m m -
d e v

Decapitating Macbook: An Odyssey

27 minute read

This is a combined, single-page view of an original multi-part article.

Intro Part 1 of 11

Accepting that I need a Mac if I want to develop for Apple platforms.

I don’t tend to enjoy using Apple products. I want to be able to make my software available on their platforms though.

To publish apps for MacOS/iOS/iPadOS, you really need Apple hardware. Also, if I am to provide software for their platforms, and especially if I want to sell my work, I need to be able to experience my apps in the same way my users will experience them.

It’s basic respect for the user.

Virtualisation

I tried Virtual Machines, probably had half a dozen MacOS VMs over the years in VirtualBox and QEMU/KVM. Getting MacOS working in a VM is difficult, inconsistent and (at least on my machines) performance isn’t great. Apple strongly does not want you doing this, you’ll always be swimming upstream.

It’s a joyless experience.

Codemagic

I tried Codemagic, a continuous integration/continuous delivery service which lets you publish to various platforms including the Apple ones. It’s a great service and has a free tier, but it seemed that my usage would end up putting me in a paid tier, and that could get expensive for me quite quickly.

It’s also from-a-distance, and while Codemagic does allow remote login to the MacOS GUI it’s not the same as having a device in front of me, and if I want to thoroughly check the experience of using my apps on Codemagic’s remote machines (rather than just running builds) that’s going to quickly eat up any free minutes.

I can certainly see this being a solution for some situations — not mine.

So…

For the first time in over 20 years of owning dozens of computers, I allowed myself to decide that I needed some kind of Mac.

Which Mac Should I Get? Part 2 of 11

Finding a Mac that I can work with.

The strongest factors affecting my decision were:

Clearly Apple Silicon was what I needed in terms of power. I’ve preferred ARM processors for years and use them for as much of my work as possible. Apple’s use of specialised ARM chips and tight control over their hardware/software architecture means they’re in a good position to maximise performance-per-Watt… if I must paddle in Apple’s pool, Apple Silicon is a no-brainer.

To keep it cheap, the obvious choice was to go with the first generation M1 chips. They reportedly still held up well and should get OS updates for a while (even longer with OpenCore Legacy Patcher).

I don’t love laptops (I’d rather choose my own keyboard, pointing device and screen so having redundant copies of these things stuck on my computer is a waste), so I was initially attracted to the M1 Mac Mini. It’s just a computer, without Human Interface Devices that I don’t need.

Two things put me off the M1 Mac Mini though:

It has a fan

People say it’s silent. Even if this is true (there are levels to this), fans are mechanical devices which can wear out (and develop a noise), suck/blow dust around (needing to be cleaned), or fail. They also use power.

Power delivery

The battery bank from which I power my home is 12V (24V or 48V would be better and I’ll upgrade when the time is right). All my electricity comes from this battery bank.

I have a power inverter, meaning I can use appliances with normal/household plugs, but the inverter wastes some power in the conversion process, stepping up from 12V to 220V. To then plug in a power brick, which will again throw away some power in converting 220V back down to whatever voltage a device uses, means double wastage, and a mess of plugs and wires.

I have DC 12V from the battery, and an easily-accessible 20V feed via a step-up converter. Then of course I have 5V over USB, not to mention all the exotic USB-C variants. Between all these methods I can power everything that I use regularly.

When I buy a new device the first thing I do is chop off its power connector, attach it to one of the XT60 connectors I use for everything , and chuck (hoard, actually) the device’s power brick. I’ve done this with multiple laptops and small form factor PCs without issue. They usually seem to want 19V-21V and be tolerant of 20V although I’ve heard stories of people damaging stuff with similar reckless behaviour to mine so maybe I’ve been lucky.

I searched for info about doing this with the M1 Mac Mini’s power brick and found some people saying they had problems. While writing this I just searched again to try to find those discussions but this time I found stuff suggesting it’s fairly easy. So I’m not sure if I used the wrong search terms before, or maybe I was just too jumpy about modding power delivery for an Apple device. Apple tends to be so unfriendly towards going off-road and they’re known for implementing measures to prevent you doing things in ‘unapproved’ ways. I didn’t want to waste money buying something I couldn’t use.

For better or worse, I decided against the M1 Mac Mini.

