does macs support touch screen monitors price

Although Apple refuses to make a touchscreen Mac, the Espresso Display V2 is ready to fill in the gap. There are 15.6-inch and 13.3-inch versions of the very slim external display, and both support touch and an optional stylus.

I tested the screen with a MacBook and iPad to see how well it performs in ordinary use. And I also tried out the stylus as well as the stand for desktop use and the case for taking the display on the go.

Beyond that, the LCD in this screen is gorgeous. And rotatable. Plus, Espresso offers a range of accessories so you can use it in the office or while traveling.

The Espresso Display V2 is a very stylish piece of kit, even before you turn it on. Most of the exterior is a single piece of aluminum that the screen is set into. All the rival screens I’ve tested have plastic casings, so this one really stands out.

The backlight maxes out at 300 nits. I found that easily bright enough to use in my office. It’s also sufficient for using the screen outdoors, in the shade. Direct sunlight isn’t recommended.

Beyond the specs, I used the Espresso Display V2 side-by-side with a MacBook, and the two looked great together. The struggle in using external screens with Apple laptops is the MacBook’s display is of such high quality that cheap LCDs look extra terrible. That’s at all not the case with Espresso’s product.

What truly sets the Espresso Display V2 apart from the pack is its touchscreen. Plug it into your Mac and you have the touchscreen Mac you’ve always wanted.

macOS isn’t designed for touch, though, so Espresso had to write an app to enable the feature. Espresso Flow is free, and there are both macOS and Windows versions. With it, you can use your finger as a mouse, or set up gestures to control your Mac apps.

I tinkered with the touchscreen functionality quite a bit, and it works very well. I found the display to be as sensitive as an iPad. But you have to get accustomed to using it because macOS is not iPadOS. I know that seems obvious but it really affects how Espresso’s product works. It works fine… once you get used to it. And configure it as you want.

Touching the screen is optional. Display V2 also acts as a standard external screen that you can use with a mouse pointer. And note that a mouse or trackpad is really the only option with iPad.

Both the 15.6-inch version and the 13.3-inch one are available with touch support. In addition, Espresso offers a 13.3-inch version without a touchscreen.

All it takes to turn the Espresso Display V2 into a portrait-oriented screen is rotate it 90 degrees. [As demonstrated here] That’s a bonus when working with long documents.

The accessory has a pair is USB-C ports, and that’s it. But that’s all you need to connect your Mac or iPad to the screen. And Espresso provides the necessary cable.

No external power supply is needed, so you can easily set the external screen up when you’re on the go. But the Display V2 has a second USB-C port so you can bring in power if you wish.

You can use Espresso’s screen with computers and gaming consoles that don’t have USB-C, but there is no direct support for HDMI or Mini Display Port. To get those, you’ll need to purchase adapters. The HDMI one is $39, while the Mini DisplayPort version is $29.

On three sides, the screen bezels are relatively slim: 0.25 inches. But, like the iMac, Espresso Display V2 has a considerable “chin” at the bottom. It’s 2.2 inches wide, and is the secret to its slim design. Rival external displays are thicker, but don’t have the chin.

And it leads to one of the rare downsides of the Display V2: it’s wider than will fit in many laptops bags. Not thicker — wider. Consider the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It is 9.8 inches wide. This screen is 1.3 inches wider than that.

I have a backpack with a slot designed to vertically hold 16-inch notebooks. This external screen won‘t fit in it. But I have another that holds laptops horizontally, and Espresso’s product does fit in that one… barely.

Espresso built a pair of speakers into the bottom edge of the accessory. In my testing, these were about to put out as much as 75 dB a couple of feet from the front screen.

Espresso Case — For carrying the Display V2 around the office or the town, there’s the $39 flip-cover case. It attaches magnetically, then covers and protects the display when you’re on the go. When you’re ready to get to work, flip it behind the screen and bend it into a stand.

This is one of the best-looking external screens I’ve ever used, and the design is top notch too. The fact that it’s also a touchscreen puts it in a category almost by itself.

The Espresso Display V2 is a top-quality product that’s loaded with features. And it’s priced to match. The 15.6-inch touch version is $499. The 13.3-inch one with touch support is $439, while a version without the touchscreen is $339.

You can definitely find a nice-looking portable display for less. Like the InnoView Portable Monitor INVPM001, which is $199. But this isn’t a touchscreen, and it has a plastic casing — you have to pay more to get more features.

Brea, California (December 15, 2021) – ViewSonic Corp., a leading global provider of visual solutions, launched the vTouch 3.1 driver for its TD Series touchscreen monitors, making the displays compatible with the newly released macOS Monterey. Mac users can extend the full functionality of the Mac trackpad to touchscreen monitors, combining dual-screen efficiency with multi-touch gesture capability. The TD Series offers a range of products for a wide variety of needs, from highly portable 16” units to more expansive 24” displays.

