Dosdude1 is a well-known hacker in the small hackintosh community, and recently, he accomplished a remarkable feat: resurrecting a Mac Mini DTK! For those not familiar with this name, the DTK is a prototype Mac Mini equipped with an A12Z chip, which Apple distributed to a select group of developers in 2020 to help them adapt their applications to the ARM architecture.
This DTK was supposed to be temporary… developers were allowed to keep it for six months, then they had to return it to Apple for destruction. But as often happens, some units fell off the back of the truck and ended up in China for recycling. This is where the story gets interesting because Dosdude1 managed to get his hands on one of these DTKs in a sorry state. The motherboard was severely damaged, the storage chips were gone, in short, it was not a promising start.
However, our genius tinkerer, armed with patience and talent, embarked on a true labor of love to restore this wreck. Essentially, he repaired the motherboard circuits with a Dremel and file, replaced the faulty capacitors, and most importantly, soldered a new storage chip after flashing it with the correct firmware. A real titan’s job!
After long hours of work, the verdict was in: the machine booted and appeared in DFU mode! Well, it’s not fully functional yet; macOS still needs to be restored and activated, but considering the security level of Apple’s chips, reaching this point is already quite an achievement!
To restore the DTK, Dosdude1 had to be cunning. Using generic firmware like for a hackintosh was impossible since the chip is locked, but the ingenious tinkerer decided to use Apple’s recovery servers to obtain the correct DTK files based on its serial number. Clever 🙂
Once macOS was restored, the machine still needed to be activated, and here came the bad surprise—it didn’t work! In fact, the serial number had changed, but Dosdude1 had more tricks up his sleeve. He managed to retrieve the original serial number and MAC address by querying Apple’s activation servers again, then re-injected them into the storage chip, performed one last restoration, and… It worked!
The DTK is now fully operational under macOS 11.2, the latest supported version. As a bonus, he added a complete Mac Mini 2018 case with all the accessories, and the result is incredible! It looks like a factory-fresh Mac Mini!
Kudos to Dosdude1 because despite all of Apple’s efforts to lock down its devices, there’s always someone who will overcome the obstacles, and that’s cool!
