I once bought an apple silicon macbook pro logic board to use with a kvm. It was a fun adventure. Things to notice:

-laptop lid closed/open sensor.

-no lid screen at first boot was a pain to fix to external monitor.

-logic board only on first boot requires macbook pro trackpad and keyboard(case), connecting external keyboard and mouse doesn't work at login screen due to security.

Once up and running though it is an excellent, cheap compiling/local llm machine i use over ssh from another mac

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NorthSouthNorth 2 days ago | parent [-]

I just had this nightmare yesterday. Water damaged MBP so just the power button worked.

You can use any keyboard during recovery mode. But not connect BT devices (technically possible via some secret screen but it was stuck on a loading loop and needed a restart every time I tried) and I didn't have a wired mouse lol. So I had to voice mode + keybindings through a reinstall of MacOS which sounds easy but there were like 5 issues with focusing screens so regular tab didn't work and needed like cmd shift f4 and other mega random key bindings (thanks to AI this was easy to figure out though with enough trial and error). Had to restart it after an install thinking the keyboard would still work, but nope after login screen it wouldn't let me lol.

Pro tip — a magic keyboard with usb-c to lightning cable DOES NOT count as an accessory somehow. So you can use that.

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benbojangles 2 days ago | parent [-]

Magic keyboard and track pad or mouse did not work for me with logic board first boot, only a MacBook case with track pad and keyboard worked. Connecting any peripheral over usb on a logic board at login screen will not function due to macos external connected device trust acceptance popup only appears after login.

	▲	NorthSouthNorth 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I also thought so but in my case the keyboard worked somehow. And I had not previously trusted it. Perhaps there was something else I did, but it worked on it's first plug in.