M1 Macbook Air Part 3 of 11

I admit it's a modern classic.

Despite its laptop-ness, I decided to think harder on the Macbook Air:

My issue with the redundant (for me) display being attached?.. this could become an advantage.

People sell these machines cheaply when the displays break (Apple is… not big on right-to-repair). I could buy a Macbook with a broken screen and remove it. I checked whether this was possible (such things are a given with most laptops but with Apple I wasn’t sure what to expect). I found that this was doable, people were out there doing it. Fantastic.

‘BUY IT NOW’

I managed to find a smashed-screen, 8GB M1 Macbook Air in Rose Pink on eBay for £300. Really if I’d waited I could probably have picked one up for less.

But this was a strike while the iron is hot situation… my resistance had been strong for many years, if I waited I might easily end up changing my mind.

8GB RAM? Rose Pink?

I’d ideally want 16GB RAM minimum on a modern laptop, but the price difference between that and 8GB was significant, even on the second-hand market. Everyone seemed to be saying that 8GB on Apple Silicon was like 16GB on AMD64, which sounded distinctly like the reality-distortion-field in effect, but there were architectural realities such as their ‘Unified’ memory architecture to back this up (or at least the idea that you get more bang per GB on Apple Silicon). I’d decided to trust.

I was mainly interested in using this machine for Flutter development, and had found several people saying they were doing that on an M1 with 8GB without issues. [Note from the future: It’s great, no worries and easily snappy enough for me]

This model was Rose Pink, the colour I’d usually be least likely to choose. Considering I was buying it to immediately butcher, this somehow made it all the more perfect.

It's from eBay. Does it Even Work? Part 4 of 11

I've generally had decent experiences buying from eBay. But before I start chopping bits off my purchase I should probably make sure it works.

Being an eBay purchase (albeit from a seller with good feedback) the first thing I needed to do was make sure that this thing was actually functional.

The screen was damaged (as per the listing) and displayed basically nothing, or to be specific a few single-pixel lines of colour which hinted at whether the machine was on or off, on a black smashed background.

Nothing so garish as ‘an LED to tell you when its powered on’ would be allowed on a modern Mac. These thin, single-pixel lines of colour would be my power indicator.

Monitors and cables

This is where I encountered my first difficulties. I have a very small, very cheap USB-C monitor. This is the only actual monitor I have. I usually run stuff headless over VNC, NoMachine etc, using tablets like my Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra as remote OLED displays. I just don’t have much need for monitors. I have a Boox Max Lumi E-ink tablet with a micro HDMI input, so that can act as a monitor but… maybe later.

So I plugged the little monitor in to one of the two available ports on the characterless bravely minimal chassis (the other port would do for power). The monitor didn’t light up.

A vast landscape of confusing possible states opened up before me. Was I in the wrong port? A USB-C port is not a USB-C port etc, especially where displays and power are concerned. Maybe only one specific port would power the Mac, or only one of them would output a display signal.

What about the cable, both cables? Were they even providing power/pixels or did they have the wrong strands in them?

Did the Macbook put out enough power over USB-C for the monitor? Did I need to plug an additional cable for power, or charge the battery some more, or plug extra power into the monitor itself?

Was my monitor just not compatible? It’s a simple AliExpress generic thing, and Apple is not exactly known for its broad compatibility with 3rd-party products. Was it just not-yet-enabled in the OS?

Was I even ‘in the OS’ at this point, or was the Macbook still booting… or stuck in some horrific ‘recovery zone’ where blindly pressing the wrong button might result in destroying the OS, the only solutions to be “plug it into one of the other Apple computers that you don’t have” or “take it to an Apple Store where (if somebody dressed like you is allowed inside) a Genius will go asthmatic at the concept of a headless Macbook and make you buy a new one for a thousand of the pounds that you don’t have”?

After an embarrassing amount of cable-swapping (80% of my USB-C cables either couldn’t deliver enough power, or couldn’t deliver the pixels, and I’ve been through this stuff so many times I should know by now to never assume that my cables are good) I eventually made progress.

The monitor lit up.

Then it went black again. Not dead-black, but that rubbish glowingly-grey attempt at black that TFT panels manage, which told me that the monitor was powered up and trying to display something, but had nothing to display.

