Isamu Sanada, the Japanese photographer who makes Mac mockups, has created a new design for a tablet Mac that blends the iPhone with the MacBook Air subnotebook. He calls it the Mac Air.
According to a rough translation of his site, the Mac Air also doubles as a desktop.
It hooks to a wireless keyboard and uses a wireless Time Capsule-like docking station as a hard drive. The dock includes a SuperDrive for playing and burning Cds/DVDs.
It boots into the iPhone operating system when a tablet, and OS X when used as a desktop.
It’s a great idea, but will Apple ever make such a device? Maybe. Sanada has once or twice correctly predicted Apple’s products in the past. As previously reported:
Isamu Sanada is a photographer by trade, but an Apple designer by calling.
Sanada is an amateur designer of fantasy Macintoshes. His Applele website is a popular showcase for dozens of speculative designs for future Apple machines.
In fact, Sanada is so adept at mimicking Apple’s look, he created a design for a new laptop that predicted Apple’s distinctive Titanium PowerBook G4 months before it came out.
Link to Sanada’s Mac Air mockup.
Sanada hasn’t made a new design for many months. No word why he’s returned to making fantasy Macs. His email simply said:
“I made a new image. Please enjoy it.”
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
10 responses to “Mac Air Tablet Mockup From Isamu Sanada”
This thing makes so much more sense to me than the Macbook Air. From what I’ve read though, Apple’s inkwell technology is a bit behind the curve in terms of handwriting recognition relative to what’s available on windows. As cool as multitouch is, I think you would need to allow for a stylus-type input in addition to any multi-touch input methods. That would mean that Apple would need to catch up a bit on their inkwell technology for something like this to be viable.
Being able to auto-detect it’s orientation and switch views appropriately like the iPhone does would be another crucial component to a product like this. I also really like the concept of integrating the stand into the design. The tablets we have at work require being locked into this obnoxiously large docking station to be used in the manner portrayed in the last few pics. What a great design though, my hat’s off to Mr. Sanada.
Love the look of it… I absolutely, positively do not want it to attempt to be a full fledged computer in it’s own right (as the Macbook Air trys and fails to do).
Note to Steve: Accessory, Accessory, Accessory.
I’ve seen pictures of this of the last few days and my immediately response was ugly, my second look told me ugly, and my most current look at this says ugly.
Why the wedge shape? I don’t picture Apple doing this shape at all. It should be rounded not a wedge.
I love this concept. I think we’re headed toward laptops which access their hard drives remotely by wi-fi, and this is a great transition toward that.
I’d like any tablet to have a stylus and pressure sensitive display so it could be used as a sketch book. This looks hot tho.