Vintage Mac in Lego looks good enough to use
Chris McVeigh's Lego build celebrates the Macintosh 128K and follows incredible recreations of classic tech in plastic bricks.
The only thing that can top building something incredible with Legos is taking a good photo of it. Chris McVeigh does both.
The graphic and Web designer is a wizard with bricks and a lens. His latest creation marks the recent 29th anniversary of Steve Jobs' release of the original Apple Macintosh in January 1984. It's just too cute for school.
Based in Halifax, Canada, McVeigh has designed custom builds and images for Gizmodo, Esquire Malaysia, and Toronto magazine Spacing. When he first gets an idea for the classic Mac or, as seen in the gallery below, a vintage camera, he uses Lego's modeling app for designers, Lego Digital Designer.
'The advantage of starting off a project digitally is that I can play around with thousands of bricks without actually having them sitting out in front of me, which can be a problem when you have as many bricks as I do," says McVeigh, who gets his bricks from stores or online retailers. "But that said, I always seem to need bricks that I don't have with each new build."
Although McVeigh says he's happiest building his own creations, "there are a lot of Lego-designed sets that I really love, especially the modular building series," he tells Crave. "However, my favorite recent set is the Haunted House. It's a gorgeous model and a great build, and it's exactly the kind of thing I'd want to design if I worked at Lego."
McVeigh says his most challenging project to date was a build for a Gizmodo article on rogue waves.
It's a boat that seems to be on the brink of being crushed by a giant Lego wave. Check out photos here, and look behind the scenes here.
The design and construction of these sets takes hours of patience and effort. A lot of us would give up without a set of Lego instructions. Where does McVeigh get his drive?
"I think I may just thrive on the challenge," he says. "Can I make a rotary telephone out of Lego? Can I make an old Mac, and make it look convincing? Can I set it up in a photo that evokes the original Mac advertisement?
"I'm the harshest critic of my own work, but when a build comes together just right, or better yet, when it finally comes together after I've overcome a series of complications, the excitement, and the sense of satisfaction, is amazing. So maybe that's what I'm really chasing with each new build."
Check out more of McVeigh's slick vintage tech Lego in our gallery above.