AirBar by Neonode - Add Touchscreen to 13.3” MacBook Air (Pre-2018)

AMAZING!! Turns an old Toshiba laptop into a touch screen computer.So far I have tried the product on a laptop with Win-7 and Win-10 OS. The Win-10 version loaded appropriate drivers instantly and I was up and running. Win-10 is designed for devices such as this, Win-7 is not and may not work (did not work for me).The sensor bar sticks to the bottom of your display screen via a magnet (on the sensor bar) and a metal plate (affixed with double sided tape). You might have to replace the tape so the sensor stays in place.PRO - Works great, I love it! You can use your finger or fingers to draw or use as a mouse. You can even use a feather, if you had one. Accuracy depends on your screen size in reference to the size bar sensor your have. Win-10 has a calibration option to try to fine toon the accuracy. If you reach outside the screen area but within the sensor, you will hear a loud beep alert.CON - The USB cable is on the right side only, and it is short. If you do NOT have a USB port on the right side of your monitor and that port is close to the monitor, you may have difficulty plugging in the device. The manufacturer recommends you get a USB extension cable; these are sold by the foot from most suppliers. I have found shorter USB extension cables, but they are too short. You CANNOT just flip the device around in order to use the USB ports on the other side of your computer. The max screen size is 15.6", no currently known plans to manufacture larger screen versions; though may I suggest 20.1" and 17".

I have an old Dell that was not touch screen. When I ran across this I thought I take a chance. Abracadabra it worked beautifully. Amazing what tech is put out. Perfect.

I bought the MacBook Air version of the AirBar about a month ago. Overall it works as described. As others have said depending on what you are trying to click on it can be hard to determine where the mouse cursor is and get clicks exactly where you want them if the target is too small. Mounting was very easy and no real problem with the magnets. I run a very small dock bar at bottom of screen and it is hard to click the icons accurately with the AirBar not getting in the way. Out of the box the single click with one finger access worked without any driver installs. I do have to plug it in to a USB port before booting for it to be recognized. I did have problems with the multi-touch driver install. I run macOS 10.13 beta and the driver install is not fully compatible. The install says it finished successfully but then the driver fails to load properly, but I was able to move a few files around and get multitouch working. Airbar preference pane does not work though. I'm sure once 10.13 is released they will release a more compatible driver. So overall it is working but will have to use it longer to see how much I use it. It is nice to be able to interact with the screen since I am used to my iPad.

I could see this being useful for a small minority of people, who for some reason cannot use a mouse. For my purposes it is almost useless, because the pointing accuracy is so poor. IN fact, the accuracy is so bad that using e.g. the OS menus poses some risks: if you wanted to "sleep" the computer instead of "shut down" you are taking your chances. On my Mac OS those two commands in a pull down menu are right next to each other, and with using this AirBar, you might get one or the other command issued depending on how slowly and carefully you make your selection. I would estimate the pointing accuracy on screen is not much better than 10mm square. Plus, if you move your finger around, say to drag an object in the OS, or painting in artistic software, the TIME RESOLUTION is also not very good: your drag is registered in perhaps quarter second jumps.I installed the driver/extension for the airbar to get multi-finger gestures functionality. So I could use two finger gestures to e.g. scroll up and down or sideways to read a document easily. That seemed to work reasonably well. However, the resolution is so bad that you can't even use the AirBar to do online browsing, because all other actions - selecting URL links - are so unreliable. Unless you had the screen/browser set to show everything HUGE, which you might do if you had very bad eyesight. Maybe the AirBar could be useful to people with poor eyesight?Aside the poor resolution, another problem affected potential use of the AirBar for artistic work. For example, using it with my photoshop software, photoshop would not detect (or the AirBar would not send) a "mouse up" or "mouse down" signal, making it impossible to draw anything naturally. Every time you lifted up your finger off the screen, and then put it down again in another part of the screen, photoshop would simply connect those two points with your drawing/painted line, as if you had never lifted your drawing tool (i.e. finger) off the artboard (i.e. screen). I suppose one could lift up the finger, and then go to some other command in the interface, but this would seriously slow down any drawing or sketching process.The AirBar was an interesting but expensive experiment, and now it is gathering dust.