Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Mac Tablet



With Mac World and CES going on this week, the internet is all abuzz with ginormous TVs and the iphone. Run of the mill techno-gadgets are not really my niche, so I'm not gonna comment on most of these, but this is one sweet little number that might have slipped under your radar.

Other World Computing, long a great source for upgrades for Macs, has partnered with Axiotron to produce these modded Mac Books, which are lovingly transformed into a Mac slate-formated tablet. OS X already has the best handwriting recognition software built in, and these puppies are upgraded with a Wacom digitizer, so this really has the potential to be a portable digital sketching solution. Of course the promotional materials are touting these as being highly useful for business applications, which is a little out of my field of expertise. But for digital artists, who frequently prefer Macs to PCs, this could be a god-send.

The digitizer has 256 levels of pressure sensitivity, half of what you would get with a graphire pad, and a quarter of the sensitivity of an Intuos or Cintiq. But you are getting a really good active area, and eliminating a layer of seperation between you and your image. For many digital graphics applications this thing would be perfect.

This kind of after market mod of course, negates any Apple warranty, so OWC is including their own 1 year warranty, which can be upgraded to 3 years.


So uh, anybody over at OWC or Axiotron need a oil portrait of the wife and kids? I'll trade two for the top-end model... Seriously.... Anyone?

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