How To Use iPad Pro As Touchscreen For Mac Mini Or MacBook

When Apple announced the iPad Pro and Mac mini refreshes, it’s unlikely that there was any consideration given as to how the pair would work together beyond features like Handoff and such, but the folks at Luna Display have proven that the most costly iPad you can buy works just fine when paired with the least costly Mac you can buy, and it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Luna Display is the company that already offers a way for users to take a MacBook and then extend its display onto an iPad, but the company wanted to see whether it could also take a Mac mini and use a new iPad Pro as the device’s sole display.

As it turns out, it managed it just fine, sharing the results in a blog post. As you might imagine, this combination looks great, and thanks to the Luna Display adapter working over WiFi to send video output as well as receive touch inputs, the whole thing gives the impression of being the Mac from the future.

Our initial thought when we got Luna up and running with the Mac Mini was “this is like a whole new Apple product!” It really felt like that. In many ways, it was so obvious and second-nature to use the iPad as your main display. The iPad Pro has such a large and beautiful screen, that of course you’d want to find a way to use it in your workflow.

While the iPad Pro obviously has its own input method thanks to touch, Luna Display notes that moving between that and the Mac mini’s mouse and keyboard works just fine.

It offers more ways to interact with your macOS too, where you can seamlessly flow from mouse, to keyboard, to Apple Pencil, to touch interactions. And since Luna runs over WiFi, you have the flexibility of a completely wireless workspace. It all just works.

If you’re using a new Mac mini as a headless machine, this may be the perfect way to get access to macOS when needed, and the Luna Display hardware can be picked up for $80, which is definitely less than a monitor while also taking up no space whatsoever. It may not be what we envisaged when we thought of how macOS and iOS would merge in the future, but it’s pretty cool nevertheless.

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