Polymaker's Panchroma Matte White is also a very close match to Classic Mac plastics.
And since I didn't actually see a link to the filament in the Ars Technica article, here it is https://polarfilament.com/products/retro-platinum-pla-1kg-1-...
I was really hoping this would be the colorful plastic backs of the early 2000s iMacs we had in school
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Grd_a4oi7qU is a really cool video where someone builds a computer that looks and feels like an early Apple design concept for a flat, portable Macintosh, something between a modern laptop and a tablet. They pull it off really well; if you didn't know better, you'd think you'd found a lost prototype. Anyway, one of the problems they had to solve was the plastic colour, and they did it by painting the case. With this new filament they wouldn't have needed the paint. :)
Not gonna lie, I was expecting to see something in translucent bondi blue.
There is a wild assortment of modern hardware out there for keeping older hardware running. BlueSCSI is mentioned in the article and I have been a customer. I used a BlueSCSI to save pull some old sources from an old SCSI drive I had been hanging on to for 35 years or so [1].
People are making replacements for the dead lead-acid batteries from the original Mac (so-called) Portable. There are USB-powered cables to charge/power early MacBooks. I'm sure others can rattle off several other devices.
Now you have people 3D printing replacement bezels, etc. for these old machines. Very cool.
> The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers.
> Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience.
So it seems like the color is for 3D-printing stuff to look "new"?
Makes me wonder if there will be a "thirty years discolored" version as well, if you want to print a piece to replace something broken... or can you just leave it out in the sun for a couple weeks or something?
These kind of "off-white" colors of the 1980s are making a comeback these days; they were considered dated design during the early 2000s but in the 2020s they're "in" again, e.g. anthropic.com, hume.ai, ...
This article is peak Jeff Geerling territory.
First thing I thought of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N5Eqt5AEN8
The first mac cube was the 4th computer I ever got my hands on, iirc. TRS80, Commodore, Apple II, Mac Plus
That’s a nice color.. but different from the nicotine yellow
Is anyone having success printing keycaps with filament?
Why PLA though, it PETG has much better qualities
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
If Tim Cook introduced new Mac hardware with the retro look (anything before, eh, 2003) the tech world would lose its flipping mind.
Something that has been kind of funny for me, perhaps others are feeling this way: I see increasingly this "retro computing community" fawning over machines that I think of as ... just machines that I used once. Some of the machines were even kind of scorned at the time as I recall — now they're sought after, lovingly restored....
I don't know if my reaction is as one who is being made aware of just how old they are (61, BTW) or if it is a bit of a sweetness that I feel that younger generations are coveting these older machines instead of reflexively landfilling them.
If Woz were still in Apple there would be Apple-run makerspaces, with Apple branded 3d printers and all the types of filament you could dream of.
Too bad Jobs turned the company into a boring locked-down anti-consumer appliance factory.
...pretty sure you can just get the color scanned and mixed at any paint shop if you really want to
Here's what the foreword to Keep It Simple https://arnoldsche.com/en/vergriffen/keep-it-simple/ https://archive.org/details/keepitsimpleearl0000essl/ says about the Platinum colour, also known as Snow White:
> Esslinger had been working with Steve Jobs since 1982 and was of paramount importance for the look of Apple products as an external designer -—as of 1983 also as Corporate Manager of Design. The start of collaboration between Steve Jobs and Hartmut Esslinger went from 1982 to 1983 with “Snow White,” a new color and design concept that was the base for all future Apple products. Besides specifying certain design aspects, the concept entailed introducing a new color. The dull “greige” of the industrial and corporate workplace was to be replaced by a broken white-called “Snow White" in the US. First used for the Apple llc, this white not only made the computer esthetically compatible with living rooms but also psychologically underpinned the user-friendly menu navigation. The new “Snow White” line worked up by Hartmut Esslinger was supposed to be launched with the Macintosh Computer—originally designed by Jerry Manock-but many reasons made this impossible. So the revised version could not be introduced until later: with the Macintosh SE.