Make An Apple Tablet Before Apple Does

[Andrew] wanted a tablet computer but is tired of waiting for Apple to come up with one. eBay and Craig’s list to the rescue, he picked up some parts and built his own tablet. You can take a look at the video tour of it after the break, or peruse parts one, two, three, and four of his work log.

The unit is assembled from a 500 MHz iBook. [Andrew] picked up a touchscreen from ebay and canibalized a USB joystick in order to add some buttons to the keyboard-less design. The end product is quite nice. We’ve wanted a tablet computer to hang on the wall for a long time and this may be the inspiration that gets us there.

Do you find this didn’t satisfy your Apple tablet fix? There’s more to be seen in our mac tablets roundup.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYVf1kWlak]

20 thoughts on “Make An Apple Tablet Before Apple Does

  1. I like the DIY-ness of this, but if you’re looking for affordability with OEM polish, get a Windows tablet and hack OS X onto it to replace the default OS. I’m running OS X 10.5.6 as one of my bootable options on my Aspire One netbook.

  2. Nothing new about any of this — Mac DOES make the “Modbook” tablet (pretty expensive though) and a PC to hang on the wall is far from new.

    A company I worked with in the early 2k’s distributed touchscreen kiosk computers that looked similar (though it was the guts of a desktop PC stuffed into a 3″ thick box frame that hung on the wall.)

    Cool project, just don’t claim any of this is “new”. ;p

    1. @supwershwa,
      actually, the modbook is not made by mac. It is just a really expensive aftermarket mod. While this may not be “new” we enjoy seeing good implementations of ideas, even if they’re old.

      This one is just touch screen right? As you could probably tell by my contribution before, pressure sensitivity is a must for graphic designers. That is one thing the modbook really got right.

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