“Mac users have long faced the challenge of a lack of OS-based support for external touchscreens. The launch of our vTouch driver significantly improved touch support for macOS. This garnered positive feedback from our Mac users,” said Oscar Lin, General Manager of the Monitor Business Unit at ViewSonic. “We have been committed to ensuring that our displays are always equipped with the latest software technology. We are proud to offer an up-to-date driver that supports multi-touch gesture recognition and provides a solution for Mac users to get more out of their devices and their operating system.”

ViewSonic’s TD Series touchscreen monitors are designed to suit a diverse array of visual needs and are ideal for overcoming one-screen limitations. In the past, Mac users could not use external touch monitors due to limitations in macOS. With ViewSonic’s latest vTouch software, Mac users can employ all the features of multi-touch technology such as zoom, pinch, spread, rotate, and stretch, as well as Mac trackpad gestures on the TD Series. This bridges the gap between Mac users and dual-screen touch technology.

vTouch 3.1 works across ViewSonic’s entire TD Series. The vTouch driver is compatible with both Intel and M1 processors. It is available for macOS 10.8 and above. Mac users can install ViewSonic’s vTouch by downloading the driver here.

The TD Series offers options for resistive, infrared (IR), and capacitive touchscreens. Moreover, the series features sharp, high-resolution displays, with sleek, clean designs. It spans a range of sizes, from the portable 16” TD1655 to the 24” TD2455. The TD Series supports Windows, Android, Chrome, and macOS devices.

I want to upgrade to a better touch screen, I send an e-mail to ELO since they seem to be market leaders but no reply. Anyone using a mac mini with a 19-22 inch touch screen in a POS enviorment ?

Every aspect of the light imaging system in Pro Display XDR is crucial to the overall quality of what you see onscreen. Each element builds on top of the last to create a display with unbelievable brightness and contrast.

Typical LCDs are edge-lit by a strip of white LEDs. The 2D backlighting system in Pro Display XDR is unlike any other. It uses a superbright array of 576 blue LEDs that allows for unmatched light control compared with white LEDs. Twelve controllers rapidly modulate each LED so that areas of the screen can be incredibly bright while other areas are incredibly dark. All of this produces an extraordinary contrast that’s the foundation for XDR.

Pro Display XDR extends exceptional image quality to the very edge. To ensure that LEDs along the sides of the display mix well with adjacent ones, a micro-lens array boosts light along the edges. This creates uniform color and brightness across the entire screen.

Apple has been touting the iPad as a laptop replacement for a while now, and one of the fundamental edges it has over the MacBook is its killer touchscreen display. But one company has developed a new accessory that finally brings touchscreen capabilities to the Mac – and it could be a game-changer.

Available in 13.3" and 15.6", Espresso Display(opens in new tab) isn"t exactly going to do your favourite blockbusters justice. But as a portable second display you can easily take into a cafe (remember those?), it could be perfect for digital artists on the move. And by adding the ability to scrub through footage in Final Cut or manipulate Photoshop files with your finger or a stylus, Espresso Display could even tempt a few iPad converts back to the MacBook. It might be small, but the extra features could make this a contender for our best monitors for MacBook Pro list.

How well exactly touchscreen capabilities translate to MacOS remains to be seen – the software is of course designed to be used with a mouse or trackpad. That said, YouTuber ben"s gadget reviews(opens in new tab) has got hold of an early review copy, and says the experience is, aside from a few fiddly menu bar items, a smooth experience.

Portable Monitors for Mac enable a boost in your productivity, whether you are using MacBook, iMac, Mac mini, or other Mac series products. UPERFECT external screen will always be your best Mac partner.

While the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro updates have been broadly well-received by reviewers and consumers alike, there are still questions about missing features like a touchscreen and Face ID. Speaking to the

While Chromebook and Windows PC manufacturers have broadly adopted touchscreens in laptops, Apple has not. Instead, the company is focusing on “indirect input” on the Mac and saving touchscreen technology for the iPad. John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, said in the interview:

“We make the world’s best touch computer on an iPad. It’s totally optimized for that. And the Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven’t really felt a reason to change that.”

What about Face ID? With the MacBook Pro now sporting a notch in the display, it seems like Face ID could come sooner rather than later – but Apple seems to think that Touch ID is better suited for the laptop form factor. Tom Boger, Apple’s VP of Mac and iPad product marketing, said in the interview that “Touch ID is more convenient on a laptop since your hands are already on the keyboard.”

Having reviewed practically every MacBook since the beginning of the Intel Mac era to the current M2 chip versions, I"ve seen a lot of features added, taken away, and sometimes added back again. That goes for HDMI ports, SD card slots and even the MagSafe connector. But one occasionally requested feature that has never been part of an Apple-made computer is a touchscreen.

