Forget Apple's iPad Pro, the makers of the Modbook Pro want to tempt you with a tablet running full OS X.
Yes, the iPad Pro is all well and good, and might pack sufficiently powerful hardware to make it a laptop replacement, but there's no escaping the fact that it still runs iOS – which certainly has limitations compared to a desktop OS in terms of multitasking (and many other facets).
But the Modbook Pro, which has actually been around for a few years, is made by a third-party outfit in LA, and lets you mix OS X and the slate form factor in one big cake and eat it.
Okay, so how is this thing made? Basically, Modbook takes a 13-inch MacBook Pro, tears it apart, takes a slate chassis and uses all these bits to fashion a MacBook tablet, as it were.
As you might imagine, this involves some compromises of its own, and to be able to fit the MacBook components into a slate, the resulting tablet is an inch thick (and as a result, we're betting it probably gave Tim Cook a heart attack the first time he saw it).
Of course, the Modbook Pro is still portable enough, and it boasts a Wacom pen tablet digitiser which can detect 1024 different levels of pressure – the device is really aimed at serious artist and designer types. (The pen has a digital eraser, and two programmable buttons on the side).
And rather than OS X, you can plump for Windows as the OS, or indeed you can opt for a dual-boot installation with both operating systems on board.
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Prices start at $2,699 (around £1,770) – with a one-year warranty from Modbook – although if you're willing to take on the build process yourself, the company will ship the raw components in a box for $1,899 (around £1,250).
A Modbook Pro X is also in the works, offering a larger 15.4-inch Retina Display and configurable with up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of PCIe flash storage. That beast should ship before the year is out.
Via: ZDNet
Also check out: iPad Pro review: by far the best tablet Apple's ever made
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for T3 across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel was published by Hachette UK in 2013).