Turns out Apple already had a touchscreen Mac... in 1999! (video)

Rumours that Apple is working on a touchscreen Mac have been circulating for over 10 years. But as it turns out, the company already has such an iMac, and it's almost 25 years old!

Details

It turns out that in 1999, Elo was producing and selling special touchscreen versions of the iMac G3 through Apple's reseller programme. They were used as kiosk machines. The author of the YouTube channel Michael MJD got hold of a prototype of such a computer and showed it in a video.

These versions of the iMac G3 were equipped with Elo's proprietary iTouch touch interface, which uses surface acoustic waves to detect where the user touches the screen with a finger.

Incidentally, a few years ago, Apple's head of hardware development assured that the Mac was fully optimised for keyboard and mouse use and the company wasn't going to change that. However, Bloomberg reports that Apple has started working on touchscreens for Macs after all, and the MacBook Pro with an OLED display could be the first touchscreen Mac in 2025.

Source: Michael MJD