Writing the app involved dealing with OAuth, which means the MacPlayer isn’t entirely standalone some of it must be done on a ‘modern’ device.

That’s a connection to the Internet, but actual wrote an app to connect to a Spotify playlist, browse tracks, and display album art in beautiful 1-bit color. Tie that together with a Finder extension and you have System 7, with WiFi. This is a continuation of one of earlier hacks that basically put a WiFi to Ethernet bridge inside an SE/30. You could theoretically get the Mac to speak, “Alexa, play Despacito” and get the same functionality, but that’s not fun, is it? You need to do it wirelessly. The trick is that this SE/30 is simply a remote for Spotify Connect. The 68030 CPU just wasn’t fast enough to play audio, to say nothing of streaming it over a network connection. While the SE/30 supported an astonishing 128 Megabytes of RAM, it’s still just a bit too slow to play MP3s or any modern audio codec.

You might be asking yourself how a computer from 1989 (it’s late enough in the year that we can safely say this computer is thirty years old) can possibly play music over the Internet. A case in point: here’s an SE/30 that’s a Spotify player. No, the SE/30 is so great because of how powerful it is, and how much it can be expanded. The Macintosh SE/30 is the greatest computer ever made, and I’m not saying that just because I’m sitting on a cache of them, slowly selling them to computer collectors around the world.

Spotify macbook