Overnight on X, I caught a glimpse of a passing post — a lush, well-lit desktop monitor, and a sleek-looking keyboard and mouse, with a single cable binding it all together. A sucker for an aesthetic desk setup, I paused for a closer look and was caught off guard by the caption “What are they doing over on Reddit?” A harmless easy-on-the-eye desk setup, what’s not to like? That’s when it hit me. I was looking at a MacBook, but not just any MacBook. This was a headless MacBook, and now I’m obsessed.
It didn’t take me long to find the original Reddit post over on r/macbookpro. What I discovered filled me with awe, curiosity, and delight. User rynlv tells the story of how they bought an M2 Pro MacBook Pro (a $1,700 laptop), for just £500 ($650). The reason for the low price? The MacBook’s display was broken. Thanks to a handy iFixit video, they were able to remove the display and turn it into a stunning desktop Mac, ready to be plugged into a 144Hz monitor via Thunderbolt 4.
Off with his head
I am now absolutely infatuated with headless MacBooks, so much so that I want to make my own. Against my better judgment, I’m not going to lop the screen of my own perfectly functioning M2 Pro MacBook Pro, that would probably be irresponsible. But the idea of giving a new lease of life to a crippled MacBook in this way is absolutely fantastic. The internet, specifically eBay, is riddled with thousands of defunct Macs that aren’t of much use to anyone because their screens don’t work anymore. Perhaps if more people knew how to make a headless Mac, they could be saved or repurposed, even on a commercial scale! I’m not the only one either, last year Luke Miani posted a video documenting his own headless MacBook project, which you can even follow yourself if you want to.
I’m literally the least handy person I know, so I’ll no doubt be calling on the expert hands of my Genius Bar-honed colleague John-Anthony to help me out. But I’m absolutely desperate to give MacBook decapitation a try, for reasons I’m struggling to describe. The idea of a perfect form factor keyboard and trackpad powering a nice 4K (or 5K) display is just so enticing to me. It’s odd because the MacBook keyboard isn’t that nice to type on, I just have an unshakeable itch to try this. As one commenter on X noted, it “goes hard in ways I can't quite articulate.”
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