May i introduce you to 2 in 1s.
They are a special breed of laptops, Sporting the features of both a PC and a Tablet even further than laptops already did, common features with these is yeeting your keyboard away to use the touchscreen, where it has been marketed to be useful for art, as these can also come with a stylus which further prove their point of "oh look, you can use these for Arrrrrrrrt.
Figure 1 (Dell XPS 13 marketing material):
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look at this beauty, its screen but we aint here to drool all over the nearly bezel-less screen are we, no (i kinda want to though). But notice the fact that the screen bends around, this is not because why not, this is because adding features actually expands your market
(someone should tell that to EA)
Now where did this all begin?
In the 1970s work began on incorporating the functionality of computers into something more portable. The first released "laptop" was the Portal R2E CCMC. This beast ran an Intel 8085 processor, had 64Kb of ram, the screen can show a whopping 32 characters (letters + numbers + other special stuffs), a floppy disk and a thermal printer. This thing weighed 12Kg. Here is what it looked like:
(Figure 2)
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The first truly portable computer is the Osbourne 1 which uses the same clamshell style for lid closing which modern computers still use to this day. Here it is and yes that is an 5" CRT Monitor, most modern phones have bigger screens than that:
(Figure 3)
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Now going faster a bit so i dont bore you, we had you weird stuff like the:
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The Epson HX-20 (1981) and the Grid Compass which the Epson has the more modern keyboard we have today and the Compass has the more modern styling, though everything is stored underneath the keyboard and not behind it. Unless your some gaming laptop that i forgot the name of
Now to the juicy stuff, touchscreens which were invented before these babies above.
In 1965, Eric Johnson described his work on touchscreens in a short article. This started the journey that lead to this thing you call a hack. Which can be shown via
this patent and
this other patent
This lead to the IBM Simon, the first touch screen phone and then the LG Prada, the first smartphone (no not the iPhone, LG was Dec06 and iPhone was Jan07)
But there was also laptops getting some upgrades, CES 2011 featured what was called hybrid laptops these were released and the first well received one of the hybrids was the Lenovo X220t, this ended up evolving into what we have today
WINDOWS TABLET MODE
Figure 2: Some beautiful Tablet UI
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Yeah, its even in the name, Tablet mode. This mode is meant to accomplish the ability to function better on tablets than the tiny icons used on the desktop version. This was added mostly back in windows 8, when they decided that their non-touch screen market didn't really care anymore and then rolled out with the pile of garbage looks like Windows Phone OS, just supersized.
So no. Its a feature, not a hack. Just a bit more recent than something like a numpad or the wheel