The rumor of a touchscreen Mac isn't new, but it turns out it's been around before, even though most of us didn't know it.
In 1999, a company called Elo produced and sold touchscreen versions of the iMac G3 through Apple's value-added reseller program for use as kiosks, and YouTuber Michael MJD recently succeeded to get your hands on one of them.
The “off-the-shelf desktop kiosks” were equipped with Elo's iTouch interface, which used surface acoustic waves to detect where users touched the screen.
You can see a prototype iMac Elo in action in the video, which also covers the history of the machine as well as its technical specifications. Considering how simple hardware modification is, this is a pretty impressive feat.
Rumors of Apple developing its own touchscreen iMac date back to 2010, but former Apple CEO Steve Jobs put those rumors to rest by stating that “touch surfaces don't want to be vertical” due to arm fatigue associated with holding a finger on the screen.
In the years since, Apple has made the iPhone and iPad its touchscreen products, without changing its mind about the touchscreen in Macs. In 2021, Apple's director of hardware engineering, John Ternus, said that the Mac was “fully optimized for indirect typing” and that the company didn't think there was a good reason to change that.
However, despite years of resistance, Apple has started working on adding touchscreens to Macs. A new MacBook Pro with an OLED display could be the first touchscreen Mac by 2025, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.