Hidden shortcut at startup lets your Mac become an iPad

Historical text from HellasProject (2009–2014). It is not current advice or a present-day service.

Apple is known for this kind of move: hiding capabilities on its computers.

Capabilities that are usually enabled with some hidden shortcut.

If you remember, before Lion, if you wanted your Mac to start in 64-bit you held 6 and 4 during startup.

Now it is the reverse: if you want the Mac to start in 32-bit you hold 3 and 2 during startup.

Today, trying various things at Mac startup, I faced a surprise.

Holding the keys “i, 5 and 1” enabled an unknown mode on the Mac. After a silver apple in the middle of the screen, my Mac started with the iPad’s OS.

With a bit more digging I concluded that to do this you must already have downloaded whichever iOS version you want to run into iTunes, then restart the Mac holding Cmd+alt+P+R, the so-called PRAM reset.

You must do the PRAM reset twice (hear the boot chime twice).

As soon as the second boot chime sounds, hold i+5+1, and the Mac will start with iPad iOS 5.1.

Of course, as you understand, it is not a real iPad, since there is no touch screen, but you can work it normally with the trackpad.

Later in the post you can see a few more images of my Mac running iOS 5.1.

Note: the test was on a MacBook Pro Mid 2010 (i7 2.66 GHz, 8GB RAM).

Source: Milaraki.com