MSI Wind netbook hackintoshed into a poor man’s iPad

In the Hackintosh community, the MSI Wind is somewhat legendary for being the first netbook out there that could essentially run OS X out of the box, with all features working and no hardware hacking required.

Now it looks like the venerable Wind has another Apple bragging point: with its keyboard ripped out and its display replaced with a touchscreen and reversed, the MSI Wind U100 makes a good poor man’s substitute for the iPad.

Sure, it doesn’t use the iPhone OS — it’s running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 — and it’s got some rough edges (it can only be turned on and off by wiggling a little paperclip in a hole), but if you were hoping that Steve Jobs was going to announce a MacTablet on January 27th instead of a big iPhone, this might be just the project to devote your weekend to.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Hardware Hacks, How-To, iPad, News |

cjmegatron81
For god sakes just buy a damn iPad
steven silva
I like this idea. If you alredy have a MSI notbook then its a good way to test it out without having to actually buy a ipad ?????? I dunno seems like the first guy that commented has money to spend. Maybe he will buy whoever comments on this blog……LoL
rj
I agree with commenter cjmegatron81. By the time you rejigger the MSI to be an iPad you would have spent as much as an iPad. At least with the the iPad you’d get some support.
mrsleep
Yeah, you might have spent as much, but you will get a more useful machine that is at least 10 times as powerful.
the iPad is just that, a pad for women on their periods.
goosesensor
it has electrical tape on it. it was a fun project for the guy and a joke at that ;)
http://www.metrokids.ca Conrad
mrsleep… what are you, 10? I really wish people would get over the ‘pad’ joke.It stopped being funny before the first oh-so-clever idiot said it.
Joshua Cohen
The MSI Wind might make a “poor man’s iPad” but without the touch screen mischegas, it is an excellent netbook. OS X runs surprisingly well on the ATOM CPU; the UI has no problem adapting to the smaller screen real estate; and now that FireFox supports a full screen mode on the Mac, you can even make the menu bar disappear when browsing to get a little extra room. I wouldn’t want to write a report on it given the smaller keyboard, but it is perfectly adequate for web browsing, email, listening to Internet radio, or watching Flash videos.
Sander van der Linden
Quote ‘with its keyboard ripped out and its display replaced with a touchscreen and reversed’. Why trying to create a phony iPad with crappy hardware? Who wants to walk around with a faked iPad? Buy the real thing for God’s sake!
jeffster
@Sander:
Hard to say crappy hardware when the iPad’s hardware is even “crappier”
Zach
@jeffster
How is the iPad’s hardware crappy? General consensus is that it the processer is blazing fast and graphics are spectacular.
Htoo Tay Zar
What the Hell? January 27? Now it’s over dude. You might want to mean 2012.
http://pakistan ishaq
sir my name is ishaq i belong to a poor family and i m heart pasion i need to mony. i have 8 little children. and i m physical unfit. i need a mony and i m very so long time jobless. plz help me send some mony in this my account no NIB bank 563242 thanks ur obendently Ishaq
http://www.foldingtablefurniture.com Lucas Parker
there are lots of better alternative to MSI Wind today..*