Old iPad Keyboard Makes For a Modern Netbook

Netbooks were a class of tiny laptops which hit their peak over a decade ago, with the idea being that you could use the Internet and do your computing on …. Old iPad Keyboard Makes For a Modern Netbook. Unfortunately manufacturers were scared of them eating their profits from bigger computers, and they were invariably built to a very disappointing spec.

That doesn’t lessen the appeal of small form factor laptops though, and [bob-foss] is here with a simple hack to make one. He’s taken a hinged keyboard case made for one of the previous generations of iPad Mini, and paired it with a high-end Lenovo gaming tablet by way of a 3D printed replacement for the original Apple-grabber. We said it was a simple hack and it is, but it’s no less elegant for that as the detail is what matters.

This isn’t a mess-of-wires cyberdeck, instead it’s a machine you could pull out on a train and get some work done. Meanwhile, if you’d like to take a wallow in what that netbook thing was all about, we took a look at the phenomenon back in 2020.