Axiotron - Modbook (the iPad we actually wanted) | Hacker News Reader

Axiotron - Modbook (the iPad we actually wanted)

axiotron.com

16 pointselblanco18 comments

Yep. This is exactly what I've been thinking for the last several days while reading through all the piss and vinegar the technorati on the web have been throwing at the the iPad.

The iPad cost $500-$900 and does a few things exceptionally well. (Like hook into iBooks, iTunes and Apple's App Store.)

The Modbook on the other hand, starts at ~$1700 and does all that other crap the technorati wanted the iPad to do. I think everyone just wanted Jobs to come out with a tablet computer that was cheap and badass like MacBooks are and, unsurprisingly, that didn't happen.

I mean, I'd love it if Chevy held a press conference and said they were going to sell Camaros for $10k. But it won't happen and I'm not going to get all indignant about it.

After all, Steve Jobs said himself they couldn't build a computer for $500 that wasn't, "a piece of crap." So I don't see what the big deal is about the iPad, in that sense. (I think it is a big deal in several other senses, like the piggy-backed announcement of iBooks and the A4 chip, etc...)

My wife has a modbook, and it is made of unmitigated awesome. It's a little heavy, and the display is a bit dim because of the glass screen cover... But it's awesome. And the price is very reasonable. The stylus works really well (and comes with several different types of tips, including a felt tip that feels just right...)

She bought it to do UX design work with it, and started on a webcomic with it because she just liked playing with it so much. ArtRage is awesome on it.

It's always surprised me that, given the number of artists Apple targets with their offerings, they have absolutely no offering like this that artists can use.

Here's a review of a similar workflow from 2002 by the Penny Arcade guys using a Windows tablet.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2002/11/27/

and here is their take on the desire of web artists to have a tablet from Apple right before the iPad came out.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/22/

Yeah, she she's spent a lot of time on setting it up to work (mostly) without a keyboard -- She says Quickscript is really good (but has some bugs). I want to play with it more myself, but it's one of those "you can have it when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" kinda deals.

> I mean, I'd love it if Chevy held a press conference and said they were going to sell Camaros for $10k. But it won't happen and I'm not going to get all indignant about it.

I think the analogy is wrong. Myself, and many of the people I know were expecting a scaled down Mac experience in a tablet form factor, price and feature competitive with netbooks (<=$500).

OSX already runs well on hacked netbooks, so the hardware is more or less ready, put on a better display that works at a higher rez, make it touch sensitive, squeeze it into a tablet form factor, mix in driver software to handle the various and obvious netbook/tablet widgets like a webcam and tilt sensors, charge $499 for it and voila! Instant win.

Instead we got the equivalent of people showing up to the Chevy Volt unveiling, and seeing a Segway that had been scaled up to seat 2 at the same price as a Malibu.

Once you add in the multitouch, accelerometer, and processors powerful enough to smoothly present the UI at the higher resolution, you don't have enough left in your budget (or the physical enclosure!) for a battery big enough make the device not suck. Instead of compromising on battery life, Apple chose to simplify the device down to something that $500 of hardware can actually do for 10 hours.

My office bought one of these a year ago to try it out. It was extremely heavy for a tablet and the person who was going to use it just couldn't use it for what she wanted to do. Basically it was meant as a way for a Professor to bring it to class and meetings, take notes, do presentations and all kinds of stuff the iPad seems to be aiming at. I think in the end the iPad will have a market. No where near the iPhone but a decent size. I think this is going to replace the MacBook Air.

Personally, I'm waiting for the android tablet about to come out from MSI. I prefer android as a platform. But the iPad is far from the failure people seem to claim it is. It's built for a certain kind of user and they usually have the money to spend on this stuff. I can think of doctors,lawyers and professors as people who already use similar devices.

I find the rush to judgment on whether the iPad is or is not a success to be wildly premature. We won't really be able to tell until it's been shipping for at least 6 months.

And even then we will only have half the picture as the first well thought out, well designed apps will just be making it out. The iPad is just as much a platform for 'awesome' as it is a complete device.

That may be the iPad you wanted but to me it just looks like a Tablet PC running OSX.

It's a Macbook turned into a Tablet PC. It would be rather funky if it didn't run OSX.

Yes, I know that. I just think it's odd that the poster was hoping that the iPad would be something that already has existed for a while (a standard laptop without a keyboard).

Why would it be odd for Apple to add a sensible product to a hole in its product lineup?

It seems to me that very few people are actually impressed or interested in the iPad, particularly since expectations, desire and hype was for what this basically is...not for an overinflated iPod touch.

But it already exists, see the link. Or you could do a hackintosh with a windows tablet. But then all you have is a laptop without a keyboard and why would you want that?

I guess I wasn't paying much attention but what I heard pre-launch was that it was going to basically be a giant iPod Touch. Which seems like quite a good idea to me. Not quite a cure for cancer but what do you expect?

Surely apple will learn lots of good stuff from the iPad and one day bring that technology to the MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro Touch ??). Its got to be there in their roadmap somewhere.

I agree and would predict that in the future all of Apple's computers will be touch screens. They've already done away with the mouse buttons on their laptops to get a bigger touchpad, and it seems like the next evolution of that is a full touch screen. Maybe they will truly become like phones and we will have iPads with slide out keyboards for the people who need to type a lot (kind of like the Lenovo hybrid).

I'm still wondering when Apple will get around to buying Wacom. They bought FingerWorks to get the best multi-touch technology, but I don't think that multitouch will be quite enough to accommodate the full range of capabilities we geeks want from our tablets. The combination of pen input and multitouch offered by Wacom's Bamboo and apparently Axiotron's upcoming Modbook Pro is, however, enough for general purpose computing. (Command lines and programming are still hard with pen input because nobody has made a pen input system that is optimized for all the strange punctuation.)

Sigh. We geeks want a do-it-all tablet in the fevered imagination of our wet dreams.

Meanwhile, Apple has leapfrogged all of us, and made the iPad (and iPhone) so easy, that my toddler and my grandma can use it without a manual. Think! They can actually email, facebook, and freaking save someone's name with their telephone number without freaking out over some craptacular user interface that someone like me made in a lab somewhere.

Remember, we are not the iPad's target audience. The target audience is the guy that picks up a mouse and tries to speak into it.

Just don't think that Apple somehow failed you, because you did not get exactly what you wanted.

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