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The WiiBook


The WiiBook is a project to take the motherboard of an old unibody Macbook Pro (made in 2009-2012), and transplant it into the shell of a Wii. Since these old laptops had CD drives inside of them, this constrained the motherboard to a very specific footprint, which almost exactly matches that of the Wii's motherboard, making this swap possible. All of the materials for the project can be found at this Github page, and the instructions are below.

A photo of the bottom half of a Wii shell, with an old laptop motherboard seated on top of it.
An early image of the WiiBook.

Wii preparation


The first step is to empty out the Wii's case, so that there are no internal components remaining other than the LED board for the disc drive. Follow this guide for help on this process.
Following this, use a Dremel or similar tool to remove any standoffs on the bottom for the original motherboard, then attach the standoffs from the "case-standoffs", "standoff-9mm", "standoff-12mm", and "standoff-13mm" files. The 9mm standoffs attach to the motherboard's fan, the 13mm standoffs attach to the two screwholes in the bottom-right, and the rest of the standoffs are 12mm. The case standoffs should be attached onto the bottom case where the retention screws would attach the top case to the bottom case: each hole is at a different height, so it should be clear which standoff goes where. At this point, you should have a shell which looks like this (this image includes the SSD standoffs which are added later):

A photo of the bottom half of a Wii shell, with several standoffs attached.
The WiiBook's bottom half with the standoffs attached.