Touch screens are coming to MacBooks — whether Apple likes it or not.
The Neonode AirBar, a $99 gadget announced this week at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, can convert a MacBook Air’s screen into a touch screen when placed under it.
“It’ll make your MacBook Air work like an iPad,” Neonode exec Remo Behdasht told The Post. “This is something people have been asking for for a long time.”
That’s despite the fact that Apple has stubbornly resisted enabling touch screens on its laptops — a hard-line stance that originated with founder Steve Jobs.
“Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical,” Jobs declared in 2010 as he unveiled a new MacBook Air. “After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.”
Neonode is betting that Mac fanatics will shrug off Jobs’ finicky dictum. Holiday sales “went very well” for a wider version of its AirBar made for PCs with 15-inch screens, winning “best seller” status on Walmart.com, according to Behdasht.
The AirBar for the MacBook Air is slated to hit Amazon.com in March.
Later this year, Neonode is planning an AirBar for the newly released MacBook Pro — even though the latest version has a “touch bar” that Apple execs contend is a superior alternative to a touch screen.
With Apple’s touch bar, “you have to look down, then you have to look up,” Behdasht says.
With the AirBar plugged into the MacBook Air’s USB port, on the other hand, “you can actually look at the screen and interact with it,” he says. “We’re trying to emulate the experience you get on an iPad.”
Elsewhere this week, a $69, Kickstarter-funded gadget that makes the MacBook Pro’s aggressively minimalist design compatible with accessories like TV monitors and external hard drives saw its funding cross the $1 million mark.