Kickstarter project aims to turn iPad into MacBook Air
The Brydge hits Kickstarter with early-adopter pricing of $150 for the entry-level model with no built-in speaker. — (Credit: Oona) — During Apple's second quarter earnings call yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook dismissed the idea …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year ago, John Paczkowski's Digital Daily framed Apple's MacBook Air as a "$2.2 billion-a-year quasi-tablet" — a notebook drifting toward the tablet. The Brydge campaign flips that arrow: rather than the laptop becoming a tablet, an accessory maker wants the tablet to wear the laptop's body, shipping a hinged aluminum keyboard case at $150 early-adopter pricing for the entry model without a built-in speaker.
The timing is pointed. On Apple's fiscal Q2 2012 earnings call the day before, CEO Tim Cook dismissed the notion of positioning the iPad as a MacBook Air replacement — and the story nonetheless travelled across ZDNet, GigaOM, Business Insider, 9to5Mac and GeekWire within a day, unusual pickup for a crowdfunding launch. Third-party hardware is building the convergence Apple's leadership publicly declines to sell.
First-order effects
- Oona gets its seed funding and validation straight from early adopters rather than retail buyers, testing demand for a $150 laptop-form iPad shell before committing to inventory.
- iPad owners who want a clamshell experience gain an option Apple itself does not offer, since Cook explicitly rejected framing the iPad as a MacBook Air stand-in on the April 24 call.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own first-party iPad accessories face an implicit ceiling: as long as the company refuses the laptop-replacement pitch, the premium keyboard-case category is left open for crowdfunded entrants like Brydge to define.
- Other accessory makers get a read on willingness-to-pay — if $150 clears via Kickstarter, expect imitators to crowd the hinge-and-aluminum design space ahead of any official Apple keyboard product.
Third-order effects
- If the campaign succeeds, it strengthens the case that the tablet/notebook boundary is a software-and-input question, not a hardware one — echoing the quasi-tablet framing of the MacBook Air and pressuring Apple to eventually concede the attached-keyboard use case on its own terms.
- Crowdfunding becomes a market-research channel for the post-PC accessory industry: small firms can validate convergence products against the platform owner's stated strategy before Apple decides whether that strategy holds.
The trend: Post-PC hardware is converging tablets and notebooks from both directions, with third-party accessory makers pushing the merger faster than Apple's public posture allows.