I’ve had iPad-mini-lust for a while, exacerbated by setting one up for my dad. I use my iPhone a lot but the screen is too small for real productivity. The prices for iPad minis aren’t too far into fantasy-land, and they’re about £100 cheaper than their full-size sistren.

Problem?
But for real productivity, I’d want the full-fat MacOS so I can run Adobe Creative Suite, QuankyAbcess, MS Office, Eclipse and similar. Remember I effectively swapped a full-size iPad 1 for a MacBook Air – it gave me the OS I want, and a real keyboard in a package roughly the same size and weight. I’m pretty sure I can find an iPad environment for MacOS if I really need to run iOS stuff.

The two things missing from this package are

• water- and shock-proofness. (Lifeproof make superb cases for iDevices, including the best iPhone handlebar-mount I’ve experienced.)
• lack of touch screen.

Solutions
I don’t know yet how to solve the former but I recalled this morning that if I ever had a spare £4000 or so, there’s a company that will happily swap it for a device based on the guts of a MacBook pro and a graphics tablet. You need to use a stylus with it, so it’s not quite a touch screen but it’s as near as I can find and I use a graphics tablet at home anyway. (It will also run Windows7 natively, thanks to BootCamp, so I guess there would be nothing to stop it also running Windows8. If BootCamp won’t enable Windows8, VirtualBox would.)

Obviously that price is well into fantasy-land. (When I think about road-bikes, I imagine spending around £1000. I guess this is because I believe I’ll never be a good or frequent enough roadent to justify spending more, but I spend a lot of time with my macs and I like to think I know what I’m doing with them.)

For much less money, it is of course possible to hack your own franken-tablet-mac or hack an existing tablet to run MacOS. Or you can make iOS look like MacOS