This week’s selection is the Macintosh Studio by Mini product designer Scott Yu-Jan.
Yu-Jan publishes DIY videos on his YouTube channel, with many focusing on aspects of 3D printers and applications for them. A prior project involved designing a unique case to produce a portable Mac Mini computer.
Now he’s taken a bigger step with the “Macintosh Studio”, a massive docking system for the popular Apple Mac Studio desktop computer.
The Mac Studio is pretty basic in exterior design: it’s a box. To use it you must hook up keyboard, monitors, external drives, etc. This process can take some time to do, and this has led to the development of docking systems that centralize all the cabling.
Yu-Jan’s thought here was to design a docking system that took cues from the original 1984 Macintosh computer, a revolutionary design at the time. Coincidentally, 2024 is the 40th anniversary of that breakthrough device.
But what, exactly, should the large Macintosh-inspired dock contain? Yu-Jan went through a series of design iterations, but in the end his concept was to incorporate several loose items around his workstation, including an iPad mini, headphones, and a collection of external drives.
The design ended up with a superstructure for the Mac Studio that slides on top. The iPad mini slides into the front and immediately becomes a second screen for the Mac Studio — and one that has touch capability. Yu-Jan uses it to draw with his Apple Pencil, for example.
In the rear of the Macintosh Studio there is a drawer that can hold miscellaneous items, which is certainly handy. However, Yu-Jan designed an alternate drawer that holds archival SSD storage units. In the image above you can see how these can be hooked up as required, as well as a slide-out hook for headphones.
The design may also be adapted in the future for the Mac mini, which has a similar footprint to the Mac Studio.
The Macintosh Studio is an incredibly cool accessory for the Mac Studio, and I suspect it could become quite popular. Yu-Jan does provide the files for printing the parts yourself, however, you will have to join his membership program first.
Via YouTube