Power button

The Macbook does grant me a power button at least, in the form of a special key on the keyboard, up in the corner.

It’s a strange item, sitting slightly lower than the other keys on the keyboard, with a slightly different tactile response compared to the other keys. Maybe this is to mark it out as being ‘other’ for usability reasons (which I like), or maybe it’s a side-effect of the button housing a fingerprint sensor.

With my lack of Apple experience and the lack of working screen, I actually found this button a little confusing. I was never sure if I’d pressed it ‘properly’, ie did it require a tap, or a little hold, or did perhaps a long hold perform a different function?

I tried searching for info about the button but there are so many different models of Macbook, many users with varying ways of communicating their ideas, no official detailed documentation for these things, and of course the reasonable assumption that Macbooks have screens. Yes, I was confused by a power button.

After several presses of the power button, and waits to see if a reboot was happening, more progress. Trees! The MacOS login screen appeared, only… not quite. There were no buttons, dialogues, or any user interface elements.

A bit of searching taught me that the missing login UI was indicative of a second screen being attached to a Macbook. The login screen was being shown (invisibly to me) on the broken internal display, and my little monitor was just acting as an extension. Fair enough.

More ‘internet research’ revealed that CMD + F1 would swap output to the external monitor. This worked. Great. I now had a dinky 11" MacOS login screen.

It Just (about) Works.

Removing the Display Part 5 of 11

Finally getting down to some hardware pruning.

Removing the display was relatively easy, but time-consuming. There were lots of screws and they had pentalobe and torx heads, but these are standard in any electronics screwdriver set — I have one of those.

I checked a couple of disassembly videos on YouTube to make sure I wasn’t going to encounter any plastic tabs which might break off, short tearable ribbon cables etc, and to find where the display connectors were. I’ve taken apart quite a few laptops, this wasn’t one of the worst.

Separating the lid from the base was tricky. Even when all fastenings were removed it was still stuck. I couldn’t tell if it was just tight tolerances on the hinges (hey, get the tolerances tight enough and metal sticks to metal… although I think even with Apple’s admittedly precise engineering this was probably normal stuckness rather than anything more mystical), or if there was a piece of the assembly in the way, something I’d missed.

I found a video suggesting to open the laptop to 90 degrees, then hang it off the edge of a table and give it a sharp whack to separate the lid from the base. They made it look easier than I found it to be, but eventually I got the lid off.

Keeping the lid

After looking into various cases and sleeves (if nothing else I wanted to be able to stop keys from getting pressed when the Macbook was put away and waking it up), I decided that I’d keep the lid. It is thin, light and tough, so why not continue using it to protect the computer? It was designed for the job.

Getting the glass panel out of the lid was a chore. Like most modern displays it was very thin and shatterable (pre-shattered in this case), and gripped tightly to the inside of the metal shell of the lid via some kind of adhesive or thin tape. I had to use heat and a scraper and it made a horrible and probably dangerous mess, thousands of specks of shattered material that looked pretty like toffee-apple but were actually cutty, inhalable glass.

I worked slowly, every minute or so I swept up the latest shards into a container so they wouldn’t get embedded in my hands/cornea/bronchioles. I did this gently so as not to disperse the bits all over the place with the flicking of the brush.

After a while I had the idea of sticking a patch of duct tape over each area of glass before I scraped it away. This worked well, preventing the pieces from scattering and making it easier to scrape the glass away from the metal shell of the lid.

With all the glass finally removed, there were a couple of areas which remained sticky and some unfinished sharp metal edges. To prevent it from getting hair stuck to it or from scratching the keyboard/touchpad I covered the entire inside surface of the lid with some clear adhesive plastic sheet.

The final effect is reminiscent of an overprotected sofa, but it’s all I had to-hand and it’ll do for now.

Factory Reset Part 6 of 11

Just a formality...

The display was removed, things were looking clean.

This is a used device. It seemed like the OS was a fresh install, but I like to be sure, so I did a factory reset. The process seemed smooth, until the reboot.

I wasn’t sure how long to wait for boot after a factory reset. I’ve had some devices (eg Android phones after installing custom ROMS) take many minutes on first boot after a reset, but online info suggested this should be pretty quick on an M1 Mac.

