Tablet Mac Becomes Reality

teknokracy writes "MacMod has a story about a unique Mac hack. Joseph DeRuvo Jr. says: 'As a Photographer and a Dyslexic the idea of being able to use a Tablet as a platform for showing photographs, editing, and an extension of my badly organized memory is very appealing. ... So taking matters into my own hands I cut into a Dual USB iBook and didn't look back.' It seems our intrepid hardware hacker hasn't just flipped around the LCD and added a semi-functioning touch screen - he's completely engineered a new kind of mac portable, complete with a CF reader, properly installed touch sensor, and topped it all off by properly engineering it all into an Ives-worthy design. With all the trouble these particular iBook models have experienced, why not hack one up for fun and turn it in to something useful?"

Re:Tablet PC

[Anonymous Coward]

To me the real market of Tablet PCs have always been Mac users : they love cute, functional stuff, are often designers / artists / scientists...

Yes yes! We scientists are real suckers for cute, functional stuff!

Re:Tablet PC

[ninthwave]

Having to work with engineers who do field inspections. Tablets are very much appreciated by people in many different areas. Just imagine any profession that used a clip board pre digital and you have a place where a tablet can be used.

He could have saved a lot of bulk!

[Ben Jackson]

I'm amazed at the interior shots. He didn't even take the plastic cases off of things like the flash card reader or the firewire hub he added. He didn't even solder the new USB cables directly to the devices -- there are entire molded plastic plugs in there!

Re:Google Cache

[iONiUM]

How is this useful?
The pictures are still loading off the /.'d server (read: not loading), and since the pictures make this story, this link is useless.

I hate how people think google cache is useful regardless of the content it's caching.

RE: field inspections

[King_TJ]

Yeah... but as someone who worked in I.T. in a factory environment before, I've seen the way most portables (and even PDAs) get treated by most "field inspectors" and the like.

They're dirty, beat-up and left sitting in rather harsh environments on a regular basis.

Perhaps that's the real reason Apple hasn't been thrilled to build a pen-based tablet computer. They're all about elegance and building a machine a user can really be proud to own, and will take exceptionally good care of.

(Don't believe me? Why would their favorite system design colors be snow white and easily scratched/smudged aluminum?) I love my new Powerbook, but it'd literally get dented up and badly oxidized in days, in some of work environments I saw inspectors using their black plastic Dell laptops in where I used to work.

Re:Rehashed to the death, but....

[JamieF]

There's a big difference between attention and sales. Lots of people want all kinds of mutated Macs - dual-G5 powerbooks, tablets, a new Cube, you name it, somebody has a concept sketch and is convinced that if Apple spent a ton on R&D and made them, they'd sell at least one.

If Apple made a turd-shaped Mac, a few people would buy it, and 1000 stories would talk about it, and everybody would clobber any web site that broke the story by going there all at once.

That doesn't mean that a turd-shaped Mac would make Apple any money.

Re:Tablet PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine any profession that used a clip board pre digital and you have a place where a tablet can be used.

Not. Clipboards and paper are cheap and durable. Tablet PCs are *extremely* fragile and enormously expensive, and most of them aren't even readable in the presence of sunlight, let alone in any outdoor situation. Clipboards and paper work all day, Tablets work for about 2-3 hours then need a recharge. Did I mention the durability issue? Try treating a Tablet PC like a clipboard and it'll be broken within seconds - just tossing it two inches on to a desktop could break it!

Doctors and lawyers are the only two professions I can think of who could benefit from tablet pcs, and coincidentally that's who they're marketed to, almost exclusively. For the myriad other professions who use clipboards they are not worth it.

Tablet?

[nbohemen]

Tablet? Is a Powermac G5 with a cinemadisplay duct taped on the side also a tablet?

Re:Look at the new iMac. Look at a tablet. See the

[MmmDee]

I can see the usefulness of a tablet PC in a medical clinic setting when a healthcare provider is interviewing a patient. As it is now, it's common to have a desktop in the examination room to lookup test results. It would be nice to have something more portable with existing capabilities (ie, wireless) and an application (and some clinics do) where you would have a checklist (at a bare minimum) of items to mark yes/no during the patient's history taking. The current hardware doesn't seem to be portable/rugged/usable enough just yet. PDA's (mostly Palm-based around here) are everywhere now, but not tablet computers.

Landscape or Portrait

[wwwillem]

I'm not super familiar with OS-X, but IMHO essential for the use as a tablet, does OS-X allow you to switch to portrait mode?