Credit: Lego Ideas user terauma

I don't usually get too excited about user-submitted designs on the Lego Ideas website, especially when those ideas would require negotiating a license with another company—user-generated designs need to reach 10,000 supporters before Lego considers them for production, two pretty high bars to clear even without factoring in some other brand's conditions and requests.

But I'm both intrigued and impressed by this Lego version of Apple's old Bondi Blue G3 iMac that has been making the rounds today. Submitted by a user named terauma, the 700+ piece set comes complete with keyboard, hockey-puck mouse, a classic Mac OS boot screen, and cathode ray tubes and circuit boards visible through the set's transparent blue casing (like the original iMac, it may cause controversy by excluding a floppy disk drive). The design has already reached 5,000 supporters, and it has 320 days left to reach the 10,000-supporter benchmark required to be reviewed by Lego.

With its personality-forward aesthetics and Jony Ive-led design, the original iMac was the first step down the path that led to blockbuster products like the iPod and iPhone. It was the company's first all-new Mac design after CEO Steve Jobs returned to the company in the late '90s, and while it lacked some features included in contemporary PCs, its tightly integrated design and ease of setup helped it stand out against the beige desktop PCs of the day. Today's colorful Apple Silicon iMacs are clearly inspired by the original design.

I wouldn't expect to see this Lego iMac in stores, but it wouldn't be the first high-profile brand that Lego had found a way to work with. Lego Mario and Zelda, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Fortnite, Lego Star Wars, and any number of Lego Disney sets all speak to the company's skill at getting exclusivity-obsessed companies to trust it with their intellectual property.

If Lego were somehow able to get permission from Apple to manufacture an Apple-branded set, it would technically be the first official Mac hardware manufactured and sold by a third party since the late '90s, when Jobs ended the licensing program that had allowed a handful of other manufacturers to make Mac OS-compatible systems. During the Intel Mac era, a handful of companies tried launching macOS-compatible PC systems without Apple's involvement, but Apple's legal department put a stop to that, albeit without totally shutting the door on the efforts of homebrew "Hackintosh" community members who were just building Mac clones for themselves.