Minutes passed and the display wasn’t showing anything. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I started playing guessing games with the power button. I wished again that there was a power LED. With the broken screen removed I couldn’t even rely on those few lines of pixels lighting up to give me clues.

I’m still not sure if I broke/interrupted something, or if this was a normal part of the reset process. I tried various patterns of tapping, holding, holding for longer, each time waiting for something to happen for 10, 30 or 60 seconds. How long should I wait before I expect to see something on the screen?

Eventually I got something to happen. I was back to the black (but lit/powered on) screen. I guessed I was somewhere mid-boot. I tried the CMD + F1 combo which had made the external monitor primary when I was on the login screen. It didn’t work – the key combo/switching must be a feature of MacOS, which I was not yet booted into. A little reading around online hinted that I might be in recovery mode.

I found a video explaining how recovery mode worked on a machine with an external monitor and no internal display, and how to handle it.

Recovery mode when you only have an external monitor

The situation is this:

In my case, the resolution of my external monitor was smaller in height than the internal monitor. This may have made the situation more confusing. I think that the top menu bar extends across both displays, and if my monitor was tall enough I’d have seen the bar, giving a massively more helpful clue than the empty black screen.

To get stuff done in recovery mode, you have to drag the window from phantom screen, onto the external display. The window is only draggable by its title bar. So you have to shoot your touchpad pointer off the right-hand side of your screen, aim for where you think the title bar might be, and try to tap/drag it back over to your real visible screen on the left .

This took me ages. I think the window on the invisible screen was centred, but because it was a different resolution to my monitor it was hard to visualise and aim for it. But once done, I could access everything in recovery mode.

After finishing the reset I booted. The monitor doesn’t start showing stuff until later in the boot process but that’s ok.

I’m in, on the external monitor, with the Macbook’s internal screen removed.

Is This Thing On? Part 7 of 11

Questioning my hatred of LEDs.

One of the most difficult problems I’ve had with using this machine headless, is knowing whether it’s turned on or not. Seriously.

If I connect the external monitor (ok, not headless in that case), no image on the screen might mean:

If I try to connect over NoMachine or VNC and fail, that might mean:

I really dislike the millions of blinking LEDs designers love to stick on electronic devices. They constantly nag or distract, I think they are bad. But I’d kill for one one this Macbook!

Things I’ve tried

I have a small USB-C SD card reader. It has a red LED which lights up when it is receiving power. For a while I used this, but it’s impractical. Although it’s small, it still sticks out to be breakage risk. A nice bit of leverage on the USB port, just waiting to wrench it off if it catches on something (a bit like the 1st-gen Apple Pencil when it was charging).

At some point I noticed that the caps lock button on the keyboard had an LED which lit when caps was locked. And (remembering I’d usually be using a Bluetooth keyboard and pointing device), the caps lock could be applied to the built-in keyboard without affecting the Bluetooth keyboard. I could just leave caps lock on and the LED would stay lit.

The showstopper problem with both of the above ideas was that they both only worked when the Macbook was fully booted and ready to rock. I guess the ports and caps lock LED are powered off at other times. Most of my periods of confusion as to whether it was powered on or not were happening when it was half-on, during boot, sleep, shutdown etc.

My current-best solution

I noticed that my router, in its list of ‘attached clients’ was providing relatively quick/up-to-date information about whether the Macbook was connected or not. It seemed to connect to Wi-Fi quite early in the boot process, and disconnect soon after I initiated a shutdown.

Following on from that, I started pinging the Macbook in a terminal window, which I could keep nearby while I worked. This was getting close enough for my purposes.

The obvious next step was to script it properly. My aim was to get a brief status line telling me if the Macbook was connected or not, and its battery charge level. The following script did the job:

#!/bin/bash

# Ping a Mac on the LAN
# If it's alive, check its battery level using a seperate script `battery-check` (present on the
# Mac)
# Return the result with coloured text to indicate off/on status, and rough battery level
# Loop repeatedly, overwriting the results text each time onto the same single line

ip_to_check=192.168.8.123
hostname=AIR

wht='\033[1;15m'
red='\033[1;31m'
ylw='\033[1;33m'
ong='\033[38;5;208m'
grn='\033[1;32m'
nc='\033[0m' # No Colour

update_battery () {
  # Log in with SSH and call script to get battery charge info.
  battery_check_output=$(ssh AIR "bash --login -c battery-check")

