A bare CRT and a tripled CPU: Jeff Geerling upgrades a 1989 Mac SE/30
The nearly two-hour livestream swaps in a screen tube from a Mac Classic II, high voltage anode and all.
Jeff GeerlingStory of Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.
I can't afford RAM, so I'm upgrading my 1989 Mac instead
With memory prices making a new build painful, Jeff Geerling went the other way. "I can't afford RAM, so I'm upgrading my 1989 Mac instead" is his one upload of the week. It is a long livestream, close to two hours, built around a Macintosh SE/30, the compact Mac many collectors still rank among Apple's best.
The chapters read like a small adventure. A teardown, an accelerator that promises to triple the CPU speed, a first nervous "Will it boot?", and then the riskier part: pulling the CRT out of a Mac Classic II donor, a look at a bare picture tube, and a yoke swap with one chapter labeled, plainly, "high danger." A microphone hiccup at the start gets its own chapter too. In the comments, viewers swap memories of owning an SE/30, point to other channels that have swapped Mac monitors, and ask whether the Mac world has anything like the Amiga's Raspberry Pi accelerators.
It went up on Saturday and gathered about 50,000 views in its first twelve hours, the fastest thing on the channel right now. Behind it, older videos keep turning over: the summer story of learning CNC to rescue a 20-year-old Apple Xserve, and his look at Intel's efficiency in Dell's XPS 13, now just short of a million views.
Overall it was a calmer stretch. Daily views ran about a third below his usual pace and the subscriber count held still. Among the tech review channels around his size, Digital Doctor had by far the busiest week and Hugh Jeffreys ran at more than twice his normal pace, while Jeff sat near the quiet end with an old Mac on the bench.
Published on Trari
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What viewers say
The SE/30 was a wonderful machine. I owned it and later I had the Quadra 605, before switching to Linux.
@recentestSee it on YouTubeOne my my general life goals is to do things "hopefully without killing myself". Good so see someone else with the same philosophy.
@rob-dewhirstSee it on YouTube
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The videos drawing views on Jeff Geerling right now
- Channel
- Jeff Geerling
- Subscribers
- 1,090,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 613,639
- Videos published this week
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- Video published
- October 3, 2026
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💡 Test your knowledge
Which processor family powered the original Macintosh SE/30?
The SE/30 took its name from its Motorola 68030 CPU, a big step up from the 68000 in the original Mac SE.
