does macs support touch screen monitors manufacturer

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 ?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After years of denials and loathing, Apple may finally be getting around to bringing touchscreens to MacBooks. According to Bloomberg, Apple is actively working on this project and may break away from its long-standing approach of designing a traditional desktop system without a touchscreen.

Apple could launch MacBooks with touchscreens by 2025 as a part of a new MacBook Pro lineup, the Bloomberg report adds. This lineup revamp could also see the company switching from LCD to OLED displays for the 14-inch and 16-inch Pro models.

Earlier this week, another Bloomberg report indicated that Apple was aiming to make its own screens for Apple Watch and iPhone. However, there was no mention of the company building displays for its Mac lineup.

Apple executives have long maintained the stance that MacBooks don’t need to have a touchscreen. Instead, for years they have invited people to try an iPad if they want a large computing device with a touchscreen. The closest Apple ever got around to bringing a touchscreen on a Mac was adding the TouchBar on the keyboard — which is slowly being phased out — on MacBook Pros.

Apple has long maintained that iPad is the best touchscreen “computer” out there. The company might have to slowly move away from that narrative if they are planning to launch MacBooks with a touchscreen. Meanwhile, Apple’s competitors, including Microsoft, have built a long line of touchscreen laptops with different form factors.

“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 a great demo, but after a short period, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work; it’s ergonomically terrible,” he had said. But technology has evolved since then and Apple has also introduced things like the Apple Pencil, another product idea that Jobs hated.

The iPhone-maker is treading on a convoluted line. On one hand, it has made its iPads more powerful in recent years, giving them desktop-class processors and decent add-on keyboards, and adding desktop features on the iPadOS. So to sell both iPad and MacBooks with touchscreen, Apple will have to keep enough differentiation between the two lineups.

Apple is working on Macs with touchscreens, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. While it’s uncertain whether the devices will actually come to market, Gurman says in a tweet that we could see a touchscreen MacBook Pro as early as 2025. The report also notes that the screens may use OLED technology, as opposed to the Mini LED displays that are currently in the 14- and 16-inch models.

The project seems to be in relatively early stages, with engineers being “actively engaged,” according to the report. Gurman says that there are no final plans for launching touchscreen Macs and that plans could always change — we’ve seen Apple scrap projects before, and the company has made prototype Macs with touchscreens that never saw the light of day, according to Craig Federighi.

Gurman says the rumored MacBook Pro would include other updates but would more or less retain the same form factor as current models; you’d just be able to tap and gesture on the screen.

If this product does end up on store shelves, it would be a major reversal for the company. Apple has famously avoided adding touchscreens to its macOS devices, even as iPadOS flourished (and as it brought apps meant for touchscreens to its desktops). Steve Jobs famously criticized computers with touchscreens — as well as devices that use styluses — saying that they were “ergonomically terrible” when announcing the iPad.

Instead of adding touchscreens to laptops, Apple pursued a Touch Bar for Macs from 2016 until starting to phase it out with the release of redesigned 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in 2021.

Since then, though, the tech has become commonplace on many Windows laptops, and a plethora of iPad accessories have basically turned the tablet into a MacBook. I’m unaware of any reports that people’s arms have fallen off from heavy touchscreen use but have found laptops with them to be convenient in many situations. With that said, I do think macOS will probably need a heavy refresh if it’s going to be used with a touchscreen; I can’t imagine trying to hit the current traffic light window controls or navigate the menu bar with my finger.

Apple is reportedly planning to add touchscreens to its MacBooks, according to Bloomberg"s Mark Gurman. It"s a seismic change in the Mac world, as Apple has long held that touchscreens in clamshell laptops don"t go together.

According to the report, the company has engineers "actively engaged" in working with touch, and that it is considering possibly releasing its first touchscreen Mac in 2025, in the form of a MacBook Pro refresh with an OLED screen.

