The Rarest MacBook Ever Made

this tablet it's actually a laptop and not just any laptop but a macbook yeah that's right this is the rarest macbook ever made and it involves a company that made 1.5 million crowdfunded dollars just vanish into thin air behind a wall of unfulfilled promises and failure but this isn't your average kickstarter scam no this is about a real company founded by a former apple executive with involvement from even apple's co-founder himself steve wozniak now unable to get in contact with anyone from the company i even found myself flying out to their headquarters to find the ceo myself this is gonna be a wild episode do you know what else is wild the size of these power adapters i mean they're huge today's sponsor ravpower makes much smaller ones with the same wattage using awesome gallium nitride tech check them out by the link below to get context for this the axiotron modbook and this the modbook incorporated modbook pro we need to talk about the apple newton the first pda which was a term coined by apple ceo john scully it's the early 90s and the newton is a portable feature-rich pda the first of its kind with powerful pen input and state-of-the-art handwriting recognition it sounds really great but unfortunately it's released a little too soon it's expensive it has buggy software and unreliable networking support it doesn't sell too well five years later the palm pilot enters the market at a lower price and while the feature set compared to the newton was actually really limited it was refined and it was inexpensive and palm would go on to sell tens of millions of these devices absolutely obliterating the newton in sales upon steve jobs return to apple as ceo in 1997 the newton project it's killed and all of the resources are then reallocated to the mac and there's one guy inside of apple andreas haas one of the last business unit managers over the newton project an executive that's not happy about this decision haas has even since stated that before the newton apple was plain with the idea of bringing touch input to the mac an idea that even after the death of newton he felt was right for apple laptops so much so that he left his pretty high up position at apple in the year 2000 to attempt at developing just that at mac world 2007 haas publicly unveils this the axiotron modbook which was the first and still to this day the only tablet to natively run mac os so let's take a look at it by today's standards it seems pretty outdated but on launch man this thing was rather slick you know those old white macbooks before the fancy unibody plastic ones released in 2009 well that's literally what this is just without the original display or keyboard axiotron ripped off the top part of the computer but continued to utilize the rather durable plastic housing for the bottom so the i o it's exactly what you'd expect for a macbook of the era it even has a dvd drive people still wanted those back then you know so let's get to uh the top half of the computer stripped away was the plastic hinge screen and a magnesium alloy frame that was frustratingly painted so you can tell mine's all scratched up but there is metal underneath there protects this fancy new display now the resolution of this screen is unchanged at 1280 by 800 pixels however the contrast ratio is marginally improved and that's right it's a touchscreen well kinda you can't actually touch it with your finger you have to touch it with the included pen the modbook uses a 133hz wacom touch layer with 256 levels of pressure sensitivity now that pales in comparison to something like a modern ipad pro which has 2 000 levels of sensitivity and a 240 hertz touch layer but still that ain't no slouch even in 2020 it feels remarkably precise and fluid now just as with all wacom displays of the era all you have to do is kind of hover the pen over here above the display and then to select something you just press it into the screen there you go now more on how this interacts with the operating system in a second but surprisingly axiotron made room for the eyesight camera as well as the microphones which is nice and there's a couple of buttons over here what are these buttons well one of them is your standard power button which is denoted by this green led up here and then this one is called the mod key which serves a couple of functions long pressing it you'll see this blue light come off and then toggle back on long pressing it will reset the controller board if you're having issues with the touch layer for example when the machine boots up at launch for me at least it doesn't recognize the touch screen controller at all and it's not until i reset it did the driver seem to load into the operating system now if you do a quick press on the button you'll see that this orange light comes on and that turns on the gps that's right this macbook has gps there are antennas underneath these plastic shrouds here and a number of shareware mac apps allowed you to actually record the latitude and longitude coordinates of the macbook you might be thinking why exactly did this computer have gps well it seems to me that they were hoping that this would get picked up by a bunch of companies and governments and used by field texts for basically on-site work jobs the software is light but it's there remember there's no keyboard or finger input support so you might be wondering how on earth did you type on this thing when you weren't strapped to