  # `battery-check` returns a string like `battery: 18%`, we want to extract the number.
  percentage=$(echo "${battery_check_output}" | tr -dc '0-9')

  if [[ $percentage -lt 15 ]]; then
    battcolor=$red
  elif [[ $percentage -lt 30 ]]; then
    battcolor=$ong
  elif [[ $percentage -lt 80 ]]; then
    battcolor=$ylw
  else
    battcolor=$grn
  fi 
}

# Hide cursor
tput civis

# Sometimes (too soon after boot?) the first call fails
# Machete through it
update_battery
sleep 1
update_battery
sleep 1


i=0
while :
do

  # -c 1 ... count 1 (only ping once)
  if ping -c 1 ${ip_to_check} &> /dev/null; then
    # Temporarily go white to indicate battery has just been checked/updated (2 * 5 = 10secs)
    if [[ $i -lt 2 ]]; then
      color=$wht
    else
      color=$battcolor
    fi

    echo -ne "  ${hostname} ${grn}    ON     ${nc}${color}${percentage}%${nc}\r"

    # i ends up incrementing every 5secs or so
    ((i++))
    
    # Increment and every n counts update battery
    # 5sec * 36 = 180secs = 3mins
    if [[ $i -eq 36 ]]; then
      i=0
      update_battery
    fi
  else
    echo -ne "  ${hostname} ${red}   OFF       ${nc}\r"
  fi

  sleep 5
done

Fromhttps://codeberg.org/mm-dev/shell-scripts/raw/branch/termux-proot-ubuntu/mac-get-status

I already had a little script on the Mac to report the battery level (a very simple wrapper around a Mac built-in system_profiler, just to shorten the output).

#!/bin/sh

percent=$(system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep "State of Charge (%)" | awk '{print $5}')
echo "battery: ${percent}%"

Then I wanted to be able to float the mac-get-status script in a tiny window.

This next script opens up a terminal in a new window, gives it a specific title macmonitor, and runs mac-get-status:

#!/bin/bash

$TERMINAL --title macmonitor -e "mac-get-status" &

Fromhttps://codeberg.org/mm-dev/shell-scripts/raw/branch/termux-proot-ubuntu/mac-monitor

Then I tell my window manager (DWM) to apply a special rule to windows with that specific title. This is how it’s done in DWM but other window managers may have ways of achieving the same thing.

static const Rule rules[] = {
    // If an Xfce4-terminal window has title 'macmonitor':
    // - Make it float
    // - Make its dimensions 150px x 22px
    {"Xfce4-terminal", NULL, "macmonitor", 0, 1, -1, 0, 0, 150, 22, 1},

    // other rules...
};

Magnets Part 8 of 11

Magnets are fun.

I experienced a ridiculous amount of confusion and wasted time due to a silly oversight I made (repeatedly!).

As mentioned earlier, I’d kept the lid for the Macbook, detached from its hinges and with the broken screen removed, to use as a kind of… lid.

When in use, it seemed like the obvious place to put the lid was under the Macbook, where it fitted perfectly.

For the first few hours, days, even weeks, I had intermittent problems with the machine randomly turning off/on (actually sleeping/waking but I didn’t know that at the time).

Remember I was having enough trouble knowing whether the machine was turned on or not in those early days.

It was the magnets in the lid, activating the hall sensors in the base and making it think I was opening/closing the lid. Due to the thickness of the base the magnets weren’t as close as they’d normally be, and the alignment wasn’t perfect. So this wasn’t a simple matter of ‘when the lid is under the laptop it goes to sleep’. This was a sporadic problem that could come and go as things wobbled in the environment. It took me a while to make the mental connection and work out what was happening.

# TODO Remove magnets from lid!

Remote Access Part 9 of 11

How I really use this machine.

Now I’m past the novelty of plugging in monitors this is how I actually use the machine.

Remote builds over SSH

I’m working on an Android tablet most of the time, using Termux, Proot-distro and Termux/X11 to run Debian Bookworm arm64. This setup has shortcomings but I find it very comfortable and manage to get 90% of my work done on it.

