Stephen Hackett on Opening Up a ‘Macintosh’ Screensaver Treasure Trove

As detailed on 512 Pixels, Stephen Hackett managed to break into the beautiful ‘Macintosh’ screensaver and uncover the details of how it was constructed.

When looking for macOS Tahoe’s wallpapers, I was reminded of this project. I went digging through the SSD on my MacBook Pro, and my journey through Finder has yielded great fruit.

The screen saver is actually an Extension, residing at /System / Library / ExtensionKit / Extensions / WallpaperMacintoshExtension.appex (spaces added for legibility).

Right-clicking to “Show Package Contents” unveils a treasure trove:

The screensaver itself is not a video one, as evident by the way it randomly displays its designs when activated. Until now, it was somewhat of a mystery how this was dynamically created, so it’s great to peek behind the curtain.

I won’t spoil the details as they are pretty fun, and not really what you would have expected. Stephen has also collected all the image files in HiRes, should you wish to download them.

As someone who absolutely adores these designs to this day (so much so that I have not one but two of them as tattoos - the pixelated cursor and the smiling Mac), this was a delightful little discovery.