring, but also includes a rear storage drawer for the designer’s external SSD drives, with the bonus of a headphone holder attached to its left side for additional declutter duties.
We highly recommend you watch his video below, if not in appreciation of Yu-Jan’s laudable design and fabrication process, for the slick editing of the entire process into one smooth time-lapsed series of events.