One current problem is that the arm64 version of the Android SDK can’t build arm64 APKs for Android. During main development I just build/run the Linux version of whichever app I’m working on — Flutter is multi-platform and suprisingly consistent between platforms. But of course I need to build APKs for Android devices at some point.

When I just need to quickly build some APKs for a given project, I use something like the following script (this one is for auDAV, my WebDAV audiobook player app):

#!/bin/sh

# Script to be run from Termux/proot-distro
# - Connects to build machine AIR (host defined in `~/.ssh/config`)
# - Logs in to working directory
# - Builds APKs
# - Syncs APKs to local machine


remote_commands=$(cat << 'EOF'
echo "~~~~~~~ Remote: Source local environment ~~~~~~~"
source ~/.zprofile
source ~/.zshrc

echo "~~~~~~~ Remote: Change working directory ~~~~~~~"
cd ~/development/audav

echo "~~~~~~~~~ Remote: Pull latest from git ~~~~~~~~~"
git pull

echo -e "\n~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Remote: Build APKs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"
flutter build apk --split-per-abi
EOF
)

ssh AIR "bash --login -c '${remote_commands}'"

echo "\n~~~~~~~~~~~ Local: Sync APKs to local ~~~~~~~~~~"

rsync -r --mkpath --progress AIR:development/audav/build/app/outputs/flutter-apk $HOME/000-WORK/audav/build/app/outputs/

Fromhttps://codeberg.org/mm-dev/shell-scripts/raw/branch/termux-proot-ubuntu/audav-build-on-mac

Full remote graphical access with NoMachine

To build apps for MacOS, iOS and iPadOS I must endure the torturous window management, tedious animations, and terrible file manager of MacOS (and that’s before we even get to XCode).

To ease my suffering I can at least use MacOS via the OLED screen of a Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, a DEFT PRO trackball and a Ferris Sweep split mechanical keyboard.

NoMachine works well for remoting into MacOS and over the LAN it performs well with very little lag. There’s client software for Android and arm64 Linux meaning it’s quick and easy for me to just pop in to MacOS from my favoured Linux/DWM environment.

Running Headless: What I've Learned Part 10 of 11

A few findings.

The lid

Power button

From dead (no/low power)

A couple of times I’ve not used the machine for a week or more and the battery has got very flat — honestly it’s disappointing that it isn’t engineered to handle this situation better.

For a while I struggled to charge it, trying all of the following with no success:

What eventually got past this problem:

This could be a red herring eg the order of plugging in cables was not important but instead the battery had accumulated a charge and the final successful attempts just pushed it above some threshold that would allow it to boot. The fact that the response was so quick (30 secs after plugging in the cables in this order the machine was on) makes me think this is unlikely.

The only other explanation I can think of is that which end of the charging cable is plugged in first makes a difference, possibly due to something related to USB-C handshake/power negotiations that I’m ignorant of. This is a hunch and might make no sense in reality. I leave the info/observation here with very little weight attached to it, it is what it is.

End Results and Bonus Part 11 of 11

I'm really happy with my choice and how I've managed to integrate the Macbook into my working environment as a build machine.

Good

Bad

I’m never going to use this as my main machine, and that was never my plan. I’m into minimal Linux with invisible tiling window managers like DWM, and dragging windows around, being forced to watch animations etc won’t cut it for my preferences.

I do know about Asahi Linux but that makes power usage much less special and I’m not sure how it plays with the development stack I need for Flutter. More crucially, at time of writing DP Alt Mode is not working, which means monitors plugged in to the USB-C port won’t work. Having cut the display off, this scuppers me.

For me this was an investment into being able to responsibly build software for the Apple ecosystem and its users who have different preferences than mine. It’s a tool for a specific sub-set of tasks, and under those conditions it does what I need.

Bonus: E-ink Macbook

Remember I mentioned that I had a Boox Max Lumi which could function as a monitor for the Macbook? Here it is in full effect.

After tweaking some settings in Accessibility/Display, MacOS can be made to look half-decent on e-ink.

All the usual caveats about e-ink apply re refresh rates and ghosting of course, but I could easily see myself working quite happily in Vim on it in some imaginary future dystopia where I’m trapped in Apple’s walled garden, all that exists, protected by a multi-trillion dollar Reality Distortion Field that they managed to power up just before the bombs dropped…

Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center!