At the moment, Gurman claims that Apple is planning for that MacBook Pro to keep its clamshell design with trackpad and keyboard, and that touch could come to more models down the line. Gurman"s sources say the screen would work with both touch input and gestures, similar to Apple"s tablets and phones.

OLED would also be a big move. Apple"s 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros use Mini LED technology, but haven"t moved to OLED, which can be found with touch on many Windows notebooks. Gurman claims OLED will also come to the iPad Pro in 2024.

In theory, adding touch should be quite a bit of work, as macOS would also need to be retooled for larger touch targets. But some of the work is done: Apple already allows developers to put iPhone and iPad apps on Mac, so those should be great examples of how to develop other software (In fact, some of the apps feel awkward using a traditional touchpad, because of their touch-first design).

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs railed against touchscreens. "Touch surfaces don"t want to be vertical," Jobs said in 2010. "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. It doesn"t work. It"s ergonomically terrible." Current CEO Tim Cook has also said touch didn"t work with a clamshell laptop. If you want touch, Apple has maintained, get an iPad.

But as Apple designs its laptops around its own silicon, it seems the company may be reconsidering some of those previous ideas. If Gurman"s sources are right and a touchscreen Mac ships, it would offer choices that many of the best ultrabooks running Windows have had for years.

Apple has previously offered a tiny touch screen — the Touch Bar, on the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro (it still lives on in the smaller size), but that never gained a huge following.

Apple is reportedly adding touch screens to its Mac computers – a design idea that the company’s co-founder Steve Jobs had considered “ergonomically terrible”.

Teams within the company are actively engaged in developing and adding touch screens to Apple’s MacBook Pro with the product being considered for release as early as 2025, according to Bloomberg.

Even as recently as 2021, the tech giant’s marketing executive Tom Boger said while the iPad is the world’s “best touch computer”, the Mac is “totally optimized for direct input”.

“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,” he had explained.

Bloomberg reports that Apple’s first revamped MacBook Pro with the new design is expected to include its standard trackpad and keyboard, with the addition of a screen supporting touch input and gestures like in an iPhone or iPad.

For this change, Apple is reportedly planning to move from LCDs – liquid crystal displays – on its Macs to organic light-emitting diode, or OLED technology.

Apple is developing and adding touch screens to its Mac computers, after being resisted from bringing this support a few years ago. Steve Jobs was known as the person who does not want this feature on computers, as he described it as an "ergonomically terrible" idea.

One argument is that it does not work well on laptops, as the company offers a better version for people who aim to have a touch interface device, which works for an iPad. Another concern is by producing touchscreen Macs, iPad sales may decrease.

But several teams and engineers are currently working together actively on a new project by Apple, as the company develops bringing touch screens to Macs for the first time.

Apple could launch its first touchscreen Mac in 2025, as part of the company"s larger updates for MacBook Pro. But expanding touch support to more of its Mac models is also possible in the future.

Before Steve Jobs" passing, he opposed the idea of bringing touch screens to Mac as he called it an "ergonomically terrible" idea. "Touch surfaces don"t want to be vertical. And after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off," he stated in 2010 when the first iPad generations were released.

Meanwhile, 9To5Mac reported that Marketing Executive Tom Boger also opposed this idea in 2021. He stated that iPad is the world"s "best touch computer", and bringing the touch screen support to Mac will not make it any better as Mac is totally optimized for direct input.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook also maintained Jobs" idea of not bringing this feature to Macs. When Microsoft Corp. released a touchscreen laptop in 2012, he stated that blending tablets and laptops was equivalent to combining a toaster with a refrigerator.

Last 2016, Apple added a Touch Bar for Macs instead of adding touch screens. But The Verge reported that this feature started to phase out with the release of the redesigned 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in 2021.

In a CNET interview with Software Engineering Senior Vice President Craig Federighi, the company made prototype Macs with touch screens. However, the company did not see the potential of releasing this up until now.