Hasta La Gadget!

Thodio, maker of the Furby-like portable iBox speaker, will now sell you a €100 tea-tray customized to hold an Apple keyboard and trackpad. The MacDec trays, in wood ($138) or acrylic ($165), are carved or machined with hollows that hold the keyboard and pad in a laptop-style T-shape, for use on the lap or the desk. They also use neodymium magnets to keep the peripherals in place, although last time I looked, aluminum wasn’t a material that stuck to magnets.

It’s a fairly useful product, if expensive, but the purpose of this post is to wonder why these things exist. The one obvious use case is the media-center Mac, but how many of those are there really?

There has been a recent flurry of these holders, in the T-shape seen here and also in a more usual side-by-side configuration (Twelve South’s MagicWand), so somebody sees this as a popular market. I prefer the laptop layout, as I don’t have to move my hand to control a cursor. I also find it incredibly comfortable to type with the tiny Apple aluminum keyboard on my lap whilst in a easy chair or on the floor, sending text to my iPad. But so far, for computer use at least, these various products don’t quite work, however well made they may be.

Any ideas? I have no answer, other than that this is a non-problem that doesn’t need to be sold. Maybe there are a ton of media-center Macs out there after all? Suggestions, if you have them, in the comments.

MacDec product page [Thodio]

See Also:

• Seperated at Birth? Thodio iPod Speaker and Furby
• A-Box, A Speaker For Real Men
• MagicWand Helps Aluminum Keyboard and Magic Trackpad Stick …
• Aluminum Tray Turns Desktop Keyboard into Laptop Keyboard