I haven"t given the idea much thought lately, being more concerned with questions like: Why does the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro exist? But my colleague Abrar Al-Heeti recently asked me to weigh in on the subject for a Q&A video.

Apple has already tried it, with the Touch Bar. As always, there is an asterisk to the no-touch MacBook rule. The now-nearly-dead Touch Bar, originally found on several MacBook Pro laptops, but now only on that last lonely 13-inch MacBook Pro, is technically a touchscreen, even if it"s only 60 pixels high. But as an experiment, it"s safe to write that off as a failure, and it might even be an extra incentive for Apple to stay further away from touchscreens.

But there is some light on the horizon for the touchscreen Mac idea. Now that both (some) iPads and Macs run the same M-series Apple silicon chips, the daylight between these products is slimmer than ever. Does this mean both products will eventually merge into a single device? Not anytime soon, but maybe we"re closer than we were a year ago.

For the company that has led the world in touch-based interfaces – thanks to the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch – it remains something of a mystery why none of Apple’s Macs have adopted this useful feature.

Well, maybe mystery is too strong a term, as Tim Cook and others have justified the approach over the years by claiming in a 2012 earnings call that the addition of touch to the Mac would be akin to a “fridge-toaster” combination, while Steve Jobs suggested in 2010 that using a touch screen Mac would make you feel like “your arm wants to fall off”.

As Jobs explained: “We’ve done tons of user testing on this… and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

But does that thinking really still hold water? In this article we look at why Apple needs a touchscreen Mac and whether Apple is coming around to the idea that Macs should have touchscreens.

As recently as 2018 Apple was still making it pretty clear that it had no plans to introduce a touchscreen Mac. Craig Federighi (senior vice president of Software Engineering) told Wired in 2018: “We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do…”

A few years previously, in 2016 Phil Schiller (senior vice president Worldwide Marketing) told Wired’s Steven Levi: “We think of the whole platform… If we were to do Multi-Touch on the screen of the notebook, that wouldn’t be enough  –  then the desktop wouldn’t work that way.” And in the same year, Jony Ive (former Chief Design Officer), in typically minimalist style, commented to Cnet that the touch feature “wasn’t particularly useful”.

But, despite this stance, Apple has made a number of changes over the years that go some way to merge macOS and iPadOS and invite a future where Macs could utilise a touch interface.

With the arrival of iPadOS 13 and macOS Catalina in 2019, Apple introduced Sidecar, which allows an iPad to become a second screen for your Mac, while also bringing some touch-controls to the party. Along with being able to interface with the screen of your Mac mirrored on your iPad using your finger, you can also access Touch Bar controls on the iPad, plus some additional commands. Add an Apple Pencil and you can turn the iPad into a graphics pad for your Mac, with even more tactile control over macOS apps, such as Logic Pro X, which utilises the iPad and iPhone touch interface through the Logic Remote app that turns the mobile devices into control panels that can play and program various music creation tools such as Live Loops.

At WWDC 2020, Apple discussed how developers would be able to easily port iOS and iPadOS apps to the Mac thanks to Mac Catalyst’s tools for optimising the converted apps from the touch interface to the Mac interface. We now have the ability to run iPad and iPhone apps on Macs with Apple’s M-series chips.

Apple’s gone on to refine and improve this unification of the iPad and Mac to such an extent that with Universal Control (which arrived in January 2022 with macOS Monterey 12.3 and iPadOS 15.4) users can share the same keyboard and mouse between a compatible Mac and iPad while either mirroring their macOS screen or using iPadOS on said iPad.

The integration of the two interfaces is well underway and iPads and Macs have never been closer together in terms of power and app compatibility. The flipside of that is that now that we have the ability to run iOS/iPadOS apps on the Mac the lack of touch input on the Mac becomes even more of a frustrating experience.

Could it be that touch is finally at the stage where including it in a Mac is less of a fridge/toaster situation and more of “hey, that’s really useful!” one instead? It’s starting to look like it.

In January 2023 Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claimed that a MacBook Pro with touchscreen could appear in 2025. If he is correct, it seems that the touchscreen “would support touch input and gestures–just like an iPhone or iPad.”

When Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, its primary focus on the touch-interface was something of a disaster. Many users complained of the phone-like experience on their massive desktop screens, and Tim Cook explained the perils of technology convergence by giving the aforementioned kitchen utility example.

First of all, Windows got a lot better. Microsoft learned quickly from the car crash of Windows 8, implementing design changes in version 8.1 and finally getting it right with Windows 10 and devices like the Surface Pro, which restored a primarily mouse and keyboard approach, but with the inclusion of touch when you need it.

