MacBook Touch Concept Design a Keeper
The folks at Yanko Design have so many cool concept products, and the MacBook Touch concept is as cool as any. There have been many rumors flying around about some sort of Mac Touch tablet or netbook, and this concept addresses them all.
The MacBook Touch defined is something I would buy in a heartbeat due to this special hinge and display that covered both sides of the “netbook”. The amount of thought that went into this concept is amazing, and the resultant device can be used as a giant slate, a notebook with touch keyboard or in a number of other configurations. Check out their design and see if you agree how cool a product this would be.
i do believe that the device will have dual lcds when apple does finally release it.
perhaps an E-ink display cover to in turn make it an ebook reader? i called it if it turns out true.
Looks like Apple doesn’t want to pay royalties to existing US patent holders for the swivel, convertible PC/tablet designs. However, the concept displayed here looks vulnerable to false keyboard input when you hold the device as a touch screen tablet, regardless of whether it has a regular keyboard or an LCD-based keyboard. They’re somehow going to have to design the keyboard to be inactive when the unit is flipped to use as a tablet; otherwise, you’re going to have users very frustrated by false keyboard input. I would also not be surprised if this type of hinge causes premature failure of wiring to the LCD display.
It’s a single OLED flexible-screen…there is no wiring and no LCD…read carefully…
very innovative design,though if it didn’t come from the brain trust in Cupertino,i doubt it will get built.
I would sell one of my Kidneys for one of these!
Absolutely stunning!! Sign me up…….
Assuming the 8.9″ screen is 16:9 at 1024×576, then at 13 inches I’m looking at 1152×1024 – bad aspect ratio and not enough height. They would need to hit at least 1280×800 at 13 inches to be anything usable, and halving the horizontal resolution when folded would mean they would have to go somewhere near 1600×1280 when fully open – too much for a 13″ display.
Maybe if the screen size was 17″ open and 10″ halved, this would be more practical and usable.
high DPI displays aren’t your enemy. having your OS incorrectly configured (resulting in everything being “tiny”) is your enemy.
anyway, i’d love something like this and buy it immediately, especially if it wasn’t from mac. fortunately, i can put windows on mac hardware.
Don’t forget that on the “half-display”, you’d be slightly smaller than a true half of the main display, because you’ll lose some displayable area on the bendy section.
So, for example, maybe the main display is 1280×1024. Half of that is 1024×640, BUT if you lose 80 pixels to the hinge/bendy-section, then it might actually be 1024×600 … which is a common netbook resolution.
Here is another concept, why not have a detachable combo, have a regular slate tablet and have and E-ink Ebook reader of the same width and length and as thin as the kindle2, but it has a touch screen and can act as a keyboard for the slate tablet. They can be attached together or have a thin cover that can attached to both to protect the screen of which ever is not in use.
I’ve been slowly drifting away from the Apple fold over the last year and a half (since I bought a Nokia N800 and then 2 months later, a Nokia N810 … then I started looking at Ubuntu for my larger devices). But a device like that one could actually get me back into the Apple arena. Full OS X on that device would be awesome.
That said… I’d be just as happy to see a very well supported Maemo or Mer (the open version of Maemo) device like that. Atom or OMAP-ARM based, either one.