The Computer History Museum is teasing the “Big Mac.” This is an almost comically large-scale rendition of the circa 1986 Macintosh Plus. However, in 2026 design terms, only the keyboard looks particularly oversized, as screens on all-in-ones nowadays totally dominate designs, with the ‘PC’ bits so small they don’t look much different to monitors.
We recently acquired an astonishingly large Macintosh Plus computer. Naturally, our first order of business was ASMR with the “Big Mac” keyboard.#Appleat50 pic.twitter.com/50rtGopaps February 20, 2026
Above you can see the “astonishingly large Macintosh Plus computer” recently acquired by the museum, based in Mountain View, California. The device was likely built for exhibition and demo purposes back in the day, when the Plus was a commercially available and desirable machine.
The Computer History Museum shies away from any kind of technical details regarding the Big Mac. For this tease,r it preferred to try and hook in the keyboard ASMR crowd, a surprisingly large niche of enthusiasts. A staffer from the museum, we presume, is videos click clacking on the scaled-up replica of the Apple Keyboard (M0110A). As you can see, this keyboard would be very compact, with just 58 keys, but at least it has arrow keys, which were absent from its predecessor, the M0110.
Apple’s Macintosh Plus launched with the same Motorola 68000 CPU as the original Mac, but buyers benefited from a default 1MB of RAM (expandable to 4MB with its 4x standard 30-pin SIMM slots), an 800KB 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a SCSI port for peripherals like HDDs and printers.
Though it appealed to graphic artists, largely due to the direction of its software library driven by the Mac’s pioneering GUI adoption, these machines (original and Plus) were built around a tiny 9-inch monochrome CRT with 512 x 342 pixels resolution. That’s why, even with the ‘Big Mac,’ the screen looks kinda small, while the keyboard is comically large in 2026.
The Macintosh Plus launched at $2,599 in 1986, for the configuration outlined above. That’s over $7,500 in 2026 money. Still, it was a workhorse fully supported by Apple System releases for a decade, with Mac OS 7.5.5 maintaining support for the little all-in-one when it was released in Sept 1996.
The Computer History Museum teases that more info on the Big Mac is coming next week. Its social media post tag suggests this computer will form part of its Apple at 50 celebrations, which kickoff in March.
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