And that’s the important factor. Touch can be an excellent augmentation to an interface, rather than replacing the existing one. The simple addition to being able to navigate websites by tapping on links rather than using a cursor has obvious benefits, aside from the fact that we are all so used to doing so on our iPhones and iPads.

Apple did actually attempt to implement a form of touch on MacBooks, but it would probably be fair to say it failed spectacularly. In 2016 Apple added the Touch Bar to the MacBook Pro. The Touch Bar is/was an OLED strip positioned above the keys that offered function keys relevant to the current app. Having been a feature of 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro models it is now only available on the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, where it’s days are probably numbered.

There are many problems with the Touch Bar concept. One being the way touch-typists have to slow down to use the feature, as contextually changing icons don’t allow for the building of muscle memory in the fingers. There’s also the factor that you can’t see the Touch Bar unless you look down from your screen, at which point you have to take your eyes off what you are doing. Not having to change your arm position, and the ease of scrubbing through video content are genuinely helpful, but the Touch Bar interrupts a user’s flow and can end up being completely ignored in favour of the traditional on-screen controls. It’s no surprise that the concept was a failure.

In many ways the Touch Bar demonstrates everything Apple had wrong with it’s view of touch on the Mac. As Macworld’s Leif Johnson puts it so well in Apple really doesn’t want us thinking about touchscreen MacBooks, “Apple seems to assume users would want to use nothing but touch support on their MacBooks, but when I see colleagues and visitors using touchscreen Windows laptops in meetings, they’re not using them for complicated tasks like clone-stamping textures in Photoshop. They’re usually not diving deep into menus, and they’re certainly not trying to recreate one of Monet’s haystacks. Instead, they’re usually standing over their laptops and quickly swiping to different parts of a page or opening files or links, thereby saving a few seconds over what using a mouse or the trackpad would have taken. It’s sure as heck a lot more convenient than the Touch Bar, which has been Apple’s only concession to touch-based interaction on MacBooks to date.”

As a way to approach touch on a Mac laptop the Touch Bar is incredibly flawed and really just shows Apple’s lack of understanding as to what users want from a touch interface. Neither the Touch Bar, Sidecar or Universal Control, solve the simple issue of wanting to quickly select links on a page or navigate seamlessly through a website like you can on most Windows 10 laptops and even the majority of Chromebooks. It’s like using a diamond-encrusted sledgehammer to tap in a nail.

Certainly, for some people this is an attractive proposition, but with the laptop level of performance found in iPad Pros whose prices rival those of entry level Macs, and yet lack the screen sizes to compete with iMacs, it’s a niche option rather than the more obvious one.

Putting a touchscreen in a Mac and offering the ability to use it when you need it, seems a far better option that trying to squeeze a Mac-like experience into iPadOS. For a company that prides itself on elegant solutions to problems, not having a touchscreen option on the Mac now seems more of an ideological sticking point rather than one that best serves its users.

According to Gurnam’s report from January 2023 (above) the MacBook touchscreen will use OLED technology. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has claimed that Apple’s first MacBooks with OLED displays could arrive in 2024, a year before the touch screen implementation.

Gurman’s report also states that macOS is “likely” to be used on these first touchscreen Macs and that the company is not working on combining macOS and iPadOS.

In a recent article, Gurman reported that the iPhone maker could launch its first touchscreen Mac as early as 2025. According to Gurman, the feature would be available in the Pro variant MacBooks.

Gurman also noted that additional updates would rollout to these rumored MacBook Pros beyond the inclusion of a touchscreen, such as screens with OLED technology instead of the Mini LED displays currently found in the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, which were released in October 2021. Of course, this is a report; keep this with a grain of salt.Apple MacBook Pro M1 Pro Photos

The closest Apple got to launching a MacBook with a touchscreen was in 2016 when the company released the Touch Bar. Additionally, Apple previously made prototype Macs with touch screens that were never released as final products, as Apple"s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, told CNET back in 2016.

If Apple were to launch a Mac with a touch screen, it certainly would be an interesting pivot for the company that previously wanted to avoid the idea of producing touchscreen Macs. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said back in 2010 that a touchscreen on something like a laptop was "ergonomically terrible." In 2012, when asked by analysts to comment on the release of the Microsoft Surface hybrid tablet, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that it was "a fairly compromised, confusing product."

A Mac with a touch screen would be placed in an interesting position in both the market and Apple"s ecosystem. While laptops with touch screens are nothing new, having been around for years on Windows OS-based laptops, Apple has been slowly turning the iPad into a "laptop lite" device.

Aside from the iPad having many keyboard accessories like the Logitech Combo Touch and the Magic Keyboard, Apple has even put its ARM-based system on a chip, the M1 (and M2 with the most recent iPad Pro models), into the iPad Air and iPad Pro models.