Would you want a touchscreen Apple iMac Retina? What if Microsoft built one?
Apple has established, in multiple occasions, two ironclad rules for its products: no touchscreens on Macs, and no Mac OS X/iOS convergence. Not now, not ever. That is for as long as Tim Cook has any say in the matter. If it has to be a Mac, it has to be a “Mac’s Mac”, without fancy touchscreens, stylus pens, or a screen that flips 360 degrees and turns a MacBook into an iPad Pro.
With that said, whatever consumers do with their Macs is nobody’s business, including putting touchscreens where Apple say they don’t belong. MaskTouch is one accessory that enables Mac users to add multi touch functionality on the 21 inch iMac Retina, and soon, the 27 inch iMac Retina as well.
The accessory is essentially an infrared powered overlay that sits atop the iMac’s Retina display, and endows the desktop Mac with iPad-like superpowers. Unfortunately for those who are particularly picky about the look of their iMacs, the accessory is a pretty thick and obvious device that not only adds bulk to the front of the iMac, it also comes in colors that, will make your iMac look like it’s wearing a ski mask.
Back to the original question: would you want to interact with an iMac, or any Mac, as you would with an iPad? And how would that work?
As it stands today, the iMac already has touch support, in the form of the Apple Magic Pad, which adds a MacBook’s like trackpad experience to the iMac. With that said, one thing is to track the movement of a mouse pointer across a screen, and another is to use multi-touch, by essentially trying to simulate the behavior of an iPad, on an operating system that is in no way designed to be used on touchscreens.
Desktop operating systems, from Mac OS X to any version prior to Windows 8.1, are just terrible when it comes to touchscreen support. Desktop UI elements are way too small and fine, to be controlled with a finger, not to mention double-clicking, right-clicks, and dragging the sneaky, tiny edge of a window when trying to resize it. This is why introducing touchscreens, especially on a 5K Retina display, is not only a terrible idea, it will also set you back a couple of hundred dollars.
With that out of the way, rumor has it of a Microsoft Surface AIO, a Windows 10 PC rumored to be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iMac.
Since 2012, Microsoft has been working hard on developing ways to let users interact with Windows, using their fingertips and a stylus. Windows 10 is the ultimate achievement of that dream, as it is a desktop operating system that is actually designed with touchscreen users in mind. Even further, Windows 10 has a Tablet Mode, built into the interface, that can be activated manually, on devices that support it, or automatically, as soon as touch-support is detected, and no keyboard in available.
Speculations aside on how the rumored Windows 10-powered AIO will look, or work, one thing is certain, whether you choose to slap a touchscreen ski-mask on your Mac, or wait for a Microsoft Surface AIO with a 21+ inches touchscreen display, here’s a word of advice: start stocking up on Lysol wipes and Windex.