Tablet Mac: Mac OS X on the touchscreen Gigabyte M912X netbook
Want an ultra-portable touchscreen tablet mac? Don’t look to Cupertino for this one; the closest thing you can get your hands today, for a reasonable price at least, is a Gigabyte M912x netbook running the Mac OS X 10.5.5. This is the Dell Mini OS X hack with a twist as the M912x is a touchscreen TabletPC netbook, swivel screen and all. The author provides no details on how he enabled full touchscreen support but from the video it appears to work rather well. He also added an internal 3G mod to enable 3G support and dual boots the Mac OS X with Vista. Awesome! With a starting price of $700, the M912x is a very attractive alternative to the rather pricey Modbook while we wait forever for Apple to decide to release its own tablet Mac. Happy hacking!
Tags: gigabyte, M912x, Mac OS X, Netbook, tablet, touchscreen
HOLY SMOKES! MY KID IS ALWAYS TRYING TO USE MY LAPTOP AS A TOUCH SCREEN PC, HIS DREAMS COMING TRUE! BTW HE’LL BE 2 IN JAN. WOW!
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lay off the caffeine or coke, Hey Ya.
this is pretty cool, not for me but its a good use of OSX.
the tropical elevator music was strange along with this guy’s reluctance to use his index finger.
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No one cares about your 2 year old son.
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i have to wonder why the demo opted for an on-screen keyboard instead of using OSX native ‘Ink’?
was this explained in the audio? (i had to watch in silence as i’m at work).
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@ Jared…be glad you had to listen without sound. The music is the gayest shit since Richard Simmons.
That’s not bad. I would love to have a dual action mac…Touchscreen + standard controls. Sometimes it would just be easier to touch the screen, but still have to have the standard mouse and keyboard as well.
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BTW…Guessing that “spaces” still work?
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is Apple paying attention, i really hope they are!
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this is what i’ve been looking for since i got my 12″ powerbook in 2004. And no where…was this on anyones to-do list. Until now.
This is some awesome shit right here. A full touch screen apple powerbook. Finaly!!! I think….wait…yes, i think i’m happy. It may even be love…im not sure, but it feels great!
Thanx guys for posting this.
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I think the music is fine, but some voice-over dialogue would have been nice. I would like to know how she/he got the touchscreen support working. Did it work out of the box, need any drivers, tweaks, etc.????
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I dunno, it seems great but you could see he was having some troubles. A couple times he tried to hover over the dock with his finger and it just clicked on Finder for him. He also had a hell of a time trying to close the TextEdit window using the pen. Also, he had to open up the virtual keyboard to type in tablet mode. I could only see this being useful in Tablet Mode if someone wrote some software that captured the pen strokes as text input so you would have to hunt and peck with the pen on a virtual keyboard - I already can type faster than I can write, but I can definitely write faster than I can hunt and peck on a virtual keyboard.
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really…lame… when apples iTablet or whatever is called….
epic fail…looks like completely unusable. As a UI designer, if that is what it takes to run a multitouch interface on a dell, epic fail.
why dont you just wait till apple does it better… and you know they are working on because they have not announced anything… and that’s why we have to suffer thru half-ass attempts at taking a complete UI structure and in interface and applying it to sub-par hardware…
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i would pay twice as much for a properly built system with the right software…
as a ui designer for over 12 years and is forced to use both windows and macs. my pcs and clients pcs are completely unreliable. I havent run across a dell that has some kind of cd burning issue. the only thing they even compare on the same level is when the power goes out, they both go out…
i would pay $1800 to make sure an apple OS runs on apple products, including the products built/designed by their new rapid prototyping plant.
my time is worth more than some silly IT wasting hours trying to reconfigure/figure out whats going on with my windows boxes..
hours wasted on a subpar OS, which is basically all windows packages, and i run mind VISTA, server 2003, and XP boxes all on my own network….
and guess what they are only testing machines, because i can not trust them. my apple print server (8 years old), my g4, my macbook, and my g5.
its a great attempt at futility to install a great OS on hardware ill equipped to run it..
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Yay! Let’s heap more praise on thieves. This guy’s greatest accomplishment is pirating Mac OS X. Tune in next time when we show how to use an iPod to avoid paying taxes.
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you guys are all wankers, if I buy a car should I not be able to swap out the engine into a different car, so if I buy Leopard shouldn’t I be able to install it on anything I want?
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Your analogy if flawed. Software (OS) is not akin to an engine. Computer hardware is akin to an engine. The engine management software is akin to software (OS). I suppose you could use GM engine management software in the place of FoMoCo’s engine management software on a Ford, but why would one want to? Why not just buy the GM product and have the whole system as designed.
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You can stick your car engine wherever it pleases you, subject to local automotive regulations, because you own it.
However, you don’t “own” your OS (unless it’s Lixux et al). You have purchased a license. Your use of the licensed software is governed by the license.
Yes, I know. You don’t believe in that crap because you have a mentality of entitlement.
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@Robin Hood:
Odd that you are critical of thieves yet chose Robin Hood as your name.
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I would like to know if he/she is able to get the touchscreen working
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Just because its not on a mac doesn’t mean he pirated it. I just did this same thing and I own a mac pro. Very narrow mind for a mac fan boy.
Wasn’t the mouse stolen from xerox?
I did this because I wanted a UMPC w/ touch screen. Not OSX, I just prefer it.
So did I steal anything, or is this like free RND.
Also the dude who’s video this is says you need compiled mac drivers.
Bu!!shit - Kalyway 10.5.2 touchscreen confirmed working.
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interesting comments, I own a number of legal copies of osx and don’t feel particularly like I pirated it to do this. apples eula does state not to install it on non-apple hardware but thats a little difficult to enforce and is a bit grey.
as for the last comment about not needing drivers on a kalyway 10.5.2 installation for the touchscreen. Yes, that is true, however using apples built in usb interface drivers there is no way to calibrate it and it drifts about 2 inches out of alignment when you move away from the central section of the screen. If you have the correct drivers then it works great to all the extremities.
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looks pretty cool but i’d wait for a multi-touch enabled version and i’m not sure why he’s pretending to swipe with coverflow? you only have to hit the icon once with your cursor.
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new video available at http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=THsN1mtSRgQ
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Thanks for the update! Nice work.
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Oxalic makes a decent point about this being a license, but licenses strike me as somewhat similar so the record companies telling us that burning a copy of a CD to our computer is the equivalent of walking into a Sam Goody and shoplifting. If there was monetary gain involved I would feel very different, and by all means I have no issues buying an Apple if that’s the type of computer I need… the OpenMac thing that went on awhile ago was exactly what I didn’t want to see come of the OSx86 project; Hackintoshes for monetary gain. Trust me, if Apple made a touchscreen laptop, I would be more inclined to get it because of stability and usability, something this video shows isn’t completely possible with this setup.
Anyway, awesome work, I might take a whack at this as well to see how well this would work in real world tests. The keyboard looks like it would do much better if you had it a little bigger, like half screen (iPhone-esque)… other than that, it looks like it would work perfectly for tablet work.
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Steve Jobs himself would not care that some guy did this in his basement. You guys sound like morons trying to play internet police from your computer chairs.
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