The aftermarketer Axiotron has introduced aftermarket, heavily modified Apple MacBooks called Modbooks, a Mac OS X-based tablet computer. It uses Apple’s Inkwell for handwriting and gesture recognition and bundles additional digitization software from Wacom.

While Apple Inc. legally forbids and doesn’t sanction running their operating system Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware,^[8] there are a large number of computer enthusiasts who are running slightly modified copies of Mac OS X on various x86 architecture PC models, among them Tablet PC computers.^{[citation needed]} To get Mac OS X to talk to the digitizer on Tablet PC systems they use a free open source driver named TabletMagic originally written to support serial tablets for which Wacom no longer supplies Mac drivers.

This form factor offers a more mobile way to interact with a computer. Tablet PCs are often used where normal notebooks are impractical or unwieldy, or do not provide the needed functionality.

The term Tablet PC was made popular in a product announced in 2001 by Microsoft, and defined by Microsoft to be a pen-enabled computer conforming to hardware specifications devised by Microsoft and running a licensed copy of the “Windows XP Tablet PC Edition” operating system or a derivative thereof