a desk with a usb keyboard with a tiny on-screen keyboard yep that's exactly how well at least that's one of the options the other option was inkwell which is actually an apple developed piece of handwriting recognition software a lot the newton that came more than a decade prior now you could select a text field with the cursor and then write text and voila inkwell converts that text as if you had typed it surely this isn't as fast or elegant as typing but it worked pretty gay and good especially for the era inkwell was actually supported in mac os all the way until the discontinuation of 32-bit apps thanks to macos catalina just about a year and a half ago the pen really excels in drawing and note-taking apps are great too because you can see the pressure sensitivity doing its job the pen gives pixel perfect readouts and the form factor i mean it almost seems not half bad you might be wondering how was axiotron able to sell touchscreen based macs i mean why didn't apple just sue them into oblivion like they've done with hackintosh makers in the past well because the axiotron modbook was a legitimate authentic macbook core 2 duo the first sale doctrine in united states law allows for the distribution or transference of a modified work without repercussion from the original inventor or distributor uh what well it's the legal concept that allows you to sell a video game that you don't want anymore or to sell your coffee table that you've stained a different color or for the british company ac cars to sell the shelby cobra a highly modified ford mustang or for of course andreas haas to buy a macbook convert it to a tablet and sell it as an axiotron modbook in fact apple even seemed to encourage it assigning axiotron officially sanctioned titles such as apple proprietary solutions provider and apple premier developer the former being extremely rare now despite being announced at macro 2007 which you'll remember is the same convention where steve jobs unveiled the first iphone the modbook shared a lot of spotlight with apple's newfangled smartphone and it was a huge hit amongst news networks blogs and show attendees was the product perfect no but it seemed to show potential and it seemed to sell fairly well at least for being a niche expensive product that sold for more than double the price of a standard macbook the hype was real and axiotron quickly began development on a new model using a custom milled aluminum chassis creating a design language of their own it was pretty clear that haas was capable and his ties to apple really worked in his favor so much so that haas even got apple co-founder steve wozniak on board the waz was an excellent engineer in his own right and is reported to have joined axiotron's board of advisors in fact at mac world 2009 waz and haas teamed up at the massive axiotron booth wrapping the sleek new modbook pro unfortunately the great recession was not kind to the primarily bank financed public company competition from the newly announced 500 first generation ipad surely didn't help either and haas was forced to close axiotron's doors in 2011. that's the end of the story no it's not haze wasn't willing to give up on his dream and he took axiotron's ip and founded modbook incorporated just a year later the modbook pro allegedly started shipping in november 2012 but look there were a number of press releases throughout 2013 that implied sales weren't going so well a money-back guarantee financing options price cuts and even the opportunity to send in your own macbook pro to be converted into a modbook pro part of this was probably lower media hype given that steve wozniak wasn't directly involved with the company anymore and while the prospect of an artist-focused mac was cool it was 2012. tablets were all the rage and a thick heavy laptop with a pen only input just didn't seem quite as appealing as it had in years prior the price was another factor the first modbuck was about a thousand dollars more expensive than the regular macbook this one it started at thirty one hundred dollars that's nearly a two thousand dollar price premium over the macbook pro itself and that only amplified when you added ssds more memory and all of that stuff that could well push these devices beyond the five thousand dollar price point it was just frankly out of reach for most people even their target audience the modbook pro hardware was better no doubt but the software is really where it came into its own what previously was basically just the wacom drivers and inkwell became a more extensive software suite in the modbook pens section you have the ability to change kind of the tip and eraser feel and how it responds to the digitizer which is cool but you also have the ability to change the function of the pen buttons now you could do this originally but they're a lot more powerful now the two that i have selected is the ink toggle which allows you to change from a standard cursor you enable it and now it becomes the handwriting recognition engine which is pretty cool you can also see that the other one i've selected is pop-up menu this is basically a universal right-click menu that works from anywhere and you can put whatever you want inside here amongst which is keystrokes or macros modbook-specific functions to open and run apps and then to toggle between pen mode and mouse mode what's the difference between those you wonder well right now it is in pen mode and it just follows my pen around on screen until i touch it and then it selects something mass mode is pretty trippy because it basically turns your pen into this crazy sensitive almost tilt adjusted mouse cursor and even though it seems nuts at first and it is very weird to get a hang of once you've used it a little bit it's actually a really great way to navigate around the interface quickly i do still prefer pen mode make no mistake but mouse mode isn't terrible and i can see people probably having gotten pretty good at this the last thing i want to show you is the mod book system preferences now this really only has three things in it quick clicks which is the keyboard that's the software keyboard that comes on screen you can toggle that on and off with that menu as well you can see right here you have all of your function buttons including brightness which is pretty handy this is upgraded from the standard system on-screen keyboard which was used previously with the original axitron modbook you can change the keyboard transparency the size whether or not you want it to repeat keys etc quickclick sounds like a really amazing name it's not it's just an on-screen keyboard but that's pretty handy and then you also have quick flip this allowed you to change the actual orientation of the display and the way it was represented in mac os this could be really really cool i imagine for artists that wanted to draw vertically and use more kind of upright landscapes in some of the apps that they were using in illustrator would probably be fantastic in indesign so that's pretty handy that that was there you could rotate it in any direction although it does say if you use it in landscape face down which is 180 degrees use caution because you will block the vents which can overheat the computer and the system menu this one's really important but kind of silly if you think about it it disables selecting zero percent display brightness because well if you go all the way down you have a keyboard or you have a computer without a keyboard and without a mouse so you're in trouble if you turn the screen all the way off and so this would allow you to get down to ten percent but not all the way down to zero percent so you'd wanna leave that one on and then the about page would just show the current system version and the ability to check for updates really this thing was powerful because of its hardware and its integration with third-party drawing software and that was mostly thanks to wacom not thanks to modbook in particular but the fact that this had become a more integrated software suite uh made it a more compelling option for artists who wanted to use this as well an artistic device which it claimed to be for man i just can't get over how good the sensitivity is in here i mean it's not as good as a modern ipad pro with apple pencil but it really isn't far off it feels way more modern than even maybe the first apple pencil integration it is fantastic and again i think that's mostly thanks to wacom rather than modbook but it holds true the same so how many modbook pros sold now truth be told i've been wanting to make this video for about three years but i could never get my hands on a modbook pro because not only had i never seen one go up for sale but i had never even seen proof that they had ever actually shipped a single one that is until one day renowned iphone leaker sunny dixon dropped into my dms with a picture of one that he said he could get me over a few weeks and several hours spent using suspiciously good investigative skills he found a couple of people that did have modbook pros and were willing to sell and so we both bought one now it'll be impossible to find out based on uh you know the fact that they're not disclosing numbers but per our kind of private research that we did and talking to a couple of ex-modbook employees we suspect that fewer than 300 to 500 of these modbuck pros ever actually sold making it one of the rarest pieces of quasi-apple history so modbuck pro it didn't really pan out and this is where things start to get shady in 2014 modbook incorporated launched a kickstarter for the new modbook pro x a device that promised to fix some of the predecessor's previous downsides like the lack of a physical keyboard the projects are passed its goal raising 318 thousand dollars the majority of which came from just a few dozen backers that had pledged more than five thousand dollars each here's the thing three hundred eighteen thousand dollars is very little money when it comes to paying for research and development on a new product especially one as complex as modbook pro x promised to be even assuming that prototypes were finished which they claimed to have had but i'm skeptical but it was 2014 and crowdfunding was booming and there was starting to develop a popular strategy albeit a dishonest one raise a bunch of money but still not enough to actually make the project and then seek out a third party investor and say hey look how many people gave us money for this product it'll be huge can you fund the rest of the project for x amount of equity for a lot of brands this worked for a lot of brands since then it hasn't and i suspect modbuck inc was hoping to be one of the former a success story they knew 300 000 wasn't enough to make their product but maybe it would be enough to convince someone that had the deep pockets to make it happen for the next year modbooks seemed optimistic they were posting monthly updates on kickstarter building out prototypes and they were behind schedule a lot behind schedule but most backers seemed relatively okay with the wait progress appeared to be happening well at least until the wait became too long modbus seemed to be ignoring the increasingly frustrated backers which was a little unusual for them until it all started to make sense as they launched a cry for help on a platform called crowdfunder which is basically kickstarter but instead of getting a product you get equity in a startup company modbus claim to have raised over eight hundred thousand dollars in just a couple months on crowdfunder and then asked kickstarter backers if they wanted to change their reward from a computer that they had ordered years ago to stock in modbook incorporated and then the doozy happened apple released the brand new 2016 touch bar macbook pro with a drastically different design from the macbook pro that modbuck had been working with so they asked their kickstarter backers who still wanted a computer if they wanted a short run of the machine that they had ordered over two years ago or if they wanted to wait just a little bit longer for a modbook pro x based on the new 2016 macbook pro most appeared to say no give me my laptop now but modbook either didn't seem to get the memo or they did and didn't actually have the ability to ship anything and so a few renders later and voila the new macbook pro x after raising a total of 1.5 million dollars from crowdfunding and crowd equity websites modbugs spent the next two years showing off the occasional prototype in an update with enthusiasm for the project until the brand went dark in august 2018 no longer providing any updates since but the story doesn't end there a year ago i tried to buy a modbook pro directly from them their order page was still live but my order was immediately canceled and attempting to order on amazon resulted in the same i emailed them multiple times with no response and their telephone line sent me through an endless automated phone tree loophole but here's the thing modbook incorporated is a corporation and thus they have to publish earning reports to the public they're not they're not good the company had three hundred thousand dollars in net losses on their most recent report with less than nine thousand dollars cash on hand interestingly while not listed on their website they do report to the sec a physical address located in rosita california where their headquarters are so last year when visiting austin evans to do a collab i drove out to these alleged mod book headquarters on a weekday at about 2 p.m i found it to be inside of a seedy business strip mall not a luxurious place and the small office that adorned a modbook logo on the door appeared closed with the lights off there was no one there i asked a security guard who requested i delete footage of her if anyone was ever around this office and she said that there was a single guy that would be there a few hours in the morning a couple times per week i showed her a picture of andreas haas and she confirmed that it was indeed him the future of modbook incorporated looks pretty grim but the devices were cool maybe a little bit ahead of their time and who knows if apple really brings touchscreens to the mac like many people including myself predict i hope andreas haas wherever he is feels a little vindicated even if he isn't ultimately the victor well we've learned a few things today never back anything on kickstarter and if something sounds too good to be true it probably is except for our sponsor raf power and their fantastic gallium nitride chargers ravpower sent me their new 90 watt charger and it is absolutely diminutive compared to the apple one how's it so much smaller you ask well old school silicon chargers are cheaper to make but at the cost of more components and more energy lost to heat this 90 watt charger fixes those shortcomings found in apple's chargers it never gets slightly warm it's even smaller and with an additional usbc port you can split that 90 watts up to charge multiple devices at once if you don't rock a top of the line power hungry macbook pro you might also consider this ravpower's new 30 watt fast charger this one is great because not only is it super tiny but it has both an 18 watt usbc pd 3.0 port and a more traditional 12 watt usb a port meaning it will charge basically anything you can throw at it these chargers are genuinely excellent i use them every day as my apple ones sit collecting dust and you should too by using my link and discount in the video description below well folks that's all for me thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video give it a like if you didn't like it well send this video to someone that you don't like but most importantly and as always stay snazzy see you later folks

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 403,161

Rating: 4.9364624 out of 5

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, modbook, axiotron, macbook, macbook pro, touchscreen, touch screen, mac os, macos, touchscreen mac, touch mac, macbook air, touch screen mac, big sur, macos big sur, history, apple fail, tech history, til, interesting facts, big story, steve wozniak, steve jobs, john sculley, andreas haas, modbook pro, modbook pro x, failed tech products, fail, mac, imac, diy laptop, mac with touch screen, windows

Id: 2AoX-5KIh9Q

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020