Modbook, the Original Apple Tablet
With Apple finally giving the iPad user experience some love with the announced release of iPadOS 26, I'm hopeful the iPad will now function like the stealth workstation I always thought it could be.
With the upcoming similarities to the Mac's functionality, I thought back to a time before the iPad when there was an aftermarket Mac product called, "the Modbook".
Like so many illustrators and artists at the time, we were limited to a handful of tablet PC's that included a digitizer for pen use. Most were not built for the creative community, but the notion proved too enticing not to at least give them a try.
Then around 2008, along came the original Modbook. With it, you would purchase a fully functional Macbook, send it to Axiotron (the parent company) where they would remove the LCD cover and replace it with an improved LCD panel designed for tablet computing. The digitizer technology came from Wacom for pen input and the pen featured 512 pressure levels with two programmable side buttons and an eraser. It was an expensive kludge at best but received positive reviews especially from the creative and Mac community (I tried it out at the 2008 MacWorld conference and thought it was amazing at the time).
The Axiotron Modbook
The original Axiotron Modbook was available from 2008 to 2010. It received positive reviews especially from the creative and Mac community (I tried it out at the 2008 MacWorld conference) but as is the case with most conversions like this, the device would become hampered by Apple software changes.
Modbook, Inc.
From its initial success (and with no other Mac-like tablet product on the market), the company became Modbook, Inc. and with support from a Kickstarter campaign explored the production of another line, the Modbook Pro, from 2012 until 2022 which included support from the chassis of either a Macbook or MacBook Pro.
Not too long after the Modbook Pro came out, the iPad Pro arrived in 2015 along with the all-new Apple pencil, a rechargeable bluetooth stylus pen with pressure sensitivity on par or in some cases, better at the time than those from Wacom. Though Modbook Inc. developed a Modbook Pro with a Touch Bar in 2017 it was clear from this point that Modbook, Inc was done. Modbook, Inc. never delivered anything and as of 2025, the site, modbook.com has also been suspended according to